You're either a person with a conscience, or you're not. I think I've got quite a fine conscience.
You can't ask someone to act middle-aged. Someone has to bring their own fatigue to it.
You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.
Truth is an illusory notion.
There's something about the soul of a country that is somehow connected to the head of state.
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.
There is something fantastically post-modern about David Frost.
There is no inherent contradiction between being right-wing and being intelligent.
There are many, many things in my work that need redoing - never the structure.
The real beauty in my professional experience has been friendships and collaborations with filmmakers.
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.
The films of which I'm most proud I've written are the ones that pivot on forgiveness.
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.
Sometimes it's okay for an audience not to understand everything that's going on.
Sometimes if biography is too head-on, it can feel too obvious.
I think I stumbled upon a voice people associate with me with 'The Deal.'
Most leading actresses have this energy, this 'Look at me. Here I am.' They're powerful; they're beautiful.
If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative.
If you start to analyze what you do, it can paralyze you.
It's important to me what the viewers think.
I prefer my writing to do all the talking for me.
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.
As any showrunner will tell you, it is crushing work. It is around the clock. It is like a monastic commitment that you make.
I don't think of the crown as this glamorous thing. It's this murderous, bejeweled thing, the crown.
I am drawn to characters so full of internal contradictions. Idi Amin was one. I loved writing him.
I actually speak fluent German. And I live in Vienna, and I'm married to a Viennese woman.
In my peaceful moments, I yearn to write a bank heist like the one in 'Heat.'
