In the past few weeks I've answered numerous questionnaires about the film, responding by email to lists of questions posed by journalists, so I thought I'd post a selection of the questions and answers here. If you think there are any areas I haven't covered, email your questions to howtolose@hotmail.com and I'll try to answer them.

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What’s the story behind How to Lose Friends & Alienate People?

In 1995 I was offered an editorial job in the New York headquarters of Vanity Fair -- a longstanding dream of mine. I had enjoyed some success as a journalist in London, but this was the big time. I thought it was only a matter of months before the Big Apple was in the palm of my hand. Five years later, I was road-testing sex toys for an obscure American men’s magazine -- and these were sex toys for men, not women. I was testing them on myself. How to Lose Friends & Alienate People is the book I wrote charting this spectacular fall from grace.

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How closely is the film based on the book?

It’s a very loose adaptation. In fact, I’d hesitate to use the word “adaptation” at all. It would be more accurate to say the film is “inspired” by the book. Peter Straughan, the screenwriter, has taken the main characters in the book and the big comic set pieces and woven an almost entirely fictional story around them. Yet, at the same time, the spirit of the book has been completely preserved. It’s still a fish-out-of-water story about a young Englishman who’s given this incredible opportunity to work in New York and, in the process of screwing it up, discovers who he really is.

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What was your involvement in the film?

Originally, I was an associate producer, which Billy Wilder defined as the only person on set willing to associate with the producer, but I got bumped up to co-producer in the course of the film’s development.

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Did you have a hand in the script?

When FilmFour optioned my book in 2002 they hired me to adapt it, but when I handed in the 33-page outline of exactly how I proposed to do this I was told not to bother turning it into a full-length screenplay. Another writer called Peter Straughan was brought in, but the main producer, Stephen Woolley, was extremely good about making sure I saw each draft of the script as it was written. I would come up with vast reams of notes and then Peter, Stephen and I would meet up and go through them. In some cases, these “notes” consisted of whole new scenes I had written -- or rewrites of existing scenes. A lot of the time, I would just cross out Peter’s gags and insert ones of my own. Sometimes Peter and Stephen would agree to let these changes stand, but most of the time they’d revert to the original or come up with something better. It was a genuinely collaborative process, but with Peter always having the final say. I feel very lucky that they involved me to the extent that they did -- I think most other people in their position would have just shut me out. I hope the reason they included me is because they thought I had something to contribute, but it may simply be because they’re both very good-natured. It also partly reflects the philosophy of Tessa Ross, the head of FilmFour, who has an unusually high degree of respect for writers. She said to me at the very beginning of the process that if I wanted to be involved in the development of the film I could be -- and she was as good as her word.

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Is it true that Kirsten Dunst had you banned from the set? Was there an “incident” involving the two of you?

To describe it as an "incident" is to blow it out of all proportion. "Storm in a teacup" is more like it. On one of my very few visits to the set, Kirsten's assistant overheard me making a remark to Stephen Woolley about her performance in a particular scene and, as a result, Kirsten asked Bob Weide, the director, if it was really necessary for me to be around. Bob then discouraged me from visiting the set in future, but it would be over-stating it to say he "banned" me -- and, in any event, he wasn't acting on Kirsten's instructions, just doing what he could to make her feel as comfortable as possible. I certainly don't blame Kirsten for finding my presence on the set a little bit irksome. I wouldn't like it if she was leaning over my shoulder while I was trying to work, either.

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You seem to have a knack for rubbing people up the wrong way. Is that why you called your book How to Lose Friends & Alienate People?

The main reason I chose that title was because it echoed the title of Dale Carnegie’s famous self-help manual. I can be pretty obnoxious, certainly, but I value my friends very highly and I’m fairly conscientious about remaining on good terms with them. I fell out with Julie Burchill when the magazine we owned went belly-up, but we’ve subsequently patched things up. I only lost one friend as a result of writing the book -- the person who appears in it as Alex de Silva, though that’s not his real name -- and I’m genuinely remorseful about that. I’ve extended numerous olive branches since but he’s rejected every one.

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How do you feel about being played by Simon Pegg?

I have to be careful how I answer that question. At Cannes, the makers of the film held a press conference and I was asked how I felt when I heard Simon had been cast as me. He was sitting right next to me and I thought, ‘Well, I could do the usual, Hollywood arselicking thing … but I won’t.’ So I said, “I was kind of disappointed, actually. I was hoping for Brad Pitt but for some reason the producers didn’t think he’d be suitable.” It was intended as a joke -- the audience laughed -- but the following day one of the papers wrote this up as, “Toby Young announced at Cannes he was disappointed to be played by Britain’s number one box office star. Said he would have preferred Brad Pitt.” Beneath this, the paper ran a picture of Brad in his pulchritudinous glory and, next to that, a picture of me looking particularly hideous.

