Peter Morgan, writer of The Queen, Frost/Nixon, Longford and The Last King of
Scotland, is having tea with me in the Wolseley restaurant, where they
serve, among other things, Viennese cakes. He has more or less decided this
is not the time to be interviewed.
“I was a little bit concerned about being caught at this moment. I thought it
would be difficult talking to you, and that’s why I was concerned before
meeting ... It’s such a mad period ... and to be, sort of, scrutinised ... I
don’t know if it would make more sense to wait a couple of months.
“There’s something very odd about scrutiny, or self-examination. I do almost
none. I don’t read reviews or the papers, almost none. I’m like the Red
Indian — er, Native American — who doesn’t like having his photo taken —
losing one’s soul. It’s about overthinking. I don’t think about what I do;
it’s instinctive, and if that reflex is challenged ... My natural instinct
is to think about what you do. I mean, not you in particular; just other
people.”
In a desperate attempt to stop him thinking about himself not thinking about
himself, I ask to see his shoes. They are sort of black suede desert boots.
It works. He stops talking, and I explain my interest in his shoes by
telling him a long story about Terence Stamp and Pilates. “I think that’s a
good instinct, to look at shoes. I talk a lot about shoes in Frost/Nixon —
it’s all about shoes. There’s a kind of homoerotic fascination based on
shoes. Nixon is fascinated by David Frost’s Italian lace-free shoes ... ”
And he’s off again.
Anyway, here he is, man of the moment, Peter Morgan. Energetic, theatrical in
speech, he is 43 and looks somewhat younger. He has large grey eyes, which
open into huge, staring circles when he gets excited. He wears a dark
pullover and cords, plus those boots. He has a big anorak sort of thing, and
he is carrying a large holdall. There is something breathless about him.
That and his deranged manner are understandable. He is, as they say, hot.
Frost/Nixon is to transfer to the West End next month and is to be filmed by
Ron Howard. The Queen is a triumph on both sides of the Atlantic. Longford,
featuring a heart-stopping performance by Jim Broadbent, was on Channel 4 on
Thursday. The Last King of Scotland, set in Idi Amin’s Uganda, opened the
London Film Festival this month.
Morgan has just come from the filming of another of his scripts, The Other
Boleyn Girl, a £20m movie based on a Philippa Gregory novel. The big holdall
turns out to be a goodie bag full of gadgets made by Sony, the studio behind
Boleyn. “I’ve never had a goodie bag before,” he says.
He’s reluctant to talk about that project, but Longford, the story of Lord
Longford’s relationship with the Moors murderer Myra Hindley, really gets
him going. “It’s like talking about my favourite child. Frank Longford had
written a book about Nixon, asking us to forgive him. It was spectacularly
ill advised, way too soon; the timing was terrible. I read the book, and it
was dreadful, but I liked it. As soon as I could tell he was a vilified
figure, my sympathy was immediately aroused, because I like vilified
figures. There’s also the Catholicism.”
Morgan says that, of all his works, only Longford and a television series
called The Jury make him “well up”. He describes Longford as “an
unapologetic voice for forgiveness”. He explains: “In the sort of climate we
are in, it’s an exciting thing to look at now, when we have detentions
without questions. It’s about the idea that change and redemption are
possible. I don’t like the idea of a society in which people put crosses on
paedophiles’ doors. Maybe it’s an illness: maybe rehabilitation is
possible.”
There is now a long digression about Viennese cakes. His wife, Lila, is
Austrian, and he is fussy. He likes going into posh London places and
telling them they’ve got it all wrong. So, first he has to go to look at the
carrot cake to see if it’s moist enough, but then he suddenly decides to
have the strudel. There is a tense moment when he tastes it. “It’s warm ...
It’s not bad — they haven’t over-sugared it. The pastry is slightly thick,
but not embarrassingly so. It’s good.”
Morgan’s background is hopelessly cosmopolitan. His father was a German Jew
who got out from under the Nazis before the war, and his mother is a
Silesian Catholic who got out from under the Soviets after the war. I
mention that my mother was Jewish, and that starts another long digression —
“I love people from mixed backgrounds. I love Jewish culture; I would hate
to be thought of as purely Gentile. Do you love to talk about your personal
health?”
“No.”
“Ah, that’s the Anglo-Saxon in you. Jews love to talk about their health. The
English just say it’s a lot of nonsense.”
