Screenwriters From England

"The family took the rightwing Daily Express, and Loach would read it cover to cover, never questioning its values. As far as he was concerned, it simply reflected the world. "I adopted the Tories like you adopt a team," he says, embarrassed. How long did he adopt them for? "Probably until I was 19, when I went into the RAF.""

"If Loach could make a film without a camera he would. He wants the actors to just be themselves so that everything looks as though it has just happened."

"When Loach selects his actors, whether professional or not, there are certain givens. He will not cast against class: "You carry your class with you in how you talk, how you behave, how you pick up a fork. You can't really act it, and you can't act a dialect." But he stresses that while a professional's training can be a handicap, equally there are parts usually when they are precisely scripted and information has to be revealed in a certain way that could not be handled by non-actors. Loach has used many good non-professionals, but Crissy Rock is phenomenal. He says he auditioned 300 people for the part, two-thirds professionals, but she was the best. Watching the film, you have to believe him."

"[[w:Sydney Newman|[Sydney] Newman]] and [[w:James MacTaggart|[James] MacTaggart]] saw no problem with running a new wave of Paddy Chayefskyan problem plays out of the electronic studio, but [[w:Tony Garnett|[Tony] Garnett]] and Ken Loach were soon rejecting this whole classical notion of "the play"’. They had seen the future of television drama, and it was A bout de souffle mated with World in Action. While MacTaggart was away, they booked up as much off-base filming as they could for a television version of Nell Dunn's book, Up the Junction, a mouthy compendium of South London lower-class lore. "At that time, you were allowed about four days filming |with cumbersome 35mm equipment] just to show a car pulling up or driving away," says Loach. "So we used those four days to whizz round and shoot half the script with a hand-held 16mm camera - about 35 to 40 minutes of screen time." The remaining studio scenes were dubbed from tape on to film so that the whole thing could be collaged together in the cutting room, with Loach deploying all manner of neo-Godardian time leaps and wild-track effects."

"[A]s I stood after coming off stage in a state of shock, a tall chap waiting in the queue … offered a few words of consolation, and then minutes later I was having coffee with my main writing partner for the next twenty years.My first impression of Graham Chapman was of physical strength. He was slightly shorter than me, but much tougher, in the lean, angular way of a sportsman. He did not surprise me when he said he was a medical student who climbed mountains and played rugby football. He was wearing a rather hairy tweed jacket and heavy brogues, and he soon lit up a pipe. He seemed dead butch, and slightly taciturn."

"[I]t took about four men to live [Graham Chapman's] life. There was the quiet pipe-smoking tweed-jacketed doctor, who could elucidate complicated medical facts to the layman while calmly diagnosing and dispensing medicines; there was the quiet pipe-smoking writer who could sit all day painting his nails with gestetner fluid, occasionally interjecting the oddest comments, squawks, shouts of 'Betty Marsden' and injunctions to sing 'Only Make-Believe' in a squeaky voice; there was the quiet pipe-smoking homosexual, who could calmly bring a party of Chinese boys down for breakfast in an extremely bourgeois German suburban hotel, causing the manageress conniptions and ending in a request that he move to a more suitable establishment; and there was the quiet pipe-smoking alcoholic, who could reduce any drinks party to a shambles by consuming half a distillery and then crawling round the floor kissing all the men and groping all the women."

"He was the most "extremely" person I think I've ever met. It didn't really matter what the adjective was, because he would be extremely that—whether it was kind or unkind or good or bad or funny or not funny, I mean there was nothing he ever did that he didn't do … much more extremely than anybody else would. … "[S]ubversive authority figures" … sounds rather like a paradox, and it's a very good paradox as far as Graham is concerned; … but, actually, the person he continually subverted was himself. … Because he was always this rather tweedy person on first meeting him, and that was an impression that lasted at least three seconds into any relationship. … But, there was always a sort of danger there, because you never actually knew what was going to happen next."

"Graham's writing, at its best, … had that enviable quality of giving no evidence of where it came from. He was like that, too, except that we all knew he came from Leicester, though Graham showed not the slightest sign of having come from Leicester. As far as I was concerned, he had come from the moon—an amiable Looney with the gift of conveying enormous reassurance. You always felt it would be all right while Graham was around—whatever "it" was. And then he would be off 'round the bar of the King's House Hotel, Glen-coe, determined to kiss everyone in the bar. Which he did. And got into a fight. And got banned from the bar."

