This year’s festival marks the 12th that I’ve been involved with, and my sixth as artistic director. Here are ten things I’ve learned since I started:

1 It’s a year-round commitment.

There’s a lovely notion that we somehow knock the festival together in a couple of months, whereas in fact we spend January through to August selecting the programme, and the whole year planning. The programming year starts in earnest with Sundance, quickly followed by Rotterdam, Gothenburg, Berlin . . . By the end of Berlin this year we’d already invited around 30 films, including Hamlet 2.

2 No one is the font of all knowledge. The first rule of programming is to have a great team of colleagues and co-conspirators, and a gang of informed and opinionated folk around the world who are our eyes and ears on the ground. They keep me sane, help me to avoid terrible lapses in judgement, and find us fantastic gems like Medicine for Melancholy.

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3 Trust your gut instinct. Programme the films you believe in, whether they’re high profile, like Che, or under the radar, like Cloud 9. It’s hopeless to be bullied, bribed, cajoled or flattered into showing something – all of which, and more, are tactics we encounter on a regular basis!

4 Glamour is only skin deep.

True, part of my year involves travelling to other festivals around the world, and it would be hard to convince anyone that standing on the beach in Cannes sipping champagne while negotiating over titles is hard work. But selecting from big festivals usually involves 18-hour days of queuing and back-to-back screenings of films of indeterminate quality.

5 Some films are so good they actually make your heart beat faster, especially when they come out of the blue. The first time this happened to me this year was watching Ballast at Sundance.

6 Prepare for heartbreak. When films I love are for one reason or another not available, it’s hard not to take it personally. These days I try to be philosophical and recognise that the most important thing is that the films get seen, even if they bypass the festival.

7 Make the festival somewhere that film-makers want to be. Look at the success of a festival like Telluride. With hundreds of festivals around the world, London has to show that we care about how films are presented, what the ambience is, how people are treated. Our fabulously discerning audiences are a huge asset.

8 Don’t be too seduced by stars. They generate buzz and raise the profile, and yes, many are gorgeous and smart (step forward Adrien Brody, George Clooney, Rachel Weisz, Kate Winslet). But there’s no surer way to alienate an audience than by playing a film solely because there’s an A-lister guaranteed to attend.

9 Peanuts are no substitute for dinner. No time to eat means an average staff weight loss of half a stone during the festival.

10 Don’t panic. Whatever happens, and however seriously we take what we do, a sense of perspective is more important than anything. The best question to ask yourself is: “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” And then try to make sure it doesn’t. Sometimes films get lost in transit; sometimes film-makers go AWOL, and if you’re really unlucky, as I once was, a large and very angry German film-maker will shout at you in public.

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