Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I can't help slightly falling in love with every character I write about. And I quite like writing about people who are vilified.
The minute you become a leader of a country, you go into a very small club. You join that sort of pantheon of other world leaders.
In some shape or form, we do have an emotional connection to our head of state, even if, for the most part, they seem very remote.
You don't really work together with Clint Eastwood. I mean, he takes the script and he shoots it - and he shoots it very faithfully.
The feelings we all have as 50-year-olds are different than the feelings we all have as 30-year-olds. That informs everything we do.
My experience is, I do a table reading, and it's literally like it's written in colossal neon lights what's wrong with the screenplay.
Generally, I read nonfiction. Theres very little fiction that I enjoy enough to spend my time reading. I am generally a nonfiction guy.
It's really a lovely feeling to write knowing that failure is taken off the table because if it's bad you just never show it to anyone.
Generally, I read nonfiction. There's very little fiction that I enjoy enough to spend my time reading. I am generally a nonfiction guy.
People bang on all the time about whether what I've done is the truth or not. Well, to me, history is just a series of elaborate fictions.
I wrote 'Hereafter' quickly and without mapping it out too much or being too schematic. As an exercise, I think that was incredibly important.
I don't think I'm an unhappy person. It's just an intensity, not a depressive thing. It's just not having enough layers of skin. It's exhausting.
It might be more difficult because you haven't got a book or a prop, but for the most part I like to write unpaid... initially and my own stories.
It's madness to hand in a script to a director, leave them alone, and for the director not to want the writer there with rehearsals and the shoot.
Self-destruction is such an interesting thing for a dramatist, and what's particular to Nixon is how human the failings were that led to his downfall.
A 20-year-old is never going to give death a second thought, whereas someone in their late 50s is going to think about it... I don't know, 20 times a day.
I'm not being presumptuous, I hope, when I say that 'The Crown' is little bit like 'The Godfather.' It is essentially about a family in power and survival.
I'm very happy for others to engage in conjecture, but if I was ever conscious of what I'm thinking about when I'm writing, oh my God, I'd be totally lost.
The irony of what I do is that the more you reveal someone in their frailties and shortcomings, the more we feel drawn to them and forgiving we feel of them.
If you're growing up in times of peace and live in a country where there's plenty of food and good healthcare, you grow up without any relationship with death.
If you don't belong somewhere, that outsider status you have gives you perspective. Of course, another word for outsider is 'exile,' and that's not fun at all.
When you make a choice as a writer about what it is you want to write, and what it is you're going to spend six months thinking about, you have to fall in love.
I can't relax when I'm watching a biographical drama because it's so close to what it is that I do that I just long for more fiction - so that I can switch off.
I can't relax when I'm watching a biographical drama, because it's so close to what it is that I do that I just long for more fiction - so that I can switch off.
As a European from a different, younger generation, the trauma that was Nixon's presidency never really had a hold over me. For one thing, I never voted for him.
The first and primary requirement for me in a director that I'd want to work with is: do they love writing, and do they love the collaboration process with writers?
Most of the things I write, I write on spec. And because I write them on spec, there's less interference. Because there's less interference, they tend to be better.
Having a phone call from Steven Spielberg was just a fantastic rite of passage. I loved it, and he was very focused, very likable, strictly business, and really sharp.
I don't understand and don't enjoy sci-fi, and it's just that if people aren't real, and they don't live in a real and recognizable society, I don't understand what to do.
You're working with other people and sometimes it doesn't work out the way you want, and sometimes you didn't realise what a mistake you've made until you see it projected.
If you think about what you do, if you become self-conscious about it, you've got to be very careful. Because I really like to write without self-awareness of what I'm doing.
I'm quick to be upset. My feelings are close to the surface. There is not much gap between a thought and a feeling with me. It makes it difficult for some people. I feel too much.
It is devastating, losing a parent. I don't really know what the effect is, but I suppose people might call me an ambitious man, and I'd say that an ambitious man is a damaged man.
I have always cited the decision by director Stephen Frears to shoot 'Mrs. Henderson Presents' before my script of 'The Queen' as the reason for my taking the plunge as a playwright.
Firms are a bit concerned about things like oil prices and US growth but actually the change (in firms expectations) is quite small so I think broadly theyre looking for more of the same.
I just feel that if I'm English and writing about an American president, I have got to have someone on my side who can help me out when I'm lapsing into lazy or obvious European skepticism.
There's nothing wrong with anybody from any other country having a perspective on the British royal family. It would be interesting. But I just doubt that they would get the dialogue right.
The stuff that I have perhaps become known for that's based on fact, and English statesmen shouting at each other all the time, doesn't entirely represent who I am. I am not a politics wonk.
I have no directing ambition whatsoever. And as long as I meet filmmakers like Tom Hooper, Stephen Frears, and others who allow that collaboration, I can't see why I would ever want to direct.
As a child, I grew up the son of German immigrant parents, so I grew up being teased and called 'Fritz' at school. When I married my wife and went to live in Vienna, I was teased for being a Brit.
It is a fairly serious thing that you're doing if you're writing about people who are still alive and who still have a role in public life. Sometimes you don't want to be reminded too much of the responsibility.
When I started writing the screenplay for 'The Queen,' about the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana, both Stephen Frears, the director, and Andy Harries, the producer, begged me not to put Tony Blair in it.
I don't want to direct. I have no directing ambition whatsoever. And as long as I meet filmmakers like Tom Hooper, Stephen Frears, and others who allow that collaboration, I can't see why I would ever want to direct.
Authorised royal biographers are so straitjacketed, deferential, fawning, and unadventurous that they can only be after a knighthood. Or they're completely scurrilous and insolent, like Andrew Morton or Paul Burrell.
As historians write more and more histories, it's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that other historians read their histories and then make synthesis, and certain things just get forgotten and left out and neglected.
Nixon had lists upon lists upon lists. They were tragic lists saying, 'Smile more,' or, 'Be stronger - remember, it is your job to spiritually uplift the nation.' This understanding of his limitations is heartbreaking.
I've done a lot of work in Hollywood and theatre, but to be honest, the biggest pleasure I've ever got is from the TV single plays I've written. It's a format where you don't mind saying, 'I want to tackle some important themes head on.'
There are people who are bound journalistically to a code of ethics that means they can't quote something that isn't sourced, whereas what I do is entirely unsourced. I effectively fictionalise history and yet somehow aim at a greater truth.
I wrote a draft of 'Playboy' for Warner Brothers, and it was impossible to really be independent of Hugh Hefner. In the end, Hugh Hefner was unable to take the back seat required to be able to write something about him that I felt I could do.
There's no way of telling why you want to do things beforehand. Something just grabs you. It might not grab you six months later, and it might not have grabbed you six months before, but at that particular moment it grabs you, so you jump on it.