I am what I am: Franny Armstrong

Franny Armstrong, 35, is a documentary director. Her feature film The Age of Stupid was released on Friday (ageofstupid.net). She lives alone with her two cats in London

- My dad was a BBC documentary maker, always off to Africa; my mum was taking in homeless people. She was the local activist, he the global — I guess I got into both.

- I went to one of London’s most expensive schools. After witnessing the superiority complex that comes with extreme wealth, I wanted nothing more to do with it.

- My grandmother would walk for an hour to save 2p. She was what I call a profound environmentalist — it’s basically about not wasting.

- I’ve jumped in front of whaling ships and gone on demos, but I realised that instead of being in a crowd of 100,000, film was the most powerful thing I could do.

- Mike Skinner [of the Streets] once said that, through life, your skill levels go up and your momentum goes down. There’s a critical period, starting in your mid-twenties, when you can do your greatest work unencumbered by the baggage of life. It’s a very, very short window, possibly 10 years.

- The people working on climate change are the happiest I know. When you do everything you can, whether it fails or succeeds, then you can feel okay about yourself. It’s profoundly fulfilling to fight for something you believe in.

- The person I want to be with lives in another country, 26 hours away by train. Neither of us flies for personal reasons. He also works obsessively on climate change without a day off, so we never see each other.

- I’ve never been bothered about cool. I always thought the cool ones were the cleverest ones.