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INTERVIEW WITH FRANK COTTRELL BOYCE
Writer of the film "24 Hour Party People" directed by Michael Winterbottom
Cannes / Liverpool, Monday May 20th 2002
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The interview with Frank Cottrell Boyce was the first one I organised. Being a complete Cannes novice, I was running on instinct most of the time. I'd been on the phone a few times to a woman called Chrissie from Freud Communications who were handling the PR for the film, and arranged to meet Frank the day after the official screening. This would also be the day after the big post-screening party, but the implications of that didn't sink in at the time.
We arranged the day and the time, and I was to ring up in the morning to find out where we'd do the interview. So I did. No reply. All day, no reply. I left messages and sent emails. Nothing.
The next morning, the day after the proposed interview, I finally made contact, and guess what - Frank had left the building. He was home in Liverpool. Chrissie, to her credit, got on the case quicksmart and arranged a phone interview. If I could supply a Cannes phone number Frank would call me.
I booked a half-hour in one of the NZ Film Commission's "offices" in their hotel - just me, a tape recorder and a speakerphone - and kept my fingers crossed it would all work. The phone rang and it was Frank.
We started to chat, then I remembered this was an interview, and switched my tape recorder on while he was talking about the call he received from Michael Winterbottom which had kicked the whole project off ...
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Frank: |
... you know, that's a kind of ongoing creative relationship, so even that phone call took place in the context of us phoning each other from time to time, saying "what about this? or what about that" and so the fact that we both clicked on that idea, immediately it gave you a kind of energy. Michael was away filming The Claim so I just got on and started interviewing people. Most of my films are about real people and real events ... I like to write about real people and real events ... the first thing I did was go and do lots and lots and lots of interviews with people involved in the story, especially with Tony who's very talkative ... so I did all those interviews and I'd done those by the time that Michael came back and had a kind of texture, and then talked to Michael, and that was when the idea came out that we wouldn't be doing just a moment, we would be doing a full twenty year spread of the story. So that immediately gave you a kind of structural problem. To be honest, I tried about five or six different things. |
Gary: |
What's the actual spread? 76 to 92? |
Frank: |
Yeah, 76 to 92, and lots and lots of people. The thing is that when we started taking it out to people then, they were constantly asking you "what's the story?" And by their definition of "story" - you know, taking it out to executives of one kind or another - their definition of "story" has been dessicated (desecrated? defecated?) by years of Robert McKee, into beginning, middle, end, and character's journey... all that kind of stuff. |
Gary: |
So it's basically the Hollywood three-act structure ... |
Frank: |
Yeah, and the journey of the character, they're very keen on the journey of the character and all that. So taking this material to them, it was kind of ... |
Gary: |
These are possible funders you're talking about? |
Frank: |
Yeah, I think for me as a screenwriter, that's the first really interesting stage ... not that it's interesting, but that first test of your material, because you take it to people who almost certainly won't get it. You're trying to convince them, you know? |
Gary: |
When you took it to those people, what was it you took? Was it just a verbal pitch? |
Frank: |
I'd been kind of bathing for weeks in all this material, and meeting all these amazing people so basically, to be honest, I just had a series of anecdotes ... and when we went round the meetings, you realise they want you to weld that into that three act structure. Which I think is just ... I hate it anyway ... that character journey thing really drives me mad. It's just a lie about life, you know? I always think it ... do you have a series in New Zealand called the Mister Men? A kids series? |
Gary: |
The Mister Men ... |
Frank: |
The Mister Men is like ... there's Mister Messy this week, and you see how messy Mr Messy is, and then it gets so messy it will go into crisis and he'll end up by not being messy any more. |
Gary: |
I don't think we have that. I don't watch a lot of kids' TV these days. |
Frank: |
But basically I think all Hollywood films are Mister Men films. "Here's Mister Sad and Lonely, but at the end of the film he won't be. By the end of the film he'll learn to love life." So kind of what was appealing ... I spent weeks trying to fit it into that structure and then thought fuck it, what's interesting about Tony is that he did this all these years and never learned a lesson ... he carried on being pretentious, he carried on being incredibly reckless, he never learned any lessons about life. He just carried on being Tony ... you saw him the other day ... this is now thirty years later and he's still ... Tony. |
Gary: |
Absolutely. Yeah. I obviously didn't know him thirty years ago, but you can see that still in him.
| Frank: |
Absolutely.
