Peter Morgan Quotes
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It's important to me what the viewers think.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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When I started writing the screenplay for 'The Queen,' about the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana, both Stephen Frears, the director, and Andy Harries, the producer, begged me not to put Tony Blair in it.
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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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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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I'm quick to be upset. My feelings are close to the surface. There is not much gap between a thought and a feeling with me. It makes it difficult for some people. I feel too much.
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Self-destruction is such an interesting thing for a dramatist, and what's particular to Nixon is how human the failings were that led to his downfall.
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Movies feel like work, and reading fiction feels like work, whereas reading nonfiction feels like pleasure.
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I wrote 'Hereafter' quickly and without mapping it out too much or being too schematic. As an exercise, I think that was incredibly important.
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I am drawn to characters so full of internal contradictions. Idi Amin was one. I loved writing him.
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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.
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I'm not an artist, and I want to take risks, and when the possibility of failure occurs, it's because the idea is all exciting or interesting as a high wire act, and sometimes you've got to fall off, just by virtue of the fact that you're constantly trying to evolve and do new things.
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In a way, I think of the press as my colleagues. I don't want to throw hand grenades at people who do something that's pretty similar to what I do. But at the same time, we all need to take ourselves seriously and be responsible as professionals. And there was a collective failure in the treatment of Christopher Jefferies.
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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.
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I've done a lot of work in Hollywood and theatre, but to be honest, the biggest pleasure I've ever got is from the TV single plays I've written. It's a format where you don't mind saying, 'I want to tackle some important themes head on.'
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The minute you become a leader of a country, you go into a very small club. You join that sort of pantheon of other world leaders.
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In my peaceful moments, I yearn to write a bank heist like the one in 'Heat.'
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I actually speak fluent German. And I live in Vienna, and I'm married to a Viennese woman.
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It is a fairly serious thing that you're doing if you're writing about people who are still alive and who still have a role in public life. Sometimes you don't want to be reminded too much of the responsibility.
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Once I start writing about somebody, I become very protective of them.