I got a commission for Cork 2005, and I really wanted to do something.

Then I heard that the director Donal Gallagher had done a production of Bedbound, which was really good. I wanted to write something for him, and the notion was to write a small piece, although the play has turned into an absolute monster, which I really like.

Essentially what I wanted to write about in this play was my relationship with the city of Cork.When I was leaving Cork, I ran out of the place, hating it, loathing it, and loathing everything about it. And since then, in the last two-and-a-half years, coming back, I've found what it was that I really liked about it. It's just like any relationship with any city that you have. This play is about the girl's relationship with the city in that way.

I'm not interested in sitting in a room and just banging out a play. I don't do that anymore. I like to work with people. I worked collaboratively over a period of two-and-a-half years on a play in Germany, and the important thing was that everyone was beginning with the same step. It meant I was not the 'big me'. We're all together.

And the words are just words, they can be kicked around. It means the director should have the confidence to say it's his or her play too.

Anyone can write words or dialogue or images.

For me it's all about structure, it's about making the structure dramatic, so that the audience is excited by the form of the play.

If I could live purely as a playwright I would. But I'm mixing theatre and film.

From a financial point of view you have to. The thing about theatre that's so great is that from conception to opening night it's two years, whereas film can take five, six years. Theatre is all about heart. In film, you're not writing from your soul, you're writing from your head. I've been to Hollywood, and there's a side to me that can play the part and be interested and all of that.

I'm still thinking about Cork in my work. I'm from Dublin, but apart from family, I've never had any affinity to Dublin. Cork has become a language that's right for me.

I'm obsessed with language. I got commissioned to do a play by an English theatre based upon language. I thought Cork wouldn't be right for it.

So I listened to loads of tapes, and really liked the Ribble Valley dialect in Lancashire. It doesn't sound anything like Cork, but there's such humour and harshness in it. I thought 'I need to learn how to talk like that.' I went up for a cycling holiday there and wrote the play.

Enda Walsh's new play, 'Pondlife Angels', will premiere on 15 June at the Granary Theatre, Cork