"Dropped in to see Graham in Southwood Lane. He came out of hospital yesterday and is not supposed to drink ever again. He looked sallow and tense. It’s going to be a great struggle for him. Barry Cryer was there too. We sat and sipped tea and Barry and I joked rather forcibly. It seemed the only thing to do at the time."

"John rings. He’s been away in the country for the weekend. Has just returned to find a message that Graham has had a nervous breakdown."

"[The other Pythons all lead] boring lives, but Graham lives what we do on the screen for real. … It's constantly surprising, what he does. … Graham was at his best, usually, in very conservative restaurants when we'd be out dining, and there'd be some nice, middle-aged, middle-class couples dining, and you'd suddenly discover Graham was no longer at the table, but was underneath the table, and other people's tables, and kissing people's feet."

"Graham was getting through two bottles of gin a day, but those were the large ones that you get behind a bar. Pretty colossal. … He never used the word alcoholic, but he knew darned well that he had to clean his act up. As I understand it anyway, Graham already knew he would be playing Brian [in Life of Brian], and had to really stop drinking with that in mind."

"Once the decision had been made, once I decided to stop [drinking], it was easy—except for the … three days of unpleasantness, of—well, of having things crawl all over me and hallucinating. … One of the worst things was not being able to remember if I'd slept or not, whether I was dreaming, or whether I was awake. I didn't know."

"The very first day of filming of The Holy Grail, in fact, we were halfway up a mountainside in Glen Coe, and I hadn't gotten my daily dose, and it was seven o'clock in the morning that we left the hotel. The bar wasn't open; I hadn't realised this, and hadn't gotten anything prepared the night before that I should have if I'd researched my drinking properly. And so I had DTs on the mountainside while having to try and remember lines and (uh) stand up. … It was then that I decided next time that I do a job like this I'm going to be clean for it. It's not fair to the other chaps in the group, it's not fair to me, it's not fair to what I've written, and it's very stupid."

"[My parents] came to grips with the drinking … much more easily, I think, than [with my sexuality]. Yes. But, things are rather better now than in those days, of course. It was some time ago. And now, even the Church of England, I think, regards a homosexual as merely being handicapped."

"It's fear. … There's no point in it. We should just love each other, and do it in our own way. That's the only thing that's important."

"I think … [what attracted me to show business] was the early radio shows. I was an avid listener to radio shows like Take It from Here; before that, Jewel and Warriss, Hancock, all sorts of radio shows. And then, later—when I was around thirteen, fourteen—The Goon Show, of course. Here came a show which was not like any of the other shows. It didn't have the same kind of rules. It didn't have any rules. It didn't even like the medium that was putting it out, particularly; it didn't like the BBC. Wonderful! There was something I could relate to, and did."

"There was one occasion when John Cleese and myself actually felt guilty about laughing at something we were writing, because it was in incredibly bad taste. So bad was the taste that we just couldn't help laughing at it. It concerned a gentleman walking into … an undertaker's premises with his dead mother in a sack. And from there it got worse."

"Ultimately, I think writing is more … satisfying [than acting], … because if you write something, later on in the day … you can read it through again and you know that it's … good. That's a very satisfying feeling because [the work] is there, it's something you've created. … Acting is … a skill which a lot of people have. Less so with writing …. But, I'm enjoying acting now much more than I did. It was torture for me at one point, in the latter days of [Monty Python's Flying Circus]. But then, after sobering up, I really began to enjoy it again."

"As a black woman I feel a responsibility to black people and to women. My responsibility is not to be compromising. Even if the content is not positively biased or doesn’t fall in line with an agenda or ideology, I want people to be satisfied by the honesty."

"The evil of storytelling is you’re trying to make the audience complicit in murder — Kill the guy! Jump him! And then once you’ve done it, it’s like, I’ve killed this guy, now what? If you do that kind of violence in a show like this, you have to bring the audience along with you and then question their judgement."

