The films of which I'm most proud I've written are the ones that pivot on forgiveness.
— Peter Morgan
Robert Bolt's storytelling is the kind that I grew up with and aspired to.
Sometimes it's okay for an audience not to understand everything that's going on.
You can't ask someone to act middle-aged. Someone has to bring their own fatigue to it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can't imagine anyone thinking, 'Oh good, it's awards season!'
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.
As a dramatist, you have 200 choices at every fork in the road. But the audience will reject it if you make the wrong choice, if they feel you are trying to shape the character in a way that suits you. It rings false immediately. People can sense when you're being cynical or schematic.
For 'Frost/Nixon,' I had eight people who were present at those interviews - they were all in the room - and when I interviewed each of them, they had a totally different narrative of events, to the degree where you thought, 'Were you all really in the same room?'
Some of the things I have written about are a way of connecting with my father - I know he knew who Idi Amin was, and I know he knew who Longford was. And I know he knew who Nixon was, because shortly before he died, I talked to him about Watergate.
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.
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 make a point of not reading reviews because of the old adage, if you read the good ones then you have to read the bad ones, and if you read the bad ones, you have to, you know... And also because it's a very, very bewildering and exposing thing.
I don't want to become too self-conscious - it's why I never read reviews, even the good ones.
In my peaceful moments, I yearn to write a bank heist like the one in 'Heat.'
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.
There's something about the soul of a country that is somehow connected to the head of state.
Most leading actresses have this energy, this 'Look at me. Here I am.' They're powerful; they're beautiful.
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.
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.
There are so many projects that I've written and had to abort because either I felt too distressed by what I was doing to the people who I was writing about, or they couldn't cope with it because their view of themselves was so far removed from reality.
It's important to me what the viewers think.
I prefer my writing to do all the talking for me.
Everything I write, I've written the first draft in Austria.
Most historians are engaged in fiction.
The film 'The Queen' came about with a producer saying to me that he wanted me to write about the circumstances behind Diana's death. I think he was hoping that I would come up with some journalistic scoop that would identify an MI5 covert plot.
I can't help slightly falling in love with every character I write about. And I quite like writing about people who are vilified.
For 'Frost/Nixon,' everyone I spoke to told the story their way. Even people in the room tell different versions. There's no one truth about what happened in those interviews, so I feel very relaxed about bringing my imagination to the piece. God knows everyone else has.
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'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.
I insist to this day that if you read the screenplay to 'The Queen,' it leaves you in no doubt that we considered her an isolated, out-of-touch, cold, emotionally inaccessible, overprivileged, deluded woman, heading an institution that should immediately be dismantled in any free and fair society.
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.
As any showrunner will tell you, it is crushing work. It is around the clock. It is like a monastic commitment that you make.
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.
I don't think of the crown as this glamorous thing. It's this murderous, bejeweled thing, the crown.
Barack Obama winning the election had an instant impact on everything - race relations, national self-esteem, tolerance. It also had an instant affect on 'Frost/Nixon.' At a stroke, instead of being a piece that reminded people of the agony they were in, it became an uplifting message about the agony they had escaped.
I'm constantly having to check my conscience about what I'm writing and the responsibility of what I'm saying.
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.
No family is complete without an embarrassing uncle.
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.
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.
Every dramatist will tell you that they know deep down what happened in the course of making that film and to what degree they took steps that were convenient and to what degree they took steps in telling their story that were dishonest. You know in your heart of hearts.
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.
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.
Truth is an illusory notion.
By nature of the job, most actors are striking, remarkable, and alpha.
If you start to analyze what you do, it can paralyze you.
