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.
If you don't have to get out of bed and do something every morning, that's kind of a curse.
In times of trial, for inspiration, people want to look to real people rather than to fiction.
India is desperately romantic, utterly unashamed of its sentimentality, its generosity, its fierce pride and massive heart.
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.
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.
Miley Cyrus twerking - is that really a model for your kids?
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.
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 very lucky. I actually like screenwriting. I rarely feel a sense of doom going to my desk.
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.
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.
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.
I just can't get excited about money as a motivation in a film. It leaves me cold.
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.'
You do need people. You can't live without them. We're all interconnected in some way.
For me, as a writer who comes from quite a naturalistic tradition, British screenwriting is quite delicate, quite small, and rarified in a way.
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.
