Ol Parker

“Bill Nighy has an idiosyncratic delivery.”

“Being a teenager anyway is incredibly intense and every moment is invested with ferocious importance.”

“There's a sports saying, if you aren't playing offense, you're playing defense, so if you are coming back for a sequel not be better but you have to aim higher and bring something else back in to the mix.”

“It's the nicest thing when you're constantly surprised by your partner.”

“It's always tricky when someone who's not used to it volunteers to be an extra and you want to go, 'Listen, you're going to be sitting there for a long time.'”

“Sequels are hard. What people want is to see the first film again for the first time and that simply isn't possible.”

“I have a brilliant memory of being driven back to school when 'Super Trouper' was number one in the charts in 1980. When it came on the radio my mum just drove right past the school gates! When you're 11 years old and meant to be going back to boarding school, that's a great feeling.”

“The trajectory of most movies is that you start off writing a sensitive movie about a couple in their 40's getting divorced, and then, three years later, you look at each other on set while you're making a film about lesbian cheerleaders. You're like, 'How did that happen?!'”

“I think films are a really small target. They're really hard to make, and they're a really tiny target.”

“As I get older, I find the things that I thought would be sorted by now aren't. The idea of writing stuff like that for a much older generation was incredibly appealing.”

“Cher can play Meryl's daughter, for all I'm concerned. Or her great-grandmother. She exists separate from time.”

“'It could be better' is the only thing that anyone should write in the margins of their own script.”

“Look, I'd take a suggestion from my grandmother if I thought it would improve a film I was writing.”

“Before you turn 40 you think, 'everyone else is going to die, but not me,' then you realize death is certain for everyone.”

“You can only shoot in India for three months a year, otherwise it's very inhospitable.”

“'Waterloo' was probably my favorite. That was enormous fun and we laughed a lot.”

“The greatest moment of all was her on set, and she said, 'Would you mind if you change the order of the phrase?' Maggie Smith asking me if I could change the line, asking politely, using my name!”

“I just did what any writer does, tried to listen to the characters, whether they're 18 or 80.”

“These are cynical times. Some of the romcoms I thought worked best in recent years were '500 Days of Summer,' 'Celeste and Jesse Forever' and 'Like Crazy,' all of which reject the standard happy-ever-after formula.”