In Fish Tank, Michael Fassbender plays a key role in a girl's coming-of-age story. He plays her mother's boyfriend, but he also ends up in a sexual relationship with the girl. In a recent roundtable interview, Fassbender discussed the film. Having recently been seen in Inglourious Basterds, he was asked if the prominence of that film changed things for him.

Not really. To be fair, it has for sure sort of affected things on this side of the water, for people who haven't seen Hunger or anything that I've done before. So [I am] getting to meet filmmakers, and interesting scripts are coming my way. I'll have to wait and see what happens next. I am waiting to start this one film which is an independent film with a guy called David Jacobson who did Down in the Valley with Ed Norton, maybe five years ago. I think the financing is finally in place, which is a good thing. Hopefully that will start in January. But I haven't been doing anything since Jonah Hex which finished in May—just been reading a lot.

When asked about having a relationship with a sixteen-year-old girl in the film, he replied:

Yeah, I know. I kind of knew when Andrea [Arnold] gave me the premise of the story what was going to happen.

Since Director Andrea Arnold doesn't give the actors the whole script, Fassbender was asked what it was like working like that.

I was a bit nervous to begin with because I usually do a lot of prep, then by the time I get on set I'm ready to go. It was a bit disconcerting not to have the whole script to look at so I could form a character and get an idea of the decisions he makes throughout. But I got an opinion that she wanted to keep it fresh and wanted to keep it light and didn't want me to load scenes knowing what was coming later. So it was fine. I said to her it would be great for me if I could get on Friday the next week's pages and scenes, and then I had the weekend to take a look at it. Then I could take it day by day from there because I'm bad at learning lines, really, and I need some time with that. You know, she's very good at creating a safe and creative environment to work in. She's great at that. And once we got going it was fantastic. There was some improvisation; we stuck sometimes to the script; sometimes we threw the script away; and then we mixed and matched. Like Rebecca [Griffiths] who plays Tyler, was very good at improvising. Sometimes with the lines she'd feel a little boxed in. So a lot of the time we'd sort of improvise with her, stick to the script with Katie [Jarvis] and Kierston [Wareing] and just sort of mix it up. It was fun. And it's always nice to have some sort of risk element involved and feeling like you're going to fall flat on your face at any point. It's sort of exciting.

He was asked about working with Katie Jarvis, who plays the central character, Mia. Katie had never acted or danced before making this film.

The most important thing was just to make sure that she was comfortable and didn't feel like she was being taken advantage of. Katie comes—it's not autobiographical or anything, but she comes—from a working class family, council estates sort of upbringing. So she's a tough girl, but she's also vulnerable like Mia. These kids—I'm sure it's the same in America in the projects—they can be quite defensive because they're protecting themselves. They've been hurt before by their immediate family or society. So she was at times kind of guarded. Once again, Andrea did a great job making her feel safe—making her feel like we weren't out to manipulate her, take advantage of her. And I just tried to keep it light—being a bit of a jackass on set and making a fool of myself so she wouldn't feel so pressurized. We just tried to keep it light. But in terms of acting with her, I had no advice to give her. I just tried to keep up with her. She's very real and very truthful and she's got this honesty about her. She's got really strong intuition. So she was great. I just had to react to her. And it was the same with Kierston and the same with Tyler. We were all doing that. We were all sort of bouncing off each other allowing each other to sort of breathe. It was really sort of loose and creative.

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