| Gary: |
It's quite refreshing.
| Frank: |
No, no, no, he was trying to find a band while we were away. He was trying to find a band this weekend.
| Gary: |
Great. You were saying you were taking your idea to possible funders ... who actually funded it in the end?
| Frank: |
In the end it was the Film Consortium. They were fantastic. They never gave us any notes at all. They were wonderful.
| Gary: |
And they responded to the same pitch you were giving to all these others?
| Frank: |
What had happened by then was that Steve Coogan had decided that he was going to play Tony, and while Steve's obviously not a big star internationally, he's quite well known in England. He's very well know in England.
| Gary: |
We know of him in New Zealand, because we've had Partridge, and also I saw some tapes of "The Day Today" which was never screened in New Zealand, but I had a friend who brought some tapes into the country.
| Frank: |
I like "The Day Today," I thought it was really good.
| Gary: |
It's excellent, yeah.
| Frank: |
It's brilliant. I think apart from his status the other thing is that as soon as we said Steve was playing it, people got it, you know? That's quite interesting. You kind of get a licence to do what you want to do from casting the right person.
| Gary: |
You mentioned in the press conference that when you knew Steve Coogan was playing Tony Wilson, you wrote for Steve Coogan.
| Frank: |
Yeah, I actually went down to stay with Steve in Brighton and talked a lot about things he'd like to do. That was great. I suppose "workshopping" would be the word, but it's not really how it felt. Just getting pissed, frankly.
| Gary: |
Well ... you know ... world of the film.
| Frank: |
Yeah.
| Gary: |
When you said you wrote for him, did you mean you wrote to his strengths as a performer?
| Frank: |
Yeah. And also the whole thing of ... Steve had quite a strong take on Tony, because ... well, frankly, Alan Partridge is partly based on Tony. Steve had actually worked for Tony years before, and I'm sure there's a lot of Tony in Alan Partridge. The thing is that Steve doesn't really come up with verbal ideas or even visual ideas, but he's great ... just talking to him and kind of offering him the odd line here and there, watching how he says them, you realise that you could do a lot less. He could make a lot out of a little.
| Gary: |
Yes, yes, I noticed even just during the press conference he's quite a sharp guy. When someone asked him what the party was going to be like, he said "conversation, a few canapes and home by eleven." Completely deadpan, with that little wry smile, and then changed it to, "No comment." ... So when you actually started the work of writing, did you begin with the traditional treatment first?
| Frank: |
No, by then the interviews and stuff had taken so long ... Michael came back ... see in a way this is very untypical of how a script is normally created, but people were very keen on the idea of Steve playing Tony, but Steve was only available for a certain amount of time, so we were almost shooting and I still hadn't finished the script. What I had done was write great set pieces. And I do think that ... this is heretical, I know, but I think ... this is for a screenwriters' magazine isn't it? I'm not being too tacky (techie?) here?
| Gary: |
No, no, this is for a screenwriters' magazine.
| Frank: |
Right, okay. Well I think there's a load of emphasis is modern screenwriting theory about structure and set-up and pay-off and stuff, but I think hardly anybody ever comes out of the cinema saying "that was beautifully structured; everything was in the right place." People come out of the cinema going "That was a great bit. I loved that bit. This bit was a great bit." And the structure's there to deliver great moments. If it doesn't deliver great moments then there's just no point in it, you know? So I felt quite confident because we had this set of great moments.
| Gary: |
So you were almost writing as things were being filmed?
| Frank: |
Well there were still quite a few gaps by the time we started shooting ... there were still gaps in the script.
| Gary: |
And those were filled in as shooting progressed?
| Frank: |
I was on the set every day ... I live in Liverpool which is about twenty minutes drive from Manchester. We had a very strong idea of what kind of thing we were looking for, you know? Those big decisions that are invisible ... like for instance we decided we were never going to leave Manchester even though very interesting bits of the Factory story happened in Barbados, or Ibiza, or New York, you know? So it was always just going to be about Manchester. And I kind of knew which characters I'd be writing for and stuff.
| Gary: |
So when shooting began, and you had a script ... albeit with a few gaps in it ... had the process from the beginning of your work until that script was ready, the shooting script that you started with, had you redrafted it at all during that time?
| Frank: |
Oh yeah, lots and lots and lots of times. It underwent massive changes really.
| Gary: |
And were those changes as a result of discussions between you and Michael?
