In a career spanning two decades Ewan McGregor has appeared in over 60 films. This year he premieres his directorial debut American Pastoral, an adaptation of the Philip Roth novel of the same title. The film stars Dakota Fanning, Jennifer Connelly, Rupert Evans and Valorie Curry. The HFPA spoke to him in Toronto shortly after the premiere screening. “I think if I decided okay, I am going to do my first movie and I am going to adapt a Phillip Roth novel and make it my first movie, then maybe I wouldn’t have made that choice because like you say, it’s daunting and it’s a very well loved book and Phillip Roth is such an extraordinary writer, but I didn’t come to it like that. I was already involved in it and I was the actor that was going to play his Swede and the story had become mine in a sense because I was going to do that. So the choice wasn’t really, the choice was made easier for me because I was sort of already in the world. (…) And then I made it my mission in those next couple of months when I was living in his book to try and understand better Phillip Roth, what he was exploring in there, and he is exploring many, many things in there, many themes and presenting different sides of arguments for those themes and not really spelling out to us what we should think. (…) I didn’t want anybody to, I didn’t want to make it black and white.”