Lee Hall, a playwright and screenwriter, was born in 1966. He was nominated for an Oscar and a Bafta for Billy Elliot (2000). His most recent work was the 2006 TV adaptation of The Wind in the Willows. His next film is Hippie Hippie Shake, starring Sienna Miller and directed by Beeban Kidron.

I wrote Billy Elliotwhen I was still a neophyte. I thought I’d be a playwright. I tried getting my name taken off my first film because it bore little resemblance to the screenplay I had written. Even the smallest British film costs millions of pounds and there are many people – producers, financiers – who want to protect their investment. I learnt early on the art of maintaining good relations with as many people in the process as possible. With Billy Elliot the initial feeling was that no one will want to come and see this: miners’ strike was too dour, no one will want to see a boy doing ballet. But Stephen [Daldry, the director] read it and he was committed to it from the start. “I’ve never made a film, but I want to make this,” he told me.

Film is very collaborative: you must have a good relationship with your director and the cast. You’ll write a script, then it becomes something else with the director and then something else entirely on the cutting-room floor. You must prepare yourself for that. If you’ve come from a literary culture where the writer’s word is sacrosanct you will be shocked. In the theatre if a line is cut, the writer can shut down the play. In film, the screenwriter’s contract literally reads that any of your words can be changed “throughout perpetuity in mediums not yet invented”. You shouldn’t be a screenwriter if you can’t cope with disappointment. It demands compromise. If your ego can’t take it – and believe me, it’s horrible – write a novel or poetry. Sometimes you’ll have to get rid of whole characters or plotlines. Your screenplay is just a blueprint.

With Billy Elliot I was involved with every detail, arguing for hours with Stephen. He had come from theatre so the atmosphere was very collegiate. It wasn’t a case of making big changes but small things to alter the emphasis. We didn’t get the broader political context of the miners’ strike in – frustrating, but we did get it into the stage play – because of the emotional balance of the film. Your screenplay will inevitably be f***ed up, but something good may come out of that f***ing up.

I start writing by dreaming up the story first in images. With Billy Elliot I saw a kid from a pit village jumping on a bed – what I used to do in my granddad’s house – but he was wearing a tutu. I wanted to make a film about industrial culture and machismo, and the warmth and incipient violence of the culture I grew up in. I was influenced by Ken Loach and Bill Douglas, but wanted to create a realistic world within which something fantastic took place. Next, I normally make some notes and then take a huge piece of paper and free-associate what the essential scenes will be (in Billy Elliot a kid who dances in the streets of the mining village, the confrontation with his dad) and then draw lines between the different scenes and plot how they will connect up. Then I write the first draft; this doesn’t take long, about ten days. A screenplay is normally 100 pages and though I wrote my first screenplay out myself, now you can use computer programs that format the whole thing automatically.

I write a prose description of each scene on little cards: how will it look, what are the central arguments or developments within it? Is the sequence of scenes making sense? I do it in chunks but try not to imagine the whole thing too much. If you do, there’s no room to breathe, or to have “accidents” – a scene might not work but its uglinesses can usually be worked into another part of the script or fed into other ideas.

I never look back while writing the draft, I get too depressed at the gap between my aspiration and the outcome. It always appears frightfully mundane, unevocative, gauche, unfilmable, unreadable, unwatchable. At the end you go back and go through it and through it and through it again. This is when you cut the verbosity, find the right tone, style. It has to stand many people’s scrutiny: director, actors, technicians, audience. It has to be definite.

You’re expected to complete the first draft in three months. It may take another two years for filming to begin. In that time you’ll have contact with a script editor; a director is assigned later. The script editor on Billy Elliot helped me to realise that Billy’s mother was in the way. So we killed her and that helped me to realise that the film was about loss and Billy’s bereavement became a metaphor for the loss of culture and industry in the North East. In the editing, even in the cutting room, you can suddenly realise: “Oh it’s not X’s story, it’s Y’s story.”

For about six months Stephen and I took every scene apart and interrogated everything: why was he jumping on the bed, why it was symbolically important for him to dance in the street wearing his dad’s mining boots. We were making less of a realistic film, more of a fairytale. We had very robust conversations, rows and upsets. If you’re lucky, as I was with Stephen, you and your director are making the same thing. You can’t be supine, but you can’t be intransigent. You have to keep fighting and yet have humility. Stephen didn’t take Billy Elliot away from me and, although I’m responsible for the story, it’s as much his work as mine.

You arrive at the final draft, which you send out to the actors. A new set of complications begins when filming starts. Locations change, the actors have their own ideas, money runs out. Additions, signalled by being different coloured sheets, are added into the script. It’s a multicoloured wonder by the end.

It’s hard to watch the finished film: you think of all the mistakes, missed opportunities, where you got it wrong. I must have written 20 screenplays, all waiting to be made. My next big project is a kind of sequel to Billy Elliot. Apparently there was such a shortage of pilots for Spitfires that they recruited men from the pit villages, which set up a culture clash with all the upper-crust pilots, who felt displaced by these oiks. The creative process is fulfilling and I’m eternally hopeful, but I have written my own screenplays, polished other people’s and had mine polished by others. Writing a screenplay is like being a lady who takes a car in for a service and everyone comes and has a go at fixing it.

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