| Frank: |
Yeah. Maybe this is interesting. Because we're close friends and we were working together, I had a kind of vision of the film, but Michael also had a vision of how he wanted to shoot. So I originally had much more extravagant things in the film, like bits that were set in 18th century Manchester and things like that, with the same characters and we're in a different time, and Michael's thing was, "I want to shoot really quickly, I don't want to have too much in the way of lighting, I don't want to have too much in the way of design, I don't want to be waiting for people to come round with fancy costumes," and stuff like that ... so let's sort of keep pushing forward and pushing forward and pushing forward. So that kind of changed what I was writing, you know?
| Gary: |
So if you had gone ahead with the 18th century Manchester thesis, that certainly would've been a very strong stylistic thing, wouldn't it.
| Frank: |
Yeah.
| Gary: |
The film is very strongly stylistic as it is ...
| Frank: |
There's still kind of traces of that approach ... I mean the first draft literally included things like that, but there's still bits of it in there, like God appearing, and the UFO appearing, that's still in there.
| Gary: |
I was going to ask, also, about the style, that very first scene, the hangliding, with Anthony Wilson in his news persona doing the thing about the hangliding ... the actor turned to the camera and says, "Now this scene works on two levels ...
| Frank: |
I think it's great ...
| Gary: |
Yeah, it is, it's wonderful, and he said, "I'm not going to go through it now, I don't have time, but just remember the word 'Icarus.' If you know what I mean, you'll get it, if you don't it doesn't matter, it'll be a great film anyway," and then he walks off. And I just thought ... what?
| Frank: |
But I think the thing that really pins Tony is that after he says that he says, "If you don't get it that's fine ... but you should probably read more."
| Gary: |
Yeah ... so that kind of stylistic thing, did that ... ?
| Frank: |
The thing is, by the time we were getting close to the shoot ... it's interesting that you should bring that up, because it was something that Michael was always just slightly uncomfortable about, I think. Steve was really, really comfortable with it, and really, really was rearing to do it, to address the camera directly. And I was kind of against voice-over, but quite keen on him addressing the camera directly. Because voice-over always looks like a repair job, you know? So I think we sort of shot that stuff with the contingency in mind that if the film didn't hang together it would be a good way of bringing it all back together again, you know? But actually ... I really enjoyed writing them, and from the day we started shooting them they were obviously, obviously going to work. I think the first one we shot was Steve going through the door after he's met his most recent wife, and turning to the camera and saying, "Don't judge. I'm just flirting, she knows I'm flirting, I'm being post-modern before it was fashionable." And we all laughed, so we knew it was going to work then.
| Gary: |
And that's great, because he's, in that moment, talking from the future really, isn't he.
| Frank: |
Yes.
| Gary: |
It's the same as the scene with the Sex Pistols playing, the little hall with forty-two people where he goes around the room and says, "See that guy over there - Mick Hucknall," and you cut to the stadium, a Simply Red stadium concert ...
| Frank: |
From a nearly tacky point of view, once we decided we were doing that I was really glad of it because by predicting the future you kind of impose an impression of unity on the script which isn't really there, it's just a kind of rag-bag really, but having Tony turn to you and say, "A little bit later he'll try and shoot me," or, "He will later sleep with my wife," does make the film feel as though it knows where it's going ... in a way that obviously it doesn't.
| Gary: |
Well, you know ... by the time you've put it all together ... I think an audience comes in with an expectation the film is going to hang together.
| Frank: |
So they impose unity. You're right, they do generally.
| Gary: |
They do, yeah, they impose that. But that style of talking to camera, it seemed to permeate the film so deeply all the way through, it's hard to accept ... it's hard for me to hear that ...
| Frank: |
I think the film kind of depends more on Steve now than it probably did at the script stage ... there were a lot more scenes with other people, and just the power of Steve's performance became the unifying factor in the film in the end I think ... in the edit, you know? So probably those pieces to camera weigh more heavily than they might have done.
| Gary: |
You said that you went through many drafts, and obviously you do a draft, go through it with Michael and discuss it ... was there anyone else involved in that process?
| Frank: |
Steve continued to be fairly (very) involved. Which was great, you know, it was great having ... well it was great because normally you're kind of compromised by having conversations with a money person or a marketing person or a distributor or whatever, who don't really know anything, whereas going to Steve and saying "I'm going to (-) do this," ... he could come back at you and just say, "No, I can't do that. I'll never be able to get away with that," or, "No, I don't want to do that," or whatever. Or the reverse, "I'd love to do that," you know?
