David Morrissey

James Nesbitt in 'Passer By'

David Morrissey was interviewed at the National Film Theatre on 2 March 2004 by film director John Madden.

A new BBC drama from actor-director David Morrissey, Passer By is an honest and intimate portrayal of a man's inner emotions and an examination of the contract between strangers. The film reunites Morrissey with writer Tony Marchant and producer David Snodin after Into the Fire and Holding On. About Passer By

Following a screening of the film, the bfi were delighted to welcome Morrissey and Marchant to the NFT stage to discuss early days in Liverpool, playing Weber in Corelli, the role of actor-director and the genesis of Passer By.

Interview © BFI 2004

Introduction

Veronica Taylor: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name's Veronica Taylor and I am the television programmer here at the National Film Theatre, and it's my great pleasure to welcome you here for this very special preview screening tonight, followed by an on-stage conversation with two of the talents involved in the play you're about to see. I'm going to say very little now because I'm about to introduce you to one of those people. First of all, though, I'd like to thank the BBC for allowing us to have this preview and, as I say, it will be followed by an on-stage conversation with the director David Morrissey, and the writer, Tony Marchant, who'll be in conversation with the film director John Madden. But will you now please welcome the director of the film who's going to say a few words about it, David Morrissey [applause].

David Morrissey: Thank you very much. Wow... I'd just like to say thank you all for coming, it's brilliant to see everyone here, it's a real buzz to have Passer By screened at the NFT, and just to say that Passer By is for the BBC and it will be out on the 4th and 5th of April. So you lot can go out those nights because there's nothing on the other sides... and it stars James Nesbitt who's not here during the screening but I think he might be joining us later on and it's written by the wonderful Tony Marchant and produced by the equally wonderful David Snodin and I'd just like to take this opportunity to say thank you to both of them for asking me to direct the piece.

You'll see both episodes in one block and then afterwards there's about a half-hour break. You can all have a drink and then come back and, I think, up here John and I will have a little bit of 'in conversation' which will concentrate on my acting a little bit and then Tony will join us and we'll have a little bit of a conversation and hopefully a bit of a Q&A as well, so save those questions.

But I hope you enjoy it and ... obviously ... turn off your mobile phones and all that... and see you afterwards, alright? Thanks very much. [applause]

[Screening: Passer By]

VT: Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. We're restarting the rest of the evening with a clip from Captain Corelli's Mandolin [2001] and then I'll ask you to welcome our first guests on stage, David Morrissey, the director of Passer By and John Madden, the director of Captain Corelli's Mandolin amongst many other things, who's going to be interviewing David, who will be joined at a later stage by Tony Marchant. So, as I say, one clip to start with, then please welcome our guests.

[Clip: Captain Corelli's Mandolin]

Madden on Morrissey

John Madden: I think that applause should be for David... I'm going to sit down here. Does this work? No, you stay there [laughter] unless you want to come up here and be embarrassed, you could do that. I just want to say a couple of words before I invite David up here. Susan Picken kindly invited me to carry out this interview with David tonight. She did so by email, which is very circumspect and polite. She could have called me but people tend not to in these situations; I think they're afraid you might be embarrassed into saying yes, because they're asking you directly, or that you might say no in a hurry, because you haven't had a chance to think about it.

But in the event she sent me an email and she needn't have worried, I would have said yes immediately, but I did have time to think of a couple of things before I clicked on the 'reply' button. A sort of mental check-list really, which, if I'm ever asked to do these things, which I am from time to time, you have to go through because it's important to come up with the right answers. The first one was 'do I like the man?' which, you'll be pleased to hear, the answer is yes. I've known him for about 15 years; we first met when I was looking for somebody to play a rather unusual role in a film that I was casting at the time called The Widowmaker which we might get into later. And I've worked with him a couple of times since, the last time the fruits of which you see on the screen there and we had the hideous ordeal of spending about four months together on a Greek island in summer. We got to know each other pretty well, both David and his family, and I count him as a friend now. So there was no problem on that score.

