David Farr Quotes
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There's nothing more frightening - and exciting - than getting lost in a forest. There is a journey towards the light, and you've got to go through the dark to get to the light. That's what the forest is all about.
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The world in the '90s had seemed somewhat stable. There was talk of the end of history, a calm consensus around where we were all going. Consumer capitalism with some sort of social conscience. Then 9/11 happened, and that illusion was blown out of the water.
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Sometimes we don't want to be lectured; we prefer to be taken on a journey.
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I was very struck by the fact that Robin Hood became increasingly taken over by the middle and upper classes. He starts out a bandit but becomes a fully fledged aristocrat.
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The character of Robin Hood stands for the deep anger of the dispossessed against the ruling classes.
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The reason it's called 'The Heart of Robin Hood' is that he starts off not having a heart - or certainly not being in contact with it. And through a series of stories, he learns to discover that he has one. He becomes much more dramatic as a character, to be honest, because there's something rather too smug about the endless do-gooder.
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In the '90s, everyone thought we'd solved everything and liberal capitalism was the agreed way to live. That got blown up in 9/11, and capitalism proved completely flawed in 2008.
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All comedy is funny because it tells us truths that we recognise through laughter, but that doesn't mean it can't be unnerving. Think of 'Fawlty Towers'; it can be very, very dark, but by God, it's funny. The two things are not in opposition.
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'Fall Of A City' aims to convey, in all its emotional richness, the effects of war and the toll taken on city and family by the horrors of siege.
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I don't like selling myself. It's a sort of shy arrogance.
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I love telling stories. I don't really think in terms of clear 'aims.'
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We go into nature to transform.
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As you enter the world of myth, you have immediately a wonderful freedom.
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I always just read the play and find a world. That world must honour the play, enhance it, and maybe shine some new light - not satirise or try to reinvent in a way that is placing the idea above the thing. The play is the thing.
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When you go into a forest, anything can happen.
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'Game of Thrones' is fundamentally based on a Machiavellian, almost Jacobean, idea of power and intrigue.
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The story of Ilium, the ancient city of Troy, has always gripped me.
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We turned Cambridge theatre upside down, using odd spaces and devising everything collaboratively. It eventually blew apart, but I'm still proud of some of what we achieved. The style was very disciplined, and we had the sense to keep things short.
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Theatre is a bastard form. I'm always proud of that. That's what makes it taste of life.
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It's a very bleak play, but there is some final sense of redemption. 'Coriolanus' shows mercy, a Christian virtue in an otherwise un-Christian world.
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Comedy is good at analysing and dealing with evil because it doesn't present it as evil but a collection of banalities.
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I think, for any writer, when you write, you just write.
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The 'Mahabharata' is a more complex and longer saga than the 'Ramayana,' which is like a fairy tale. It's much lighter and more fun, and at its heart, there's a cracking love story.
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I would say what you have to do as a screenwriter is strip the book back to find the skeleton. When you've found the skeleton - that's what you trust - you reclothe.