| Gary: |
And all through this, the funding body, the producers, were not interfering at all?
| Frank: |
No, they were really, really, really hands-off. As far as I know. I mean our producer may well have been protecting me from that. I think partly it had a momentum of its own. From the point of view of speaking to screenwriters in a screenwriting magazine ... I don't know what it's like in New Zealand, but here, the way the industry is set up, it really mitigates against close, trusting relationships between writers, directors, actors, producers ... the commissioning people like to be in the middle of that, and I'm completely convinced that if you can create that space and work together, then you can develop a momentum and a kind of creativity that you just can't if you're trying to please an authority, you know?
| Gary: |
Right, well I would like to ask you a bit about that because there is a very clear developmental process in New Zealand. We have the New Zealand Film Commission, which I won't speak too badly of because I'm using their office right now ...
| Frank: |
Right ...
| Gary: |
... but they provide the bulk of the funding for any one feature film, and then the producer has to top it up from a co-production with an overseas company. The Film Commission is the only company in New Zealand ... the only body in New Zealand that funds films. And of course every time you do a draft it has to be submitted to them for approval ...
| Frank: |
God almighty ...
| Gary: |
... before they will fund any more. So when you were writing, when you were drafting, were you paid from the word go?
| Frank: |
Oh ... right ... I see what you mean. I'm sure that contractually exactly the same setup existed, but because I know Michael and trust Michael and we have a long relationship ... whatever ... I think by the time I got any money we were probably already shooting, you know? The way we have worked in the past, from that point of view, I think what we've tended to do is, sometimes I've written spec scripts for Michael, quite often I've written spec scripts for Michael knowing that if he says he's going to do it he'll do it. I think the awful thing is being trapped in writing twenty versions of a script before anybody makes up their mind, you know? So I think in the past if there has been development money what we've tended to do is work on the script till we're happy enough to show it to somebody else and call that version the first draft. And there'll be a kind of hiatus before anybody gets anything. But the draft that we put out as the first draft will be something that we're happy to defend and it'll really be the twelfth or the thirteenth, you know?
| Gary: |
And would you have drawn down some of that development money?
| Frank: |
I'd have my first draft money, or something, you know.
| Gary: |
Yeah, yeah, okay, and that's lasted you for the twelve or thirteen versions that you've done ...
| Frank: |
Yeah ...
| Gary: |
And once you've got to that stage, do you then have to resubmit it to the person who's funding you?
| Frank: |
Yeah, I think so, but again ... to go back to my point about collaboration ... if there's a group of you, if you're a writer,and you're getting the script back with somebody's notes, the only response you've got is to act on those notes, really ... whereas if you're sitting there with the director and the producer, and in this case the star as well, you felt strong enough to say, "Well no, actually, you're not right about that," or "We won't do that," or "We will be doing that," or "We've already done that," or something. It becomes more of a conversation if you've got some backup. I hate that thing of being ... there is a very similar setup here, and I have been able in my life to get round it, with a mixture of trust and loyalty and friendship, and doing things on trust. What I hate about the setup is that it's titled "development," and the ethos is that we're slowly improving the script, but actually it's all a big disguise for the inability to make a decision. They kind of hold you in abeyance while they um and ah. Obviously you want the script to be as good as it can be, and I'm really happy to write fifty drafts of the script if I want to ... if that's part of making a movie ... but actually a lot of the time you're redrafting a script not to make a movie but to help them make a decision. Which just seems crazy to me, you know?
| Gary: |
Well ... deja vu. I know that experience, it's very similar. So the earlier stuff that you've done, was it a similar process? I mean this obviously was a very close collaboration with Michael and Steve for this ... and Andrew Eaton I assume as well ...
| Frank: |
It's all been very different, you know, obviously with The Claim which we won't talk about in too much detail, but obviously that's like a big budget historical movie, so the script had to be very very tight before they went out there, just because there was no room to ... I mean really the reason we made 24 Hour Party People was that making The Claim was quite a miserable experience, but obviously you had to have quite a different kind of script for that, because you couldn't leave anything to chance.
| Gary: |
So over the course of your scriptwriting career for film, have you actually evolved your technique?
