Top 124 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Morgan
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British writer Peter Morgan.
Last updated on September 18, 2024.
There is something fantastically post-modern about David Frost.
It's madness to hand in a script to a director, leave them alone, and for the director not to want the writer there with rehearsals and the shoot.
I actually speak fluent German. And I live in Vienna, and I'm married to a Viennese woman.
I don't think I'm an unhappy person. It's just an intensity, not a depressive thing. It's just not having enough layers of skin. It's exhausting.
You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.
I make a point of not reading reviews because of the old adage, if you read the good ones then you have to read the bad ones, and if you read the bad ones, you have to, you know... And also because it's a very, very bewildering and exposing thing.
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.
Generally, I read nonfiction. There's very little fiction that I enjoy enough to spend my time reading. I am generally a nonfiction guy.
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.
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.'
Sometimes you are lucky enough to get offered things, and there is no rhyme or reason. I am very lucky because I come from England, and you have a whole range of things offered to you, from television plays and shows and theatre, so much more to explore, so it's never really money.
You're either a person with a conscience, or you're not. I think I've got quite a fine conscience.
I do have an innate understanding of where a story should or shouldn't go, in a way that I don't think can be taught.
If you start to analyze what you do, it can paralyze you.
There is no inherent contradiction between being right-wing and being intelligent.
I don't understand and don't enjoy sci-fi, and it's just that if people aren't real, and they don't live in a real and recognizable society, I don't understand what to do.
There are many, many things in my work that need redoing - never the structure.
I'm not a vindictive person. But I do want to shine a light on human frailty and heroism in equal measure.
For 'Frost/Nixon,' everyone I spoke to told the story their way. Even people in the room tell different versions. There's no one truth about what happened in those interviews, so I feel very relaxed about bringing my imagination to the piece. God knows everyone else has.
The first and primary requirement for me in a director that I'd want to work with is: do they love writing, and do they love the collaboration process with writers?
I quite like the idea - just as an abstract idea - of 12 people's collective life experience and wisdom being this formidable thing. People say juries can be led - I think 12 people from different backgrounds, different races, different genders, different ages, it's hard to hoodwink.
I can't help slightly falling in love with every character I write about. And I quite like writing about people who are vilified.
There are people who are bound journalistically to a code of ethics that means they can't quote something that isn't sourced, whereas what I do is entirely unsourced. I effectively fictionalise history and yet somehow aim at a greater truth.
I wrote 'Hereafter' quickly and without mapping it out too much or being too schematic. As an exercise, I think that was incredibly important.
People test movies within an inch of their life so that the entire audience experience is a uniform one.
Nixon had lists upon lists upon lists. They were tragic lists saying, 'Smile more,' or, 'Be stronger - remember, it is your job to spiritually uplift the nation.' This understanding of his limitations is heartbreaking.
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.
I'm not good at fantasy, no. I have been offered stuff, and I can't get my head around it.
I have no directing ambition whatsoever. And as long as I meet filmmakers like Tom Hooper, Stephen Frears, and others who allow that collaboration, I can't see why I would ever want to direct.
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.
Once I start writing about somebody, I become very protective of them.
As a child, I grew up the son of German immigrant parents, so I grew up being teased and called 'Fritz' at school. When I married my wife and went to live in Vienna, I was teased for being a Brit.
I think I stumbled upon a voice people associate with me with 'The Deal.'
I watch drama on DVD because I can't stand ad breaks.
If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative.
Truth is an illusory notion.
The real beauty in my professional experience has been friendships and collaborations with filmmakers.
I am drawn to characters so full of internal contradictions. Idi Amin was one. I loved writing him.
Sometimes if biography is too head-on, it can feel too obvious.
I have a great deal of compassion for those in public life and what we have done to them.
I'm very happy for others to engage in conjecture, but if I was ever conscious of what I'm thinking about when I'm writing, oh my God, I'd be totally lost.
People bang on all the time about whether what I've done is the truth or not. Well, to me, history is just a series of elaborate fictions.
By nature of the job, most actors are striking, remarkable, and alpha.
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.
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.
As historians write more and more histories, it's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that other historians read their histories and then make synthesis, and certain things just get forgotten and left out and neglected.
It was so interesting to discover Nixon was a Californian. I always think Nixon should come from a cold place.
The irony of what I do is that the more you reveal someone in their frailties and shortcomings, the more we feel drawn to them and forgiving we feel of them.
Belief in God is so deranged that it makes absolutely no sense, but it holds people together somehow.
I am not a politics wonk. I like the idea of my writing reflecting more about who I am or other people.
Authorised royal biographers are so straitjacketed, deferential, fawning, and unadventurous that they can only be after a knighthood. Or they're completely scurrilous and insolent, like Andrew Morton or Paul Burrell.
Ambition interests me because it's such a surefire indicator of damage.
If you think about what you do, if you become self-conscious about it, you've got to be very careful. Because I really like to write without self-awareness of what I'm doing.
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.
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.
No family is complete without an embarrassing uncle.
Movies feel like work, and reading fiction feels like work, whereas reading nonfiction feels like pleasure.
I don't want to become too self-conscious - it's why I never read reviews, even the good ones.
If you don't belong somewhere, that outsider status you have gives you perspective. Of course, another word for outsider is 'exile,' and that's not fun at all.
There were a couple of things I lost sleep over with the play 'Frost/Nixon,' so I went back and addressed them a bit more in the film.
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