The second one that I would ask myself on the check list is 'do I admire him professionally?' I'm going to have to give a rather cautious answer to this (no, not really...) The answer is extravagantly. I mean I would imagine the fact that I've worked with him three times would attest to that, but that's not a unique distinction because pretty much everybody who's been in a position to offer the man a job has done so more than once, or will do so more than once if they've only just worked with him. It's a distinction, for example, I share with Tony Marchant and with David Snodin, with whom he collaborated on this wonderful piece that I think you all saw tonight. It's something of a distinction though, to be an early member of the Morrissey fan club, a fully paid-up member.

In those days ... this was fairly early on in his career ... the only ones who shared that with me were the people who knew him from RADA, where he trained, or from the RSC or the National, where he spent time, or you had had the pleasure of working with him on his television projects which were not so great in number then. But you could always tell somebody else who was in the fan club because they'd say 'oh, you're working with David Morrissey... oh, yes...' and you would immediately feel kind of flattered in your taste and your perception, and flattered by the fact that the person who was telling you this, or asking you this, or whatever, had a similar taste and perception.

But you always tended to notice ... I did then ... that that kind of attitude towards him was not just shared by people who worked with him. Anybody who's in the business knows that you always get ... or if you're a director anyway ... get asked what projects you're working on at the moment. I'm talking about stepmothers and aunts and neighbours and people like that. They always pretend to be interested in the story but actually the only thing they really want to know is who's in it. And if you, as I've had the pleasure of doing on a number of occasions, say David Morrissey, they always say 'oh, David Morrissey, oh he's absolutely wonderful.' And there's a sort of unmistakeable sense that people feel they're in some kind of a club, with inside knowledge, and that club, of course, is now rather large ... it's been fattening up nicely as his résumé extends... now approaching obesity and I imagine you're all fully paid-up members as well, or you wouldn't be here.

But he is an extraordinary actor and, of course, he's now, rather infuriatingly decided to develop his talents in other areas as well, the fruits of which you also saw tonight. Now the last one on the check list for me was 'do I think I would have anything to ask him in an interview that I didn't already know?' and the answer to that was a quick affirmative as well, and it's this: that even though I worked with him three times I really have no idea how he does it. If you ask anybody in the business, David is known as an 'actor's actor' which is a pretty rare accolade, as you know the profession is not famous for celebrating the achievements of rivals and contemporaries, or at least if they are famous for it, they're not famous for doing it with much sincerity. But in David's case it's a real exception. Other actors admire him enormously and you won't find a more sceptical audience, I think, for an actor's work than another actor, because when they watch other actors work they're looking for the tricks, which they of course all know, and they're looking for the wheels turning, and with David you can't see the wheels turning, and it's a pretty extraordinary compliment, that, from other actors, and I can attest to it myself.

He is one of those actors who, I suspect if you went out and asked people on the street do they know David Morrissey's work, most people would now say yes. Five years ago, four years ago I suspect they wouldn't have done. But everybody would know his work . They know him from the characters he plays rather than who he is, and when you watch a David Morrissey performance, you don't see the actor, you certainly don't see David Morrissey, what you do see is the character, completely invested and completely transformed into whatever the part requires, so I do have something to learn from tonight on your behalf, which is what his secret is and how he does it, so I will intend to be a stern interrogator. But I'd like you to welcome him now on stage please, David Morrissey. [applause]

Early days

David Morrissey: Thanks very much. Wow, that was fantastic. Thank you very much. One of the things I would just like to say about Corelli , on watching that scene there is my wife and I, Esther, our two children... one of the things that has always infuriated us is that we've never had any decent photographs of all four of us together, because there's always me taking it, or Esther taking it, or somebody else who cuts my head off or whatever, and the one great photograph that we have of all four of us is the kids looking fantastic, Esther looking fantastic, and me in a completely Nazi uniform [laughter] just standing there. I had it on the shelf in the house for a while ... people came in and never came back again [laughter] . So that's one of my memories of just seeing myself in that uniform...

JM: Before we talk about Corelli let's just get a couple of things out of the way, all the kind of boring questions, the questions that people ask you. How did you get into the business in the first place?

DM: Well I come from Liverpool and, again it was school really, I was encouraged by a teacher at school, and my education was not great in the fact that it was quite a tough school to grow up in. What happened was there was one inspiring teacher.

