Sometimes if biography is too head-on, it can feel too obvious.
Belief in God is so deranged that it makes absolutely no sense, but it holds people together somehow.
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.
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.
If you start to analyze what you do, it can paralyze you.
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 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.
By nature of the job, most actors are striking, remarkable, and alpha.
Truth is an illusory notion.
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.
I can't help slightly falling in love with every character I write about. And I quite like writing about people who are vilified.
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.
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.
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?'
Most historians are engaged in fiction.
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.
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.
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.
I prefer my writing to do all the talking for me.
I can't imagine anyone thinking, 'Oh good, it's awards season!'
