Philip Seymour Hoffman has worked with some of the best film directors in the world: Mike Nichols, the late Anthony Minghella, Spike Lee, the Coen brothers, David Mamet, Paul Thomas Anderson...even George Clooney in the recent The Ides of March.

He was guided to Oscar greatness by Bennett Miller, winning the Best Actor award for his portrayal of the writer Truman Capote in Capote.

So he had plenty of lessons to draw from for his debut behind the camera, adding them to his 10 years of experience of directing for theatre.

Jack Goes Boating, which can be seen at the lighthouse in Wolverhampton for a week, is a character piece, an adaptation of a play that Hoffman, 44, had successfully developed and performed in New York.

“It did very well (there)," he says. "Big Beach Films saw it there and they wanted to make it into a movie. It is quite a cinematic play to begin with. All the things you see happen in the movie we’d had to make happen on the stage...including the boat.

“John Ortiz (co-founder with Hoffman of the NY-based LAByrinth Theater Company), who plays Clyde in the play and film, said: ‘Why don’t you direct it?’ since I’d done a lot of plays with the company over the years.”

Hoffman plays Jack, a shy and awkward limo driver, unsatisfied with his job with little going for him bar a love of reggae music and a not-entirely extinguished hope that there might be someone out there for him.

“He is a man lost in the middle of his life,” says Hoffman.

Clyde, a fellow driver, conspires with his wife Lucy to set Jack up with one of her work colleagues, Connie, a similarly tentative and put-upon soul.

They make hesitant plans to date, with Jack rashly promising to make her a home-cooked meal and to take her boating.

Unfortunately Jack can neither cook nor swim, and resolves to learn both before venturing near a kitchen or lake.

For the latter challenge this meant pouring Jack’s portly white frame into swimming shorts and a little rubber hat.

“I was so embarrassed doing those scenes. I couldn’t even look at me,” jokes Hoffman.

“No, what was fun about it was I used to be a lifeguard whereas John (who, as Clyde, is trying to teach Jack) actually had to take a lot of lessons to learn how to swim well enough to say he was a good swimmer.”

The cookery lessons come courtesy of a professional chef who shares a secret with Lucy. Things come to a head at a dinner party that gets so out of control it’d make an episode of Come Dine with Me look like a teddy’s bear’s picnic.

Food gets burnt, dishes get smashed, doors are slammed and hearts broken.

“That took a good week to shoot,” recalls Hoffman. “I’m actually a pretty good cook and I’ve never had a dinner party that went that bad. I have had nights that went that bad. I think we all have.”

Strangely, the one element of the film-making process the actor says he didn’t enjoy was having to act as well.

“Directing myself is not something I liked. I have been an actor for a long time and I like someone else out there telling me that I am not good and challenging me. Putting a good strong hand out there for me to take.

“Not doing well on any given day and knowing I was the only one to turn to was uncomfortable.

“I had to get over that. I had to trust the writer, who was there almost every day, my director of photography and my script supervisor. I just looked to them.

“Sometimes I had to walk off go in a room and do the acting work, then come back and be the actor.”

Jack Goes Boating is the flip side to the starry-eyed likes of Sleepless in Seattle, An Affair to Remember and When Harry Met Sally, where New York is a lovers’ playground.

Jack and Connie are two lonely people leading small lives in a big city who want what could be a last chance at making a connection.

“I see them as having had some relationships when they were young. It didn’t work out, and they just let life go by without taking the risk because it just didn’t work out to begin with,” says Hoffman. “That’s what happens in life. The days go by.

“Jack is actually attacking life. He’s saying ‘I don’t want to be who I am anymore. I want to change’.

“This is not a movie about two people falling in love. It is a movie about knowing that love, having a relationship, may possibly mean being hurt, but still doing it anyway.”

Unlike the luckless Jack, Hoffman has been blessed by career success unheard of to most jobbing actors, straddling both film and theatre and winning plaudits for both.

“I am sure winning the Oscar has helped some way in my life since then. But I don’t really see a vast difference between my life before and after. I have been able to support myself as an actor since my late 20s and trust me, most don’t have that.

“I consider myself incredibly lucky.”