| Frank: |
Yeah, depending on who I'm working with, as well. There is a kind of ... probably quite a slipshod approach with Michael because we kind of trust each other, and also because Michael quite likes things to be slipshod, but with my other big collaborators, Anand Tucker who I wrote Hilary and Jackie for, and we're working on quite a big movie at the moment, he's the opposite, you know, very meticulous, we spent a lot of time together at the script stage, whereas Michael and I don't really work a lot physically together on the script, it's more like, you know, he trusts me to get on with that and he's there when I want him, but with Anand it's a very meticulous ... more like a Hitchcock thing where all the decisions are made at the script stage ... whereas Michael just really wants a passport to go out and shoot.
| Gary: |
Do you prefer one style over the other? Or is it horses for courses?
| Frank: |
Yeah, it's two different types of material, two different people ... I like having both. It's good.
| Gary: |
So do you feel that rather than the style evolving, you've developed several weapons in your armoury?
| Frank: |
Yeah, if anything I would say that it's given me the insight into the fact that there is always more than one show in town. What's awful about this film commission type setup that you're describing and which we have here, is that in the name of protecting quality they've actually become very prescriptive about what shape films should be and what the process of film-making should be. They set up something that's supposed to be quality control, but it's actually imposing a set of conventions.
| Gary: |
Did you have any kind of test screenings at home before you brought the film here?
| Frank: |
We did have a few, but I wasn't that privy to the test screening process. Andrew will tell you, but I'm sure there were test screenings. We went to a lot of cast-and-crew type screenings.
| Gary: |
And was everyone feeling pretty good about it?
| Frank: |
Yeah ... I think everyone felt "What will anyone outside Manchester make of it" ... it'll just be interesting to see what people make of it, really.
| Gary: |
And how did you feel about the reaction here to it?
| Frank: |
Well I think it's really weird watching it at Cannes, you know? I've been in competition in Cannes once before with "Welcome to Sarajevo" and that was a very strange experience, because we'd not long come back ... it was a film that was made very quickly ... and you're in a place that's suffered terrible privation, and there's hardly any water, and the electricity's unreliable, and there were mines on the ground ... and the next thing you knew you were with the French bourgoisie and their little Chanel dresses, politely clapping it ... what's that for? And it kind of feels slightly similar about this, you know, which is obviously ... it's kind of weird, it's like my family photo album, this film ... it's like finding your family holiday snaps hung up in the Tate Gallery. What will anyone get from that?
| Gary: |
You mentioned earlier on that you liked stories about real people, real events ... that kind of stuff ... and you said we could get into that a bit later if we liked ... well I'd quite like to hear your take on that.
| Frank: |
Well again, because of that convention thing, I've found that the way funding is set up ... god, I'm so inarticulate ... it's because I was up all night at that party ...
| Gary: |
That was two days ago!
| Frank: |
I know, but I've not really caught up.
| Gary: |
I was going to bring some vitamin B to the interview ... I've got a tube of it in my room ...
| Frank: |
It's a shame we didn't meet up there ... never mind ...
| Gary: |
I tried to.
| Frank: |
Freuds is just like really inefficient, I think. I didn't do anything yesterday, I just hung out ... I would've been free ... it would've been really nice.
| Gary: |
Yeah ... anyway ... the real stories, the real people ...
| Frank: |
Right, real stories ... it kind of ties together what I was talking about. I've found that here - I don't know what it's like in New Zealand - but the Film Commission, Film 4, even the BBC, they're all infected with that virus of story structure, which poses as a kind of aesthetic or a kind of way of improving the script, but is really really really prescriptive, and it's kind of installing cliches, I think, at the heart of things, you know? If you ever go to a talk on a screenwriting course, they're always about these things, and I get really depressed because to me we're teaching students cliche as something to strive for. If you go to real stories then you've always got the defence of real life to pit against those things ... so for instance, I was able to go to people and say "Well I'm afraid Tony just doesn't have a character arc, because he didn't learn anything," or "I'm sorry that you lose sympathy with the character in act three, but the fact that she wasn't very sympathetic ... what do you want to do about it?" you know? So you've got real life as a kind of Court of Appeal, really. So I found that doing real life stories has liberated me from having to deal with convention, and it's allowed me to mess about with structure a lot ... and a lot of my films are quite bold about story structure ... like, for instance, "Hilary and Jackie" is in two parts ... you know, one part's from Hilary's point of view, and one's from Jackie's point of view ... and obviously "24 Hour Party People" the story's told by someone talking to camera ... but he doesn't really know the story. So I've been lucky in that I've been able to play with lots of more interesting ways of telling stories, the way novelists are allowed to. It's real life that's allowed me to do that, you know? Because real life is meaty and chunky and it's got loose ends in it, and it doesn't fit in neatly to a pattern and therefore it kind of liberates you to use different narrative tools, you know?
