Keep your central character moving, discovering, learning.

As a child growing up in a grey-skied Yorkshire village, I would occasionally happen upon a Bollywood movie on the television. After a few minutes watching a bunch of sari-clad dancers cavorting on a Swiss mountain to tuneless music, I would switch over to some proper drama about housing estates and single mothers.

When you make a movie, a dramatization based on the real experience of a living subject, you cant airbrush that away into to a perfect movie arc.

I'm very lucky. I actually like screenwriting. I rarely feel a sense of doom going to my desk.

There isnt a more important issue in the world than global warming. Even the Cold War and the Bay of Pigs crisis were a notional threat.

I guess my approach to adapting books is to treat them with a deep respect on one level and at another level part them to one side and go, 'I'm doing something completely different here.'

They say crying makes the heart lighter

One doesn’t question a miracle.

Real life is messy, and drama is a shaped version of real life.