JM: Do you remember his name? Her name?

DM: Well it was a Miss Keller and she was fantastic. She really just inspired you to get up there and we did The Wizard of Oz and I played the scarecrow... and all that. And I was about 11, and I got on stage and I realised there was something happening, there was a dialogue happening between me and the audience and it was real and I enjoyed it ... the bottom line was I enjoyed it. She left, and I was sort of bereft by that, but there was a great place in Liverpool called the Everyman Theatre, and the Everyman Theatre had a wonderful youth theatre and I had no idea how to get into this place. I'd heard about it but I had no idea, and my cousin was working there at the time ... he was going out with a girl from the box office actually, to be honest, and he said to me 'you should, you know, get into the youth theatre, so I went along and I walked in and of course the first thing was the fact that it was just all these people of my age who were so all over the place, jumping around, doing workshops, having fun and I felt completely intimidated. And I went up for a couple of weeks and was just a wallflower.

JM: It was a pretty amazing time there...

DM: The main theatre was... [Alan] Bleasdale, [Willy] Russell, it was also, you know, Julie Walters, Pete Postlethwaite was there, Anton Lesser was the actor I remember mostly there, because he did Cloud Nine and what I didn't realise was that he was in both halves of the play: in the first half he played a woman, and in the second half he played a gay man and I always thought he was only in the second half. The transformation of this man was unbelievable. But what the theatre was wonderful about was in encouraging the youth theatre... bringing it in, and then Ken Campbell took over and did The Warp and it was a completely bizarre time and he as well was just doing exercise with us which were just... you just didn't know you could have so much fun, it was completely anarchic.

JM: When did you discover that you were good at it?

DM: That's a tough question, because it's sort of...

JM: You're supposed to say 'I don't know that now...' [laughter]

DM: I think it's when you, when people keep asking you back a bit, you think 'oh, that must have been OK...' but the one thing that we were encouraged with in the youth theatre was to make sure that you enjoyed the process, so whatever you decided you wanted to do with your life didn't matter. It was very much about 'come out of your shell, enjoy yourself, be true to yourself and have fun.' And at the time Liverpool... Brookside hadn't started then, so it was quite... and everybody was in a band, mostly, you know, it was... musicians... was what was happening. But suddenly the youth theatre got a real reputation of doing good work, and work that was relevant, and then the riots happened, and we did this big play called Fighting Chance at the youth theatre, which was all about the Liverpool riots, and suddenly you felt that you were going out and you were meeting people and they were telling you stories and then we went back ... there was a wonderful guy called Roger Hill who ran it ... and we devised this play about something that was happening 100 yards down the road. And people came to see it, from 100 yards down the road, and they were like 'God that was just, you know, just exactly what happened' and that collaborative experience was what I enjoyed more than anything.

JM: And so, at a certain point, you decided you'd take it up professionally, and you auditioned for RADA, but you'd done something before that, hadn't you done...

DM: I was really lucky, because Willy Russell wrote a five-part series for Yorkshire Television, called One Summer [1983] which was about two Scouse lads who ran away to Wales. They came to look for them, they saw lots of people, and they came to the youth theatre, and they saw myself, they saw Ian Hart as well, who was my best friend, we went along to endless auditions and it was directed by a Scottish director called Gordon Flemyng, who's sadly not with us any more, and about 18 interviews later both Ian and I got parts in this film TV series, and we did it and we went and we had fun and it was hard work and I suddenly learned that... you know, you told the story backwards, that was the one thing I'd never realised, that on the first day I would be doing the end of episode three. The second day I would be doing the middle of episode two. And I had no idea about films and how they were made in that way, and that was a real shock to me, that you never told the story in a linear way. And Gordon was wonderful, he'd done a lot of great films, a lot of great telly and he took us under his wing.

And then a year went by, and I went travelling ... I went to Kenya to visit some cousins of mine and had a really good time, and I was sitting in this place in Nairobi and I was sitting there with my cousins and this woman in front of me had the English papers and she went [snigger, snigger] and my picture was on the back... and I just went 'oh my god' and there were all these reviews about this thing that had just come out and I got back to Liverpool ... I got back to London first...

