“No family is complete without an embarrassing uncle.”
― Peter Morgan
“As a dramatist, you have 200 choices at every fork in the road. But the audience will reject it if you make the wrong choice, if they feel you are trying to shape the character in a way that suits you. It rings false immediately. People can sense when you’re being cynical or schematic.”
― Peter Morgan
“I’m not a vindictive person. But I do want to shine a light on human frailty and heroism in equal measure.”
― Peter Morgan
“Barack Obama winning the election had an instant impact on everything – race relations, national self-esteem, tolerance. It also had an instant affect on ‘Frost/Nixon.’ At a stroke, instead of being a piece that reminded people of the agony they were in, it became an uplifting message about the agony they had escaped.”
― Peter Morgan
“In my peaceful moments, I yearn to write a bank heist like the one in ‘Heat.’”
― Peter Morgan
“If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.’”
― Peter Morgan
“I wrote ‘Hereafter’ quickly and without mapping it out too much or being too schematic. As an exercise, I think that was incredibly important.”
― Peter Morgan
“People test movies within an inch of their life so that the entire audience experience is a uniform one.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“You’re either a person with a conscience, or you’re not. I think I’ve got quite a fine conscience.”
― Peter Morgan
“Generally, I read nonfiction. There’s very little fiction that I enjoy enough to spend my time reading. I am generally a nonfiction guy.”
― Peter Morgan
“I actually speak fluent German. And I live in Vienna, and I’m married to a Viennese woman.”
― Peter Morgan
“Movies feel like work, and reading fiction feels like work, whereas reading nonfiction feels like pleasure.”
― Peter Morgan
“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?”
― Peter Morgan
“I am not a politics wonk. I like the idea of my writing reflecting more about who I am or other people.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“I’m not good at fantasy, no. I have been offered stuff, and I can’t get my head around it.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“Once I start writing about somebody, I become very protective of them.”
― Peter Morgan
“You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“I watch drama on DVD because I can’t stand ad breaks.”
― Peter Morgan
“It was so interesting to discover Nixon was a Californian. I always think Nixon should come from a cold place.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“There is something fantastically post-modern about David Frost.”
― Peter Morgan
“The real beauty in my professional experience has been friendships and collaborations with filmmakers.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“I am drawn to characters so full of internal contradictions. Idi Amin was one. I loved writing him.”
― Peter Morgan
“I have a great deal of compassion for those in public life and what we have done to them.”
― Peter Morgan
“Ambition interests me because it’s such a surefire indicator of damage.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“There are many, many things in my work that need redoing – never the structure.”
― Peter Morgan
“I think I stumbled upon a voice people associate with me with ‘The Deal.’”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“There is no inherent contradiction between being right-wing and being intelligent.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“Sometimes if biography is too head-on, it can feel too obvious.”
― Peter Morgan
“Belief in God is so deranged that it makes absolutely no sense, but it holds people together somehow.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“I don’t want to become too self-conscious – it’s why I never read reviews, even the good ones.”
― Peter Morgan
“If you start to analyze what you do, it can paralyze you.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“By nature of the job, most actors are striking, remarkable, and alpha.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“Truth is an illusory notion.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“I can’t help slightly falling in love with every character I write about. And I quite like writing about people who are vilified.”
― Peter Morgan
“Some of the things I have written about are a way of connecting with my father – I know he knew who Idi Amin was, and I know he knew who Longford was. And I know he knew who Nixon was, because shortly before he died, I talked to him about Watergate.”
― Peter Morgan
“It is devastating, losing a parent. I don’t really know what the effect is, but I suppose people might call me an ambitious man, and I’d say that an ambitious man is a damaged man.”
― Peter Morgan
“The film ‘The Queen’ came about with a producer saying to me that he wanted me to write about the circumstances behind Diana’s death. I think he was hoping that I would come up with some journalistic scoop that would identify an MI5 covert plot.”
