I was always sent scripts with premises like ‘There’s a nerdy guy and his friend is a womaniser,” Paul Feig says with a grimace. “And the friend is like, ‘We gotta get you laid.’ And I never liked them because in the real world, that dynamic doesn’t exist. Nerds would never be friends with that guy. We would be, like, ‘Ugh, get away from me!’”

The director of Bridesmaids, Spy and 2016’s all-female Ghostbusters reboot has little in common with Hollywood’s geek stereotype of choice – the terminally dishevelled, comics-crazed horndog, as canonised in many of the films produced by his friend, the comedy mogul Judd Apatow. Instead, he is a nerd of the old school – a 55-year-old Walter the Softy made good. We meet on a weekday evening in Claridge’s Bar, London: Feig is wearing an immaculate pinstripe suit from Anderson & Sheppard, Prince Charles’s preferred tailor, with a violet boutonnière pinned to his lapel and a silk square standing crisply to attention in his breast pocket. This is Feig’s one-man pushback against what he calls the film industry’s “tyranny of the casual”, where even auteurs dress on set as if they’re taking out the bins. But Feig looks like he means to work – and at the moment, much work is afoot.