JM: Did you read the reviews?

DM: They were read to me, I remember [laughter] and the reviews were good, and then I was on the train from London to Liverpool and suddenly people were like 'oh my god, there's that guy...' and stuff and it went down really well, and one of the actors in it was James Hazeldine who, again is sadly no longer with us... and I saw it recently, I got sent it recently, and I was really amazed by how it stands up really, and people now, you now, John Simm, for example, who I worked with in State of Play [d. David Yates, 1983], he did an interview where somebody said 'did you enjoy working with David Morrissey?' and he said 'yeah, I've admired him since I was a kid' [laughter] and of course I was like 'hang on a minute, he's only two years younger than me!' but he was like... it obviously did have an impact in Liverpool, which was very romantic about that time...

After RADA

JM: So after RADA you did primarily stage work for a while...

DM: I did, yeah, after RADA I went back to Liverpool to the Liverpool Playhouse to do a play called WCPC which Pam Brighton directed and then I went to Stratford East, and then I went to the RSC. And at the RSC I worked with Deborah Warner, principally, and we did King John and that was a real learning curve for me because, you know, at RADA... I adored RADA but there was a sense that 'would you ever do Classical theatre? Is that something that you would go into?' and when I did One Summer a lot of people said 'there's no point in going to drama school, you know, you have your Equity card, you have a profile, why not just stay out?' And Jimmy actually, Jimmy Hazledine was the one person who said 'you should go.' It was the one thing he hadn't done, and he regretted it, and he said, you know 'you should go and...'

JM: Did it give you a confidence that you think you wouldn't otherwise have had?

DM: Well it gave me an introduction into a different world, you know, obviously at the time drama school was not based around film or TV at all, it's very much around theatre, and your craft. It gave me a place to fail, with character, so you would do a character and you would fall flat on your face, but you were able to, you know... the great thing about RADA, as opposed to other drama schools is you get into performance very quickly, in your second term you play in front of an invited audience.

JM: Do you think it gave you technique?

DM: It gives you some technique, it didn't give me any technique that I sort of use now, but it gave you technique as far as... you know, breathing, stuff like that, and how to approach character and stuff like that. But more that anything it gave you an experience of performance. It was really like 'get out there and do it... sink or swim.' And that's what I enjoyed about it.

JM: I met you... I don't know... probably fairly shortly after that. I was doing a film called The Widowmaker which required a character, or an actor to play a part of a completely ordinary man who had virtually no distinguishing features ... he lived in a kind of anonymous suburb... [laughter]

DM: Perfect...

JM: ...Outside a northern, well actually a Midlands town. He was notable only for being a member of a gun club, and the story begins with this character going completely crazy and shooting 14 people, and it was quite a tough one to pull off, the character that you played was the centre of the story, in a narrative sense, but actually only really appeared in brief flashbacks, well, at the beginning of the story there's apprehension, then flashbacks during it. And a key scene at the end, but the entire movie depended on the plausibility of this part and I was introduced to him by Michelle Kish who was casting the film and David read for the part, I really can't remember the experience very clearly except thinking... well I remember the experience of making the film... but the experience of the audition... except thinking 'well that's it, that's over, that's that part cast.' He just had some extraordinary quality, which I've since come to recognise, which is... perhaps we'll talk about in a moment, because I want to just show another clip, but... it's a quality of somebody who's hiding something, which is a very particular characteristic, that you've mastered. I mean, to some extent all parts are like this, about the history that we don't know and don't understand, but the characters you've played who have some secret that they're withholding from us, it's a kind of recurring pattern in your work. But we'll come back to that in a second...

This Little Life

JM: ... I just want to show another clip of a piece that David did, which I think was broadcast last year, am I'm right...?

DM: Which is this?

JM: This Little Life [d. Sarah Gavron, 2002].

DM: Yes it was, yes.

