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I think I stumbled upon a voice people associate with me with 'The Deal.'
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Everything I write, I've written the first draft in Austria.
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There is no inherent contradiction between being right-wing and being intelligent.
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By nature of the job, most actors are striking, remarkable, and alpha.
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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.
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Belief in God is so deranged that it makes absolutely no sense, but it holds people together somehow.
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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.
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You can't ask someone to act middle-aged. Someone has to bring their own fatigue to it.
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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.
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The irony of what I do is that the more you reveal someone in their frailties and shortcomings, the more we feel drawn to them and forgiving we feel of them.
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As a dramatist, you have 200 choices at every fork in the road. But the audience will reject it if you make the wrong choice, if they feel you are trying to shape the character in a way that suits you. It rings false immediately. People can sense when you're being cynical or schematic.
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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.
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I have a great deal of compassion for those in public life and what we have done to them.
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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.
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People bang on all the time about whether what I've done is the truth or not. Well, to me, history is just a series of elaborate fictions.
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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.
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People test movies within an inch of their life so that the entire audience experience is a uniform one.
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I'm not a vindictive person. But I do want to shine a light on human frailty and heroism in equal measure.
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If you think about what you do, if you become self-conscious about it, you've got to be very careful. Because I really like to write without self-awareness of what I'm doing.
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I watch drama on DVD because I can't stand ad breaks.
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I don't want to become too self-conscious - it's why I never read reviews, even the good ones.
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No family is complete without an embarrassing uncle.
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I have no directing ambition whatsoever. And as long as I meet filmmakers like Tom Hooper, Stephen Frears, and others who allow that collaboration, I can't see why I would ever want to direct.
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I prefer my writing to do all the talking for me.