They spoke German at home. His wife is also a Catholic, an observant one, and
she is bringing up their four children in the church. “I don’t object, but I
don’t participate, and I fully expect them not to participate in time. I
tell my wife there are many other spiritual things we could be doing on a
Sunday morning other than going to church. Sitting in church is a spiritual
thing to do. But there are other things as well.”
He is, he says, a “seeker”, spiritual but not religious, which is one reason
he so closely identifies with Lord Longford, a Catholic convert who spent
his life visiting prisoners, locked in the spiritual vanity of his own
private mission to forgive.
If only professionally, Seeker Morgan was found when he wrote Stephen Frears’s
television film The Deal, about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s meeting about
who should take the Labour leadership, held at Granita restaurant, in
Islington. It was a huge success, but it typecast Morgan as a writer of
fictions based on reality. He spits out the word “docudrama” with revulsion
— “It sends me into paroxysms of rage” — and then tries to explain his
working method.
“I wrote The Queen first, and then went away and fact-checked it. There’s a
meeting at the beginning when she pisses on Blair, and then there’s a
meeting at the end where she’s cowed. Then there’s a Monday, Tuesday,
Wed-nesday structure in the middle, where she kind of f***s up. That was
there — I wrote that very quickly — and then I spent months interviewing
people.
“There’s always an emotional landscape behind my research. My take on the
matter is always emotional. I always thought the Queen in my piece would be
a vulnerable 70-year-old woman who doesn’t understand the world any more,
and he (Blair) is the ersatz son finding a mother figure. The Deal was about
brothers, of course.”
With Frost/Nixon, the emotional landscape was “two desperate, emotionally
complex men, unable to be intimate”. For both of them, the American
television interviews set up by Frost with the disgraced former president
had to be a huge success. Morgan discovered so many different versions of
what actually happened, he came to the conclusion that “the truth is
nonsense” and regards his play as just one more version, “just another
fiction”. The Last King is slightly different, in that it is based on a
Giles Foden novel, but the landscape of Longford is that of “a f***-up; he
made a bad call”. But all of them, he says, are love stories.
I ask him why he thinks people are so gripped by such dramatisations of
reality. “My guess would be that it’s about leaders or people being
portrayed not in a cartoon or journalistic way. They are flawed, but we
don’t judge them for their flaws. I think that’s what it is — the fairness
of it. It’s something to do with not being scurrilous, not having an agenda.
Asking people to love Idi Amin could be seen as hideous arrogance, but I
don’t think dictators are born. I saw him as an enormous great black
foundling, Moses in a colossal basket. Once I knew the reality of his
childhood, I thought, ‘I love that.’”
Yet Morgan is beginning to feel slightly trapped by the form. He seems to have
stumbled on it by accident rather than design. It is not, however, going to
go away. He has the film of Frost/Nixon coming up, and then he has a
commitment with Frears to do a film about Brian Clough. Somewhere amid all
that, he plans to work on a self-generated fiction, probably with the
Longford director, Tom Hooper. “It will be about death, not in a morbid but
in a hopeful way.”
His own fiction, he feels, is what he should be doing, and he squirms at the
thought that he is stuck with the reality-fiction form. But otherwise, he
has no doubts about his current career path. “Screenwriting is all I can do.
It’s the only thing I’m quite unabashed in saying I’m good at. I live in a
state of low self-esteem about my work all the time. The only thing I know
how to do is tell a story. The Queen worked out well, but it could easily
have not worked out well; it could have been risible.”
I point out that the low self- esteem is a bit rich, considering the applause
he is getting. “Oh, come on!” he snorts. “Where’s the Jew in you?” The
single career focus plainly dominates his thinking. Everything is about
storytelling. He says he reads almost no fiction — “I lose patience with it”
— but, if he does, he prefers pulp, “because the storytelling is so good”.
So he reads non-fiction in order to be stimulated by real events.
He regards with awe the work of Aaron Sorkin, writer of The West Wing, and of
Larry David, the co-creator of Seinfeld and star of his own,
quasi-autobiographical comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm. He mistrusts the very
idea of the big movie. “It’s so corrupting. It’s almost impossible to make a
good big movie, because there’s so much interference, and nothing good comes
out of interference. When a good one does come along, it’s just fantastic.”
So, there you have him. Peter Morgan, man of the moment. Nice guy, if a touch
logorrhoeic and easily distracted, and a brilliant screenwriter. He should
go far. Oh, sorry, he already has.
Frost/Nixon is at the Gielgud Theatre, W1, until February 3; The Last King
of Scotland opens in January
