Showed The Principles of Lust in Sheffield last night. It's on at UCG multiplexes - those industrial estates with a Brannigans, a Frankie and Johnny, an Old Orleans, a petrol station and a ten-screen cinema. It's interesting, but extremely weird, that it's not playing in the arthouse cinema. The cinema was almost full. Tristam, the manager, introduced me and Lee - a filmmaker and radio presenter - and explained that we would do a Q&A after the screening. While the film played we went off and drank nervously - a large brandy and a huge glass of white wine. Lee told me: "This is not my favourite film. But I did find it challenging and it has stayed with me." Oh God.

"THE AUDIENCE IS PRETTY STONY"

The film ends, we walk in and stand there as the credits roll. Most of the cinema walk out. Are they all enraged? Around 60 people stay. Some of them don't look happy. I say something or other, but it's hard because the audience is pretty stony. Wendy, a fantastic youth worker who appears in one of the scenes in the film with the young people she works with (where Juliette performs Ovid in a community centre) stands up. "This is obviously a good film but I am very concerned. I didn't realise young people I work with were going to be in a film with pornographic content and this is going to come back on me." The whole row she's in applaud her. I remember explaining the context very clearly but she shakes her head. I did say that the film was very extreme and there was a lot of sex and violence in it but clearly she and others have found it more extreme than they expected. I feel really bad.

Jonathan Romney from the Indie rings Zoe, the publicist. He saw the film in Rotterdam last year and again this week. He thinks we have recut all the violence. We haven't touched it but he's not the only person to think he's watching a different film. Sienna Guillory, who plays Juliette, thought I had changed it too and added about ten minutes to the orgy scene. We haven't changed a frame. (Yes, they are shagging, and no, I had no control over them.) Not only do people encounter this film in radically different ways (some say it's amoral, some it's too moralistic) but it looks different every time they see it. It's weird.

"TWO MORE HUGE BRANDIES"

I've made a film a lot of people hate and feel assaulted by. Marc Warren, who plays Billy, insists we must remain unrepentant. "This is the film we thought we were making," he says. And he's right. I am happy that the actors like the film a lot. I still carry on drinking after last night's screening. I need an anasthaetic. Another large, very large, glass of white wine. Two more huge brandies. I wake up three hours after going to sleep dreaming that I'm lying on a beach with the tide coming in on both sides of me. And very hungover.

Have lunch with Peter Dale from Channel 4. He's says nice things and is surprised that I'm so vulnerable. I think he's labouring under a delusion that I am braver than this. I'm brave when I make films because I am in a psychotic, heightened state and anything that stands in the way of the film must be swept aside. But now it's just me. I have no control over anything any more and must passively soak up whatever people throw at me.