JM: ...which is a beautiful piece, I don't know if anybody saw it, about a couple who have a premature baby. I won't tell you any more about it if you haven't seen it, because you'll see the clip that follows, but interestingly David's role in that film is somewhat analogous to the role that I first cast him in because in the case of the film that I was directing the man's wife was really the central character, played by another actor's actor, Annabelle Apsion, and David was the kind of presence that kind of catalysed the story. It's a similar situation here where really the part that Kate Ashfield plays is the focus of the film, but the scene you're about to see is a critical one, so if we could just take a look at that, this is This Little Life .

[Clip: This Little Life]

JM: That's an extraordinary scene later on. Tell us a little bit about that, it's a completely heart-rending piece. Obviously you see the critical scene there, that this child turns out to be severely brain-damaged. We've been watching a very intense portrayal of the character Kate Ashfield is playing, David's wife in the story, who is living in a hospital, and pretty much a permanent resident in the intensive care unit where the child is, and she's going through her own sense of life, really, with this child.

DM: Well she's bonding with the child, that's the thing, I mean, when the script came I thought it was a very delicate territory, because it's based on a book by Rosemary Kay who went through this experience and when I read it I thought 'well this is... you know, it's a story that... where's the warmth, where's the... you know, the real hope in the story?' And actually the hope is via Kate's character, that what she does is she decides that, although her baby is born 24 weeks prematurely, she's going to stay with the baby, she's going to bond with it, and she does have those three months with the baby, where she's able to communicate, and have... you know, somebody in her life. She has a child. And when it comes to the point where Peter Mullan gives us that... the baby is going to die, Kate, although she's angry in this scene, later on she says to me, you know 'we have to let him go,' and the father says 'well that's all right for you because you've had him, I've never had him.' And when I spoke to... I spoke to a couple of fathers who'd been through this experience, and they said well that's exactly... everything in that period, in that process and that environment is geared towards the mother and the child, and you as the father, you're always this person who's sort of on the outside, you're not allowed to ask questions.

And all your male, sort of, genes kick in, you think, 'oh I'll just be sturdy and I'll be fine. I'll be at home and I'll be a worker and all that,' and actually what you want to shout is 'what about me? I want my son as well, I want my child as well,' but nothing within the environment is geared for you to come into that. And I spoke to this one guy, I met this one guy, because I live by the Royal Free, and I went there to the premature baby unit and I met this guy and he was... he explained to me this very story, and I met him in the pub at the end of my road and he had all these photographs of the baby in the incubator, and he was a big guy, you know and it was a bit of a noisy pub and stuff, and he just broke down in front of me. And it was to do with the fact that he hadn't actually ever spoken about that period in his life to anybody, and of course me being the nosey actor, I'm saying to him 'well how does it feel when this happens, and when that happened... and what happened, did... is this true that people, you know, don't ask you this, and then you get...' and he just went >bommm< and it was as if he'd just never, ever had the experience of talking about it. Nobody'd ever asked...

JM: Well let's just talk about this for a moment, because that's one of the ways, any of us who've worked with you, know that you work, which is that research is incredibly important to you. That's not the way every actor works, some actors don't like to ask questions, they like simply to respond to the script, they like to dip into their own imagination, they sometimes prefer to know... nothing about what they're doing in order to preserve their instinct.

DM: I'm worried about dipping into my own imagination [laughter] I don't trust it.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin

JM: You're always getting cast as psychopaths... But I remember, for example, when you came to play Weber in Corelli you produced this book, which, I was astounded to see, was filled in on both sides of the page... page upon page upon page which was really your own investigation into who he was, I'm not talking about the character in the novel necessarily, but who you felt... the questions he might ask himself, what music he liked, what he wanted to be, what his failures were. Tell us a bit about that process.

DM: That's the geek in me coming out, I think. I think that I do... the nature of filming, most of the time is it's 'hurry up and wait,' but when you get to the actual process of putting it down on camera, it's really quite quick that process, and you never know when you're going to get it, or when you're not, or when a cloud's going to come, or whatever, and I like researching, the fact that... it means that I can... I always work from back-story, that's what I always do, so you get a character, and you think 'OK, who's this guy, before the story starts?' I always do a back-story, which is either from his parents or even further back sometimes. When I did Our Mutual Friend [d. Julian Farino, 1998], there was a whole... this man... most of the people I play have a monkey on their back; they have this thing that they can't function in the world as well as they would like to, because of something they're trying to fulfil in the story, they have a fantasy of themselves. And you only know that by working on the person's back-story. And so I invent a back-story, so all my work...

