It’s an incredibly long journey, and a good idea is only the tiny little spark at the beginning of this immense process.Īnyway, I came up with the idea for Michael, it was about a father and a son who both found out on the same night that the girls they were with – the girlfriend and the wife – were having sex with other people. And I suppose this is my first observation, that I think the difference between having a good idea for a film and a finished film that you like is the same as seeing a pretty girl at a party and being there when the same girl has your third baby. That was the first big mistake that I’ve never made again, which is that I always have lived with the idea of any film that I’m going to do for at least a year before I eventually start writing it.įilms can’t be infatuations, they’ve got to be relationships. So I got a phone call from my agent saying ‘he wants to see you tonight’, and I thought of the idea for the film that I was going to try to sell him on the Northern Line. I’m going to tell you a little bit about that, because often the things that you don’t do in life are the most important, and there are many things about this first experience which completely defined what followed in my life. The answer is because someone called Michael, an American, asked me to write a film. So, the first question that I’ve asked myself is ‘why did I start writing films?’. The question is ‘why?’, I’ll be answering that, and then I think Edith and I have agreed that we might talk about ‘how?’ as it were, about the processes a little bit more, and then you can ask ‘what’ ever you like. So I seriously don’t know what’s right or wrong, all I can do is tell you what’s true for me.įor the first bit of the evening, I’ve decided to use Jeremy Paxman as my inspiration, because I’m just going to ask myself the same question a few times and try and give a few different answers.
There may be other people who do the exact opposite, who care about every word and don’t put it down until they’re sure it’s right. I write enormous amounts, I write 20, 30 pages of stuff a day and hope that some of it’s good. Without it they couldn’t, perhaps, feel the challenge. There may be other people for whom the empty page is absolutely key. For instance I always think it’s a clever thing to leave myself notes for the next day, so I’ve never woken up and started writing with an empty page in front of me. Screenwriters on the whole don’t talk to each other about what they do. Or, as it were, only true for me, which is a really important thing. Also, this is almost my first lecture, all the other lectures I’ve ever given have been to my children, and I’m still doing the washing up so I’m not exactly convinced of the efficacy of the lecture form.Īnd also I do want to say that everything that I want to say will only be partially true. So I’m just pleading ignorance before I start. Or films that should have been wonderful and don’t work out quite as they should have done. There are thousands of good screenplays, I’m sure, packed up and ready knowing exactly where to go. That’s just to say that nobody knows the truth of what makes a good screenplay or a bad one, what leads to success. He says ‘Nobody knows why Elvis threw it all away/ nobody knows what Jack Ruby had to hide/ nobody knows why some of us get broken hearts/ and some of us find a world that’s clean and bright/ you can be packed up and ready/ knowing exactly where to go/ how come you missed the connection/ no use in asking/ the answer is nobody knows’. It’s a song by an Irish pop singer called Paul Brady, called Nobody Knows. Richard Curtis: I got a slide that I thought I might put up straight away, because it was a song that I was listening to while I was working out what to say. Richard Curtis (Notting Hill, Love Actually) reveals his tricks of the trade & offers advice for writers.