I prefer love scenes to be shot up close with a lot of focus on eyes and mouths. Otherwise it can feel uncomfortable and voyeuristic.
I know that a ridiculous number of classic serials have been commissioned, and that reviews show a reaction against them. The critics seem fed up.
I always do like to write love stories, even if they end tragically.
As a fairly innocent teenager, growing up in a village in Wales, I just thought, “God, I would like to go and hang about Soho and write great poetry and try to avoid drinking myself to death.”
I remain, however, fairly optimistic for the future of period drama because it’s just such a popular thing.
The writer in movies is about as low as you can get and you really are a hired hand. You are paid a lot of money to be treated like dirt.
The BBC fulfils a wonderful cultural function. Maybe the problem is that it feels it needs to be everything to everybody.
I was getting rewarded for writing well, from about the age of five or six. A teacher would say, “Look what Andrew has written,” and I thought, “Maybe I could be a writer.”
Taking the humour out of Dickens, it’s not Dickens any more.
Rebecca Eaton has made an enormous contribution to the cultural life of America, and, more than that, she is one of the most fun people I know.
I had a very high opinion of my father’s judgement of things and he said, “You better get a job that pays the bills because a writer doesn’t make any money. If possible, get a job that allows you to write in your spare time.”
From time to time there is a move to do a little less in the way of period dramas, but people rebel. Audiences say we want them. There is a big hunger for them. I don’t think it’s sentimentality or nostalgia, it’s often that they are simply the best stories.
When you see two writers named on a movie, one of them did some drafts and got the boot.
You’re stuck with being yourself, so the important thing is to find people who like that.
The joy of writing drama is putting yourself into different people’s heads.