JM: So with the character that we just saw, Weber in Corelli , what was his fantasy?

DM: Well the thing about Weber, I think, is like... it's very difficult with Weber because he was... he is a sympathetic Nazi. He's somebody who is, as we know... you know, that was this massive machine that took over a country, and he's not German, he's Austrian, and the one thing for me is, with him, was the fact that he was... it's all very well to be someone who stands up and says ... and they're the brave people ... who stand up and say 'I won't do that. I will not have that.' And there's other people who go 'just get me through today... just... if I get through today, I might be all right tomorrow,' and they constantly do that and I felt that the one thing about Weber was that he was... not a weak man, but the ideal he was working with... you know, the Nazi system, wasn't his natural self, and when he meets Corelli he goes 'god, I want to be like these people...'

JM: I think that's something you convey with incredible deftness, I mean you've just seen the scene, and you can see very clearly this is a man who is desperate to be accepted.

DM: But you also work backwards with the script because the other thing about Weber is ... his great scene in the film ... is where he's stuck between a rock and a hard place, where he just can't... he has to kill his best friend, and he has all the, you know, everybody watching him, and he will be killed if he doesn't kill... so you think, OK how does this man get to this point? There must be something in his past that makes him not just pull that trigger, or turn round and shoot himself. He has to have that make-up from somewhere else...

JM: So you feel you need to know exactly what the history is that leads up to that point in order to be able to invest it.

DM: Yeah, I always think that, you know, the other thing about research is, for me ... and it doesn't work for some actors and, you know, everybody works differently and I think that one thing... I'm very suspicious of 'method' because I always think that whenever I've worked with people who say they are method actors, it means that they'll do anything and woe betide what you do, you could walk into the scene naked and they'll still be doing their thing. But the one thing for me was making sure that the research I've done and the character I was building meant that he could go anywhere, and you build the character and the director might say to you 'OK, listen, this isn't working, let's do something else,' and you knew that you were always being true to the character, because you'd done your work. And the other book I read, when I was doing Corelli was the book of Albert Speer , which of course the National did, next door. And here's a man who... his upbringing, the way that his parents brought, or neglected to bring him up... the fact that he was an academic... but he had no relationship with his father at all, so that when someone comes in and praises him, like Hitler did, he's just... he's there, you know. And it's not to excuse any of his behaviour, but you say 'where's the key into his behaviour? Don't just make him bad or, you know, evil. Where do these things fall down?' So it's actually about...

JM: So since you're often playing roles where the characters have something that is to be revealed, do you find that that's what you need to do, you need to build up a sense of what it is, so that at the moment when we need to see into your soul we can do it. Because that is an extraordinary quality you've got, a quality of transparency. It's the great gift of the actor, I think, to be able to play complexity of emotion but somehow to allow you to see those complexities very simply and very availably.

DM: Yeah, I mean I think, you know, when you read a script there's always the incidents whether it's, you know, with Our Mutual Friend with Bradley Headstone ... there's an incident with this man where he tries to kill someone because he doesn't know... he tries to kill his opponent in love because he has no other way. He doesn't know what to do. He feels sleighted so he does that... so you work from that moment to go 'how does a man get to this moment? Why can't he walk away from it? Why does this sleight from this man mean so much to him?' And then you work backwards and I think that's important.

JM: When you... the normal process, I imagine these days obviously you're sent a script and asked whether want to do them, but if...

DM: No, that's not true...

JM: How do you approach a part? What makes you want to play a part in the first place?

DM: Well of course when you're not... when you're working or, you know, you're inside something, then you always say 'the next part I want to do, I want to do... this... or I want to do comedy, or I want to do that' and actually a script comes and you just can't turn it down, and you think 'actually I want to do this , this is great, this is speaking to me now.'

JM: But what's the quality that makes that happen, is it the writing...

