‘Did you see Yarrow yet?’ grins Sam at Matthew in a smooth and tuneful American West Coast accent. ‘My God. I looked at that guy and thought, you lucky fucking son of a bitch. You have no idea what you’re doing and yet suddenly you’re the toast of the festival. And you know what? He doesn’t even understand that! Yarrow thinks he deserves it. Fuck me! I saw Jane and she was like: I’d like to fire him for proving the universe is cosmically unfair, only …’

‘… She’s making ten per cent on that cosmic unfairness,’ finishes Matthew.

‘My point exactly,’ grins Sam. He turns to Emilia, ‘You, dear Ems, are that rarest of things. A client I like better the more I get to know her.’

Emilia gives him a small smile.

‘You’re having a great festival, too, I must say,’ says Matthew, addressing Emilia.

‘It’s Martin’s film,’ she says, in a low and considered Texan drawl, making her sound unfazed by anything. ‘He gets an easy ride from the critics.’ She gives a slow shrug, like success or failure mean very little to her. I’ll bet she does a lot of bikram yoga, thinks Becky.

‘Not always,’ says Sam. ‘I’ve seen Marty take a kicking more than once.’

Sam is dressed in jeans, short enough to display sockless feet in tan leather loafers. Suit jacket and t-shirt. His job is to oil the wheels, smooth the seams and join the cracks, so that his client has a secure platform on which to stand. He is courtier and gatekeeper, turning on a dime between being a bad-ass deal-maker, sensitive confidant and cocktail party wingman. And for all his ice-breaking bonhomie, he never forgets – and never lets anyone else forget – that Emilia is the star, the epicentre of this meeting. Her work quickly dominates the conversation. Her recent gig with Spielberg. How the central heating broke down in a Nepalese hotel when she was shooting at the foot of the Himalayas, and how Sam nearly flew over there himself with a portable heater and bear skins, it got that bad, ha ha!