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.
— Peter Morgan
There were a couple of things I lost sleep over with the play 'Frost/Nixon,' so I went back and addressed them a bit more in the film.
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.'
I think I stumbled upon a voice people associate with me with 'The Deal.'
Ambition interests me because it's such a surefire indicator of damage.
Sometimes you are lucky enough to get offered things, and there is no rhyme or reason. I am very lucky because I come from England, and you have a whole range of things offered to you, from television plays and shows and theatre, so much more to explore, so it's never really money.
For a younger generation to imagine a time where there was no security at airports - going around the world in the bar of a jumbo jet, 'Tell the plane to wait, I'm running late!' - there is something very Austin Powers about David Frost, a man who, in all seriousness, would approach women in a safari suit, with sideburns.
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 watch drama on DVD because I can't stand ad breaks.
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.
You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.
I'm not good at fantasy, no. I have been offered stuff, and I can't get my head around it.
I am not a politics wonk. I like the idea of my writing reflecting more about who I am or other people.
I actually speak fluent German. And I live in Vienna, and I'm married to a Viennese woman.
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.
Belief in God is so deranged that it makes absolutely no sense, but it holds people together somehow.
There is no inherent contradiction between being right-wing and being intelligent.
I'm not a vindictive person. But I do want to shine a light on human frailty and heroism in equal measure.
There are many, many things in my work that need redoing - never the structure.
I have a great deal of compassion for those in public life and what we have done to them.
The real beauty in my professional experience has been friendships and collaborations with filmmakers.
I quite like the idea - just as an abstract idea - of 12 people's collective life experience and wisdom being this formidable thing. People say juries can be led - I think 12 people from different backgrounds, different races, different genders, different ages, it's hard to hoodwink.
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.
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.
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.
Once I start writing about somebody, I become very protective of them.
I'm not an artist, and I want to take risks, and when the possibility of failure occurs, it's because the idea is all exciting or interesting as a high wire act, and sometimes you've got to fall off, just by virtue of the fact that you're constantly trying to evolve and do new things.
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?
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 test movies within an inch of their life so that the entire audience experience is a uniform one.
Sometimes if biography is too head-on, it can feel too obvious.
In a way, I think of the press as my colleagues. I don't want to throw hand grenades at people who do something that's pretty similar to what I do. But at the same time, we all need to take ourselves seriously and be responsible as professionals. And there was a collective failure in the treatment of Christopher Jefferies.
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.
I do have an innate understanding of where a story should or shouldn't go, in a way that I don't think can be taught.
I am drawn to characters so full of internal contradictions. Idi Amin was one. I loved writing him.
There is something fantastically post-modern about David Frost.
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 was so interesting to discover Nixon was a Californian. I always think Nixon should come from a cold place.
If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative.
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.
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.
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.
Movies feel like work, and reading fiction feels like work, whereas reading nonfiction feels like pleasure.
You're either a person with a conscience, or you're not. I think I've got quite a fine conscience.
I wrote 'Hereafter' quickly and without mapping it out too much or being too schematic. As an exercise, I think that was incredibly important.