DM: It's always the writing. It's always the writing that you just... it just keeps you going along, that you want to keep reading, even the scenes you're not in, you know, This Little Life , it's not, you know, I'm not the lead in that at all, but you think 'this is a story I want to tell; I think it's an important story' and it is the story of, you know, Kate and her baby, but it's also the story of that relationship, and the character's not there for a reason because actually that man's not there for a reason. It's about this thing, and I think... I look at a script and it's just about whether it just keeps me going, keeps me reading and wanting to do it. And sometimes scripts are there, that you think 'I really don't want to do this because it's too much like hard work' and it frightens me and you always go 'OK I better do that' [laughter]

State of Play

JM: All right, well in the interests of moving forward let's just take a look at another clip, which is an extraordinary piece. I have to make a confession about it, which is that I saw the first episode of this series that kind of gripped the nation last year...

DM: ...and didn't watch any more...

JM: ...I didn't watch any more because I missed the second one, and I thought I'm definitely not going to watch the third one, and I thought eventually, you know, if you're in the business you can ask your mates if you can look at it, and obviously I had an opportunity to do so when I was going to do this interview, so Susan kindly sent me the tapes which I sat down to watch in the last couple of days, and episodes 1-3 came up and I'd seen 1, but I put it in, I thought 'I'll just watch 1 again.' It came up and thought 'I haven't seen this, what is this? I haven't seen this episode' and they'd put 3 first, I'm sorry about this, Susan, but I watched episode 3 and then went back and watched episodes 1 and 2, and I still haven't seen episode 6, but I have seen episode 5, which you're about to see a little bit of here, and we'll talk about that afterwards. This is State of Play .

[Clip: State of Play]

DM: I've actually beaten up Marc Warren a couple of times, I have to say [laughter] , in my career... But you've not seen episode 6.

JM: I haven't seen episode 6...

DM: Ooooh... shall I tell him...?

JM: I've got a little bug in my ear here which is telling me to ask you whether you had any idea when you were working on it that that would become one of those... one of those series that stops people dead in their tracks and remember for years afterwards.

DM: No, not at all. I mean... you never think like that. I mean, I don't think any of us feel that way when we're working on something, that it's going to have that, you know... you don't think about how it's going to be received. Obviously you think about the work and everything, but... I certainly do try to put that out, that's not for me to think about. All I know is that I really enjoyed doing it, it was a great character... but reading it... but also the way that Paul works, Paul Abbott, is that he always works to deadlines very late, so, you know, you were getting a...

JM: How did that come to you, did it come to you in the six episodes at once...?

DM: It came to me in three, and I read the first three, and I read the first three and I loved them, and then I phoned up and said 'I'd like to read the other three' and they went 'well, they're not ready yet.' And then I spoke to Paul, who was writing them and he told me the end, which I was knocked out by, and then I had to go back and read the other three again, and because that is a thriller, it's a six-part thriller and there's a massive revelation at the end of it, that my big concern was then you had to work backwards from that again, to make sure that the motivation of the character, all the time, is true. So when you're watching it for the first time you're on one ride, and when you watch it for the second time you're on another ride, but it's no less enjoyable, because you're watching a man then, juggling more balls than you thought he was juggling the first time you watched it.

JM: That's the secret of a good thriller.

DM: And I do think State of Play stands up in that, really.

JM: Yeah, it's phenomenal. What kind of research did you do for that? The first of a number of politicians that you play ... we're going to come to that later...

DM: What I did for that, I mean, I spoke to a friend of mine about it... I was away in the summer, talking to a friend of mine, Paul Greengrass, who's a director, and I was saying to him 'oh god, this thing...' and he said the one thing about political thrillers is just get the job right. Make sure you get the job... that's what they always get wrong... the job of being a politician. And so I got in touch with Hilary Bevan Jones who produced it, who put me in contact with so many people, and I met a guy called Kevin Baron and a guy called Fabian Hamilton who were both Labour politicians and they took me round the House and they told me all about what it was like to be a politician whose constituency was outside of London, so you come to Westminster and you're commuting all the time, and how tough that is. And, you know, you're always on Select Committees, you're reading all the time... and also you're trying to get up this greasy pole of politics. And then, fortuitously, I met Peter Mandelson, who said to me that I could have half an hour of his time, so have my questions ready. And I met him and I told him what the piece was and he said 'OK well listen, I can't talk to you, but just spend the day with me,' and he just, very generously with his time, just said 'just spend the day in the House with me,' and I just followed him around for a day.

