Peter Morgan Quotes
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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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There's nothing wrong with anybody from any other country having a perspective on the British royal family. It would be interesting. But I just doubt that they would get the dialogue right.
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It's madness to hand in a script to a director, leave them alone, and for the director not to want the writer there with rehearsals and the shoot.
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There is something fantastically post-modern about David Frost.
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There's something about the soul of a country that is somehow connected to the head of state.
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There are people who are bound journalistically to a code of ethics that means they can't quote something that isn't sourced, whereas what I do is entirely unsourced. I effectively fictionalise history and yet somehow aim at a greater truth.
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The films of which I'm most proud I've written are the ones that pivot on forgiveness.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As a child, I grew up the son of German immigrant parents, so I grew up being teased and called 'Fritz' at school. When I married my wife and went to live in Vienna, I was teased for being a Brit.
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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.
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Nixon had lists upon lists upon lists. They were tragic lists saying, 'Smile more,' or, 'Be stronger - remember, it is your job to spiritually uplift the nation.' This understanding of his limitations is heartbreaking.
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I can't help slightly falling in love with every character I write about. And I quite like writing about people who are vilified.
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Ambition interests me because it's such a surefire indicator of damage.
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As any showrunner will tell you, it is crushing work. It is around the clock. It is like a monastic commitment that you make.
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I quite like the idea - just as an abstract idea - of 12 people's collective life experience and wisdom being this formidable thing. People say juries can be led - I think 12 people from different backgrounds, different races, different genders, different ages, it's hard to hoodwink.
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I'm constantly having to check my conscience about what I'm writing and the responsibility of what I'm saying.
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I'm not good at fantasy, no. I have been offered stuff, and I can't get my head around it.
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The film 'The Queen' came about with a producer saying to me that he wanted me to write about the circumstances behind Diana's death. I think he was hoping that I would come up with some journalistic scoop that would identify an MI5 covert plot.
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For a younger generation to imagine a time where there was no security at airports - going around the world in the bar of a jumbo jet, 'Tell the plane to wait, I'm running late!' - there is something very Austin Powers about David Frost, a man who, in all seriousness, would approach women in a safari suit, with sideburns.
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If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative.
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There were a couple of things I lost sleep over with the play 'Frost/Nixon,' so I went back and addressed them a bit more in the film.
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The feelings we all have as 50-year-olds are different than the feelings we all have as 30-year-olds. That informs everything we do.