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 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.
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.
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'm constantly having to check my conscience about what I'm writing and the responsibility of what I'm saying.
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.
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.
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.
Most leading actresses have this energy, this 'Look at me. Here I am.' They're powerful; they're beautiful.
You can't ask someone to act middle-aged. Someone has to bring their own fatigue to it.
There's something about the soul of a country that is somehow connected to the head of state.
Sometimes it's okay for an audience not to understand everything that's going on.
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.
Robert Bolt's storytelling is the kind that I grew up with and aspired to.
The films of which I'm most proud I've written are the ones that pivot on forgiveness.