JM: It turned out to be useful in a way you couldn't have imagined...

DM: Yeah, yeah, it was... later on, it became even more useful, but for this it was... he was massively generous with his time and it was brilliant, and it was just about the seduction of Westminster, how, in those walls, with the history of that place, that you can be taken out of everything that you've worked for to be a politician, how you can get seduced by the machine...

JM: There's that terrific speech that Michael Feast, who plays the spin-doctor character, has to you about the vanity of schoolboys; it's a big part of the job.

DM: You see it when you're in the House. I mean, one of the things, when you go to the House, that amazes you, is people on either bench, just trying to make a political speech, and on the other... opposition, there's these schoolboys just screaming at them: 'aaghh, sit down!' and you think 'hang on a minute, this isn't... this is politics ... this is where everything gets decided,' and the spoiling tactics that people have in politics where they put in four bills so that... this bill, they'll run out of time for seeing this bill, which is really important, all that was just bizarre. It was a real eye-opener to me, but just being there and seeing how it worked and how you could be seduced by Westminster itself...

JM: Was that highly discontinuous, the filming of that - I mean non-chronological?

DM: It was all over the place, no it was. I mean, as all filming is. But I think the other thing about State of Play was like Holding On [d. Adrian Shergold, 1997], which was the other thing I did with Tony Marchant, was that... the sense that multi-storey... multi-character storyline is so wonderful because you sort of meet people for breakfast or at lunch and 'how did your scene go?' 'Fantastic,' and they're on this completely different storyline to you... For the actor it's so wonderful because you want to just sit down and see how it comes together and then you look at the director who's pulling his hair out in the corner, he's like 'I don't know how this is going to go together,' but it's just fantastic that so many people that, you know, the BBC, have both those projects have put in so much time and effort for, you know, that's really brave television, both that and Holding On in order to tell that many stories over that time.

Actors-directors

JM: So you just refer to this figure in the corner who's pulling his hair out...

DM: What you mean the director?

JM: The director... obviously that's a development that had already begun before you made State of Play , and also played a bigger part in your life since. There are some of us who are directors because they discover they couldn't act, mentioning no names, but you obviously didn't have that problem. Why did you decide that you wanted to be a director as well as an actor?

DM: I'd always been aware... I really am so happy on a film set, I love being on a film set, it's the happiest I am, really, apart from my family life, I just love the process of being there. But I was very aware that as an actor you came into a process late. You'd get to the read-through and the room would be packed with people. And they'd been working on it for weeks and months before you'd even arrived. And they'd sort of be making decisions about your character, you know, where your house was and what car you drove and things like that. Sometimes that...

JM: Hang on...

DM: Sometimes that was great, and then other times you went 'my character would never live here, what the fuck's going on?' And then also I was aware that I'd leave a job early, that you get to the wrap party, you'd all be enjoying yourselves, and again the director was going 'I've still got months on this,' and then you'd see it months later and there'd be music on it or whatever... and it was frustrating me. It was just frustrating me in the fact that I did feel that I was coming in, doing my job, which now I love, but before I started directing, it was like I did feel that I was leaving something behind unfinished. And I was arriving late. And I got to a point as an actor where I was working with writers where... and directors where I was able to say 'I'm not sure whether this bit works and that bit works,' but in the end you just play, you just have to play and get on with your own job. But I was fascinated by the whole process, and I wanted to be involved in a piece of work where I came in earlyish ... not from a conceptual point of view ... but came in earlyish and saw the job right the way through...

JM: And very different pleasures, obviously, can you imagine combining them in the same piece of work, can you imagine directing yourself?

DM: That's the one thing I could never do, I think it's very... I've worked with actor/directors myself and I think it's very unfair on the other actors. It's also not how I work as an actor, I think I'm quite tunnel-visioned when, you know, once the camera starts rolling, you're in it, and I don't know how you would direct... I mean I just don't know who'd shout 'cut' for a start [laughter] ... half-way