By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Eschewing creative pride: how Peter Morgan types
Last King of Scotland co-writer and The Queen screenwriter Peter Morgan talks toolbox with with the Reporter’s Martin Grove. “Morgan told me he’s “an early morning man (and writes on) a computer. I use Final Draft. In this instance, I did a bit of research and then I worked only from my imagination. I wrote the film how I wanted it to be and then I did the research to fact[-]check my imagining. I didn’t really do all the research to find out which way to go because I find that way I can lose the wood for the trees, as it were. I actually need to have a view beforehand. I write what I’m hoping it is or how I’m imagining it is and then I go and fact check that. And if it’s wrong, then I’ll change it. If it’s right and in sequence, great. But it allows me to keep the broad sweep of my own imagining.” Does he structure his screenplays using note cards on a board? “No, I don’t do that at all… But I do work from an outline and I just constantly revise the outline. The reason I work from an outline is that it’s somehow less heartbreaking to tear an outline up than it is to throw a screenplay away. I can cope with any amount of structural failures on an outline. They don’t dent me or prick my confidence whereas if I was to hand in a screenplay that had profound structural problems that would become exposed and that would become clear. That would be devastating and it would be hard to go back whereas I have no creative pride invested in an outline.”