In truth, I couldn’t be happier. There are other actors who would have been able to do it -- Sacha Baron Cohen, Ricky Gervais, Steve Coogan -- but none would have been as perfect as Simon. The characters he usually plays are the embodiment of a certain kind of contemporary Englishman -- awkward, socially inept, slightly out of step with the modern world, but, at the same time, determined to fight their corner, to be given their due. That’s me in a nutshell.

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Jeff Bridges has been cast as the Graydon Carter character. Do you think that’s a good choice?

Clayton Harding -- the Graydon Carter character -- is a poacher-turned-gamekeeper -- someone who was a real outlaw in his youth, but has reluctantly become a pillar of the Establishment in middle age. So who better to play him than Jeff Bridges, who went from playing a counter-culture hero in Cutter’s Way to the President of the United States in The Contender? He even looks like Graydon -- and they’re exactly the same age.

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What’s your relationship with Graydon like these days? Has he seen the film?

We haven’t spoken in a while, but I don’t think he has any particular animus towards me. CBS News recently ran a profile of him in which he said that he’d seen the film and he thought it was “fine”. On the other hand, I don’t think he’ll turn up to the opening night party. “I’m not sure of the date of the premiere,” he told a reporter from WWD, “but I believe I have a previous engagement.”

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The choice of director is interesting, given Bob Weide's involvement with Curb Your Enthusiasm. Did you think that was a good fit?

Absolutely. There’s a huge amount of overlap between the character Larry David plays on Curb Your Enthusiasm and the character Simon Pegg plays in this film. They both seem to be suffering from the same personality disorder -- a kind of social Autism. I think I suffer from that same disorder -- and, to a lesser extent, Bob Weide does, too. So in that respect it was a very good fit.

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Do you feel the humour of Curb fits well with the humour of your book?

Well, I hope so, but that’s not really for me to say. I think Larry David is a genius -- the best comic mind of our era -- and when I was writing the book I hoped that some of the comic set pieces would be as funny as some of the set pieces in Seinfeld and Curb. That’s the gold standard, as far as I’m concerned, and I was immensely pleased when Bob Weide came on board because he has worked so closely with a writer that I have so much admiration for. I guess it was flattering, too, because it meant he thought that this project was in the same league as the stuff he’d been doing with Larry David -- but, of course, Peter Straughan deserves the lion’s share of the credit because it was the script that hooked Bob, not the book.

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You’ve been fired from virtually every newspaper or magazine you’ve ever worked for. What’s that about?

A lot of it is down to sheer idiocy on my part -- committing one faux pas after another -- but some of it is deliberate. When I think about the key incidents that led to me getting fired they nearly all involved a failure to pay due deference to someone in a position of authority. I find it very, very difficult to doff my cap to a person just because they occupy a higher tier in the office hierarchy than me. I think it may be genetic. My father was a bit of a rebel, as was his father before him, and his father before him. It probably dates back to the moment the Romans invaded Britain. Basically, if I see someone wearing a hat that identifies them as an authority figure, I want to knock it off.

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So how do you earn a living?

I like to joke that I’m a professional failure -- I’ve forged a career from writing about my disastrous career. But the truth is, I don’t see myself as a failure, in spite of my inability to hold down a steady job. The important thing is to regard each setback as just one more obstacle that has to be overcome, rather than a reason to give up. As Churchill said, “Success is going from one failure to the next with no loss of enthusiasm.”

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Are you happy with the way the film’s turned out?

Yes, very happy. It has a great script, a great cast and a great director -- what more could anyone want? Funnily enough, though, the thing I’m proudest of is that it is a genuinely funny British film, which is a rarity these days. Calling it a “British film” may not make much sense, given that it’s set in New York, the majority of the cast is American and the director is an American, but that’s how it appears. This is partly because Simon is in every scene, and he just radiates a certain kind of Englishness, but mainly, I think, because the whole sensibility of the film is quintessentially British. Various Hollywood studios were interested in optioning the book, but they would have completely Americanised the story. The reason I did a deal with a British production company was because I wanted the film to have a British feel -- I wanted it to be the kind of film that would appeal to fans of British cinema -- and it has that in spades.