| Gary: |
Do you think that audiences are getting educated into believing that the Hollywood structure is how you make a film?
| Frank: |
I think that audiences remain very open and interested in seeing new stuff. I think it's executives that have a problem. Because audiences are seeing all kinds of things. Any audience in the world, all over the world, will have seen really challenging things outside cinema and will be able to bring that ... so for instance, we've all watched the roadrunner ...
| Gary: |
Yeah ... that's right ...
| Frank: |
Fantastic storytelling in the roadrunner cartoons ... it's so amazing. The same thing is going to keep happening, and you're going to keep being surprised by it and all that stuff ... no one's going to talk, and all those things ... we're used to seeing incredibly complicated things ... in pop videos, or whatever ... but for some reason executives have become completely mired down in the checklist approach to things. Because, almost by definition, they're people who don't have a lot of courage, otherwise they'd be film makers instead, you know?
| Gary: |
When you said if you do stories of real people you can use reality as a Court of Appeal ...
| Frank: |
Yeah ...
| Gary: |
Did you find yourself actually having to do that?
| Frank: |
On this? Oh yeah, all the time.
| Gary: |
And you were doing this to the executives ... saying, well this didn't happen ...
| Frank: |
And moreso with "Welcome to Sarajevo." Particularly. I don't know if you're familiar with "Welcome to Sarajevo," but it's about a jounalist who's caught up in the seige of Sarajevo, and he takes a little girl home with him. Now you can see what the Hollywood structure for that would be ... which is that the girl leaving town would be the end of that film, and you'd have seen a film set during the seige of Sarajevo, but it would be about the emotional redemption of a Western journalist. I could see that people wanted that structure, you know? But because in fact that was a much much more messy business, being able to say "Well that just didn't happen; this is a true story, we've got to be as close to the facts as we possibly can. I'm sorry, it just didn't happen." It was great, you know, and we had the whole act three which is ... where the Hollywood film would've ended with the end of our act two, we had an act three that said, "Yes, the little girl got out, but it didn't make anything better."
| Gary: |
And did you find that the people you were defending yourself to actually bought that?
| Frank: |
Yeah, they do, because they just can't keep up with us, basically. They do, because you can be pious about it, you know, you can say, "Well these people are alive, you know? You can't just change it, they'd be so upset." They do kind of buy all that. I don't know whether Hollywood executives, who are probably made of stronger stuff, and are probably a lot smarter ... I don't know if they'd quite buy it, but in England you can always run rings around them by being more liberal than they are, you know?
| Gary: |
How did you enjoy the experience of being here [Cannes] as a writer.
| Frank: |
I love it, I love Cannes ... but the thing is that I'm a writer, so basically, when it comes down to it, I work in my house in Liverpool ... my day is dominated by the school run and food shopping and looking after the kids and stuff like that, so two or three days even in the madness of Cannes seems fantastically exciting to me, you know? That's the great blessing of being a writer ... is that you can dive into those things and then come home again. It'd be awful to be a producer and have to live like that. But I just had the most fantastic few days, it was wonderful. And nearly everyone associated with the film came out, you see, we were a massive party ... there were fifty or sixty of us so it was great.
(chit chat)
| Gary: |
What are you working on at the moment?
| Frank: |
Michael and I are doing a science fiction film next. Michael's actually shot a film since "24 Hour ..." already. He wants to do another one this year which will be a little science fiction film. And with Anand Tucker it looks like we're going to be shooting a film called "The Railway Man" which is about the Burma railway in the second world war.
| Gary: |
Vastly different ...
| Frank: |
Yeah ... a great big fuck-off David Lean film, you know?
| Gary: |
Is science fiction something you're keen on?
| Frank: |
Yeah, bizarrely I am ... but Michael's never shown any interest in it before ... I don't quite know what made him want to do it.
| Gary: |
Did the idea come from you?
| Frank: |
No, well ... the idea of doing a science fiction film was Michael's. He just said, "I want to do a science fiction film." He said that during the shoot ... we were seeing quite a lot of each other then, so we threw a lot of ideas around.
END (chat)
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