― Peter Morgan
“For ‘Frost/Nixon,’ I had eight people who were present at those interviews – they were all in the room – and when I interviewed each of them, they had a totally different narrative of events, to the degree where you thought, ‘Were you all really in the same room?’”
― Peter Morgan
“Every dramatist will tell you that they know deep down what happened in the course of making that film and to what degree they took steps that were convenient and to what degree they took steps in telling their story that were dishonest. You know in your heart of hearts.”
― Peter Morgan
“Most historians are engaged in fiction.”
― Peter Morgan
“My experience is, I do a table reading, and it’s literally like it’s written in colossal neon lights what’s wrong with the screenplay.”
― Peter Morgan
“Everything I write, I’ve written the first draft in Austria.”
― Peter Morgan
“It is a fairly serious thing that you’re doing if you’re writing about people who are still alive and who still have a role in public life. Sometimes you don’t want to be reminded too much of the responsibility.”
― Peter Morgan
“Most of the things I write, I write on spec. And because I write them on spec, there’s less interference. Because there’s less interference, they tend to be better.”
― Peter Morgan
“I prefer my writing to do all the talking for me.”
― Peter Morgan
“I can’t imagine anyone thinking, ‘Oh good, it’s awards season!’”
― Peter Morgan
“It’s important to me what the viewers think.”
― Peter Morgan
“I just feel that if I’m English and writing about an American president, I have got to have someone on my side who can help me out when I’m lapsing into lazy or obvious European skepticism.”
― Peter Morgan
“I can’t relax when I’m watching a biographical drama because it’s so close to what it is that I do that I just long for more fiction – so that I can switch off.”
― Peter Morgan
“There are so many projects that I’ve written and had to abort because either I felt too distressed by what I was doing to the people who I was writing about, or they couldn’t cope with it because their view of themselves was so far removed from reality.”
― Peter Morgan
“I wrote a draft of ‘Playboy’ for Warner Brothers, and it was impossible to really be independent of Hugh Hefner. In the end, Hugh Hefner was unable to take the back seat required to be able to write something about him that I felt I could do.”
― Peter Morgan
“I’m constantly having to check my conscience about what I’m writing and the responsibility of what I’m saying.”
― Peter Morgan
“As a European from a different, younger generation, the trauma that was Nixon’s presidency never really had a hold over me. For one thing, I never voted for him.”
― Peter Morgan
“I have always cited the decision by director Stephen Frears to shoot ‘Mrs. Henderson Presents’ before my script of ‘The Queen’ as the reason for my taking the plunge as a playwright.”
― Peter Morgan
“In some shape or form, we do have an emotional connection to our head of state, even if, for the most part, they seem very remote.”
― Peter Morgan
“There’s nothing wrong with anybody from any other country having a perspective on the British royal family. It would be interesting. But I just doubt that they would get the dialogue right.”
― Peter Morgan
“I don’t think of the crown as this glamorous thing. It’s this murderous, bejeweled thing, the crown.”
― Peter Morgan
“Most leading actresses have this energy, this ‘Look at me. Here I am.’ They’re powerful; they’re beautiful.”
― Peter Morgan
“You can’t ask someone to act middle-aged. Someone has to bring their own fatigue to it.”
― Peter Morgan
“The feelings we all have as 50-year-olds are different than the feelings we all have as 30-year-olds. That informs everything we do.”
― Peter Morgan
“There’s something about the soul of a country that is somehow connected to the head of state.”
― Peter Morgan
“Sometimes it’s okay for an audience not to understand everything that’s going on.”
― Peter Morgan
“As any showrunner will tell you, it is crushing work. It is around the clock. It is like a monastic commitment that you make.”
― Peter Morgan
“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.”
― Peter Morgan
“Robert Bolt’s storytelling is the kind that I grew up with and aspired to.”
― Peter Morgan
“I’m not being presumptuous, I hope, when I say that ‘The Crown’ is little bit like ‘The Godfather.’ It is essentially about a family in power and survival.”
― Peter Morgan
“The films of which I’m most proud I’ve written are the ones that pivot on forgiveness.”
― Peter Morgan
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