Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
BAFTA-winning screenwriter and novelist, best known for the international bestseller One Day, adapted into a top-10 Netflix series globally.
On the island
Eight records
I Say a Little PrayerFavourite
When I was 16, I was listening to a lot of slightly pompous prog rock, and a friend of mine, Katie, gave me Aretha Franklin's Greatest Hits, which I loved, and I particularly loved this song, which you know seems simple but has all these wonderful chord changes and time signature changes. I love the way that the main singer doesn't sing the chorus, and I love the warmth of the song and the emotion of it.
I completely idolized her as a 15-year-old, and I do still now. I can't express enough how important she was and how much I admire her. And I could have chosen hundreds of songs, but this one again kind of hovers between melancholy and joy, and I think it's just a phenomenal piece of music, so strange and eccentric and wonderful.
The grandiosity and the mix of the classical piano and the glam rock drums and the way it goes in all kinds of unexpected directions. I think it's just a fantastic, almost ridiculous piece of music, but I love it.
And Bach since then has been incredibly important to me. I listen to Bach every day of my life really and this track in particular reminds me of sitting in my little bedset on the Upper West Side writing letters to friends. It felt very writerly. It felt like writing music.
When I was thinking about writing, my good friend Matthew asked me to collaborate on an adaptation of a Sam Shepard place in Patago. And we went to meet him in his London hotel. And he was the most handsome, charismatic man I'd ever met. And we were these two slightly nervy suburban boys, fans, huge fans of Sam Shepard ever since we were at university. And we had to ask him for permission to adapt his play, which he very kindly gave. And that was my first produced screenplay. So I'm very grateful to Joni and to Sam Shepard and to my friend Matthew, who was the first person really to encourage me to write a script.
Around the time that I was giving up acting and thinking about writing, I met Hannah, Hannah Weaver, my partner for 27 years. This is 1997. And in the early days of the relationship, we were doing that thing of sharing all the books and films and music that we loved. And I remember one particular Sunday afternoon listening to this song, We Belong Together by Ricky Lee Jones, one Sunday afternoon, and a song that we both loved. So I'm not sure if it's our song, it might just be my song, but it's a song that makes me think of Hannah and it means a lot to me.
Who Knows Where the Time Goes?
I'm getting to an age now where I'm very aware of time accelerating, and this is the great song on that subject. I realize this is a terrible party list. ... I do love this song.
You know, sometimes a book has a theme song, and for One Day, this song was very much in my mind, Protection by Massive Attack. And also, Tracy Thorne is one of those voices that I've been listening to since I was a teenager, and which I absolutely love. And I think also, you know, making the recent Netflix One Day was such a happy experience, working with brilliant new talent and old friends, and it was a very, very, very happy time. And we managed to find a way to use this song in the soundtrack. So, this is Protection by Massive Attack.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:43You've said you don't find happiness a very interesting subject. Why is that?
No, I guess they're always shot through with a certain amount of melancholy and sadness. I I never quite believe happy endings. I always want to know what happens next. A happy ending only works if if you stop the story there. If you keep rolling, there's something else to come. So I'm trying to get better at it, but I I am interested in that mixture of, as you said, major and minor keys of the sadness and the joy and trying to include both.
Presenter asks
2:55Has streaming been creatively beneficial as a writer, do you think?
I think so, yes. I think there are all kinds of things you can do now that were absolutely not possible. You can make the episode the length it needs to be rather than fitting a slot. You can cast in a new way because it's international. Often the budgets allow you to do things that you wouldn't necessarily be able to do with terrestrial T V. At the same time, I love that old tradition. That's the tradition I was brought up on of scheduled terrestrial television. I learnt so much from that and I still love it now.
Presenter asks
6:11How would you describe your relationship with your dad?
He was very much a father of his time. He worked incredibly hard. He worked shifts, so he was always either at work or recovering from work, you know, working through the night. He was a maintenance engineer, so responsible for keeping the production line going. You know, at the time, you don't quite appreciate how stressful and fraught that was. He obviously was extremely anxious about it all the time. I remember him coming home from work one day having sort of mangled the top joints of his fingers and being incredibly worried about losing his job. I think he was worried about losing his job all the time. And so there was a certain amount of stress around that. … It wasn't easy.
The keepsakes
The book
Leo Tolstoy
I think it's the great love story that I haven't read. People are quite shocked and surprised that I haven't read [Anna Karenina] … [it] does feel like an omission. I think [Anna Karenina] and Middlemarch are the big gaps in my reading education, so this is my chance.
Presenter asks
12:08What were you like at school?
I think I was very earnest, I mean swatty. You know, I was very ambitious as well, you know, keen to come top of the class and everything, and probably Not much fun. I mean not not fun to be around. A little bit nervous, a little bit socially anxious, certainly, until until my teens, definitely. When I reached fifteen or sixteen, I did have a great group of friends. But but until then, yes, slightly nerdy and strange. Not particularly a victim of bullying. I mean, I just made myself very small and very quiet.
Presenter asks
29:25When the novelist is still alive, do you feel an extra pressure when it comes to adapting their work?
It can feel quite intimidating to take someone else's characters and invent new material. I mean, you have to do that, whether it's Thomas Hardy or Dickens or Edwardson Orban. There'll always be something that's necessary in a new medium. The hope is that you'll get away with it, that the joins won't show, that it'll feel like a strange kind of hybrid of the original source material with your own contribution in a very minor way just lying underneath. So I love it. And I think for me, as a writer myself, working on these extraordinary books, I've learnt so much as a writer and managed to push at the edges of my own work. And they've taught me to be a bit more ambitious in what I'm capable of writing.
Presenter asks
33:29Was it a passage from Tess of the d'Urbervilles that sowed the seed for One Day?
Yes, I read it when I was 16. And then many years later, I was adapting the book for the BBC for Jemma Artiton, Eddie Redmain, as Tess and Angel. And around that time, I had this idea of writing a big epic love story covering 20 years. And I couldn't quite work out how to control that amount of material. And that seemed an interesting idea, that you take an ordinary day and just tell the ordinary day over and over again without revealing why it isn't an ordinary day. And that was the structural idea that led ultimately to One Day.
“I never quite believe happy endings. I always want to know what happens next. A happy ending only works if if you stop the story there. If you keep rolling, there's something else to come.”
“He was very much a father of his time. He worked incredibly hard. He worked shifts, so he was always either at work or recovering from work, you know, working through the night. He was a maintenance engineer, so responsible for keeping the production line going. You know, at the time, you don't quite appreciate how stressful and fraught that was. He obviously was extremely anxious about it all the time. I remember him coming home from work one day having sort of mangled the top joints of his fingers and being incredibly worried about losing his job.”
“I got cast as Constantine in the Seagull on the main stage of the National Theatre and it was Judy Dench, Bill Nye, Helen McCroy and me playing a servant but understudying Constantine. And I was a really good Constantine in the Seagull and instead I just used to have to run on stage every night with a broom and nod at Judy Dench and then run off. That was my part.”
“I had this idea of writing a big epic love story covering 20 years. And I couldn't quite work out how to control that amount of material. And that seemed an interesting idea, that you take an ordinary day and just tell the ordinary day over and over again without revealing why it isn't an ordinary day. And that was the structural idea that led ultimately to One Day.”
“It was very strange because, you know, the books you write belong to the age you are at the time and I love One Day, but I would do it very differently now if I'd do it at all. In fact, I couldn't do it now. It very much belongs to my 41-year-old self, just become a father, just thinking about this new stage of life.”