Repressed English writers have to write love stories because they can't say what they really mean.
— Simon Beaufoy
It's a very weird thing, making a true story, because you need your freedom, as filmmakers, to do what you need to do.
The recession of the late 1980s was a very visible humiliation. Cities across Britain had become the victims of botched battlefield surgery - surgery that involved the ripping up of factories, the flattening of buildings, and the razing of the Victorian heritage of heavy labour.
I think you are doing a disservice to a novel just by transposing it wholesale onto the screen, because it doesn't work. They are completely different beasts.
Everyone's got a boulder in their life of one sort or another that they need to overcome. For most people, it's not a literal one, but there are certainly metaphorical ones.
If you've been nominated for an Oscar, it would be ridiculous to say you didn't want to win. It would be lovely to have one of those statues.
British audiences are toughest on British films. So often, a British film is the last thing they want to see. If you please them, you really know you've made an impact.
'Slumdog Millionaire' is a fairy tale, but it starts in a place you really believe, and that came from spending two months wandering around the slums picking up stories and talking to people.
If you don't have to get out of bed and do something every morning, that's kind of a curse.
What's important in the filmmaking process has stayed the same. Keep it small, keep it personal, keep it authentic, work with people you like and trust. That process is much longer than the filmmaking process. The development process is a long one, so try and say something of importance.
You write who you are somehow. Even if you try to not to. You can't help but write who you are. I'm just not a very cynical person. I believe in the humanity of people, whether it is just the guys in 'The Full Monty' or Aron Ralston.
For me, as a writer who comes from quite a naturalistic tradition, British screenwriting is quite delicate, quite small, and rarified in a way.
I guess my approach to adapting books is to treat them with a deep respect on one level and at another level part them to one side and go, 'I'm doing something completely different here.'
I just can't get excited about money as a motivation in a film. It leaves me cold.
The West has become very sophisticated, seeing love as a very complex thing. In Bollywood, it's not complex: it's an arrow straight to the heart.
It's a huge responsibility writing about people who are alive. It's the thing about writing that keeps me awake at night: dramatising real-life events with real people.
Everyone hated the title 'The Full Monty' until they saw the film did really well and then loved the title.
After a while, you become really irritated that you're not recognised as the person who wrote 'The Full Monty.' Everyone goes on about how lovely the characters are. That's because they were written! 'What a clever title.' Yeah, that's because I made up the title!
I'm not interested in superheroes. What about normal people doing extraordinary things?
'The Full Monty' was my first feature script, and I wasn't that skilled at it.
Miley Cyrus twerking - is that really a model for your kids?
I'm not into being all 'film-y' and going to the premieres and parties. I tend to feel like the embarrassing uncle at a wedding.
When you make a movie, a dramatization based on the real experience of a living subject, you can't airbrush that away into to a perfect movie arc.
I'm a documentary filmmaker by training. You got to start with the real people and the real place.
In times of trial, for inspiration, people want to look to real people rather than to fiction.
Real life is messy, and drama is a shaped version of real life.
As a child growing up in a grey-skied Yorkshire village, I would occasionally happen upon a Bollywood movie on the television. After a few minutes watching a bunch of sari-clad dancers cavorting on a Swiss mountain to tuneless music, I would switch over to some proper drama about housing estates and single mothers.
I'm very lucky. I actually like screenwriting. I rarely feel a sense of doom going to my desk.
In life, unlike in movies, people don't change - what's the word I'm looking for? - absolutely. They change a bit, slowly.
When you haven't got a job, a joke is about the only thing that's free.
I have a huge admiration for the ability of people to go, 'I don't care if it can't happen. I don't care if you say it's impossible. I am gonna do it anyway.' I think it's an amazing part of human nature. It feeds into faith and belief in human beings to not only do the improbable but almost the impossible.
I've been in electric storms in the mountains. Scary things.
If you work in the studio system in America, they've almost got to the point where a computer programme could write scripts. Effectively, they hire and fire enough writers until they get something generic.
Being rich would be disastrous for me as a writer. I have always needed to write to pay the bills.
I used to live on a barge - it is incredibly good to write near water. There is an ever-changing landscape, so you never get bored.
The poorest people are so incredibly poor, and the rich are so incredibly rich on the other side. That is a kind of fascination.
There isn't a more important issue in the world than global warming. Even the Cold War and the Bay of Pigs crisis were a notional threat.
I believe innately in the human spirit being a powerful and positive thing. And that just comes out, whether you like it or not. It comes out in the writing.
In the midst of global recession, in the face of uncertainty about what's going to happen next, film looks for inspiration to real people.
You do need people. You can't live without them. We're all interconnected in some way.
India is desperately romantic, utterly unashamed of its sentimentality, its generosity, its fierce pride and massive heart.
