Simon Beaufoy

“I'm not interested in superheroes. What about normal people doing extraordinary things?”

“Real life is messy, and drama is a shaped version of real life.”

“I used to live on a barge - it is incredibly good to write near water. There is an ever-changing landscape, so you never get bored.”

“The recession of the late 1980s was a very visible humiliation. Cities across Britain had become the victims of botched battlefield surgery - surgery that involved the ripping up of factories, the flattening of buildings, and the razing of the Victorian heritage of heavy labour.”

“There isn't a more important issue in the world than global warming. Even the Cold War and the Bay of Pigs crisis were a notional threat.”

“If you work in the studio system in America, they've almost got to the point where a computer programme could write scripts. Effectively, they hire and fire enough writers until they get something generic.”

“Everyone's got a boulder in their life of one sort or another that they need to overcome. For most people, it's not a literal one, but there are certainly metaphorical ones.”

“I have a huge admiration for the ability of people to go, 'I don't care if it can't happen. I don't care if you say it's impossible. I am gonna do it anyway.' I think it's an amazing part of human nature. It feeds into faith and belief in human beings to not only do the improbable but almost the impossible.”

“The West has become very sophisticated, seeing love as a very complex thing. In Bollywood, it's not complex: it's an arrow straight to the heart.”

“British audiences are toughest on British films. So often, a British film is the last thing they want to see. If you please them, you really know you've made an impact.”

“If you've been nominated for an Oscar, it would be ridiculous to say you didn't want to win. It would be lovely to have one of those statues.”

“After a while, you become really irritated that you're not recognised as the person who wrote 'The Full Monty.' Everyone goes on about how lovely the characters are. That's because they were written! 'What a clever title.' Yeah, that's because I made up the title!”

“Repressed English writers have to write love stories because they can't say what they really mean.”

“'The Full Monty' was my first feature script, and I wasn't that skilled at it.”

“I think you are doing a disservice to a novel just by transposing it wholesale onto the screen, because it doesn't work. They are completely different beasts.”

“I believe innately in the human spirit being a powerful and positive thing. And that just comes out, whether you like it or not. It comes out in the writing.”

“In the midst of global recession, in the face of uncertainty about what's going to happen next, film looks for inspiration to real people.”

“I guess my approach to adapting books is to treat them with a deep respect on one level and at another level part them to one side and go, 'I'm doing something completely different here.'”

“Miley Cyrus twerking - is that really a model for your kids?”

“I'm a documentary filmmaker by training. You got to start with the real people and the real place.”