"A lot of the challenge with TV, as opposed to making movies, is that you have to leave room for the characters in the story to tell themselves. Sometimes you don’t know where a character is going to go and what’s going to happen to them until you’ve seen the actor take that part and make it their own. Then, like novelists say, the book starts to write itself, and the characters start to tell their own story. And then, we know where they’re going, as opposed to mapping it out, step by step. We have broad, general strokes, but you’ve got to leave space for these characters to live and breathe."

"There’s a problem when you write for Hollywood in particular, they only read the dialogue. They call it reading down the middle. They have 10 scripts to read over the weekend, so all the bits that are in block prose, they won’t look at. But that’s the important stuff in the cinema. A cinematic script… they always say that you can watch a good film with the sound down."

"It’s not as if we’re specifically thinking of jokes for adults and jokes for children. We think of jokes, and occasionally we’ll think of an adult one, but it’ll detract from the story. People will say ‘I don’t understand that, what’s going on’. So if that happened, we probably wouldn’t use it. There’s the occasional joke that kids won’t get, but it if doesn’t interfere and it’s fun, then that’s fine."

"I think if you’re true to yourself then it will have a universality to it, that’s my belief."

"You know, I'm not at all against CG. I really admire many films that are made, especially when they have such great design sense to them. I think that's so important, whichever medium. You use a medium for a reason."

"When you write a project your imagination just flows! You usually have some idea about budget and schedule but still try to write freely and honestly. Then when you get the budget and you do have to compromise, but this is part of the process."

"Policing is about moving from the unknown to the known and then further—to the provable."

"After that I was up and ready for action. It might have been a Saturday, but below the rank of chief inspector weekends are an entirely notional concept."

"“But I want you to be cautious.” “Hey,” I said. “Cautious is my middle name.” “But your first name is Never Knowingly,” said Stephanopoulos. Which got all the laughs it deserved."

"Still magic, like policing, has always been much more about the practice than the theory."

"I’m sorry, I couldn’t find “a good song” in your music. —Siri"

"Been there, I thought, done that, read The Silmarillion."

"With a rich history like that there was nothing to be done except flatten it and replace it with a shopping arcade designed in the who-the-fuck-cares school of retail architecture. The result was a two-story warehouse with a flat roof designed to maximise floor space and nothing else."

"The prisons are full of people with poor impulse control and a lack of foresight."

"Miss Karmargi who’d been my Religious Education teacher at school. An avowed atheist who’d once said that she respected all religions equally—“which is more than can be said for most religions,” she’d added."

"The first rule of Big Brother is that Big Brother is never watching when you want him to."

"God, I thought, Mum’s going to be upset if the rapture arrives and Jesus looks like Robin Williams."

"I asked Reynolds if she could put the bodyguards on what we’d taken to calling the Unreality List of people that might be magical, members of the demi-monde or suspiciously weird. “It would save ever so much time,” Reynolds had said when we set it up, “if we just added the population of Florida right at the start.”"

"Nothing beats a long wait at a bus stop as a reality check."

"“When you say shades, what do you mean?” I asked. “Do you mean Fae?” “I mean everything that’s not normal,” said Mrs. Chin. “Like New Jersey,” said Stephen."

"“I’m interested in history,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me what happened.” “Why would a young man like you be interested in history?” “So I can avoid repeating it.”"

"The more power something has, the less the actual facts matter."

"Not everything that’s unexplained is caused by magic."

"“There’s paperwork for magic? asked Vanessa. “Not so glamorous now, eh?” I said."

"Gaston did betray an abstracted quality that might have been the result of magic. But was more likely down to consuming, I suspected, a tremendous amount of recreational chemicals."

"It’s like with germ warfare. They weaponise germs for aggression and we say we study weaponised germs purely for defensive purposes. Nobody likes to admit they’re doing it but everybody knows everybody else is doing it."

"As police you can live with the violence, the squalor and the stupidity—it’s the waste of people’s futures that really grinds you down."

"It’s one of those weird truths you learn early on as police that quite a high percentage of the public have all the survival instinct of a moth in a candle factory. They run the wrong way, they refuse to move, some will run toward the danger, and others will instantly whip out their phones and take footage."

"None of this was real. But I’ve learned that just because something isn’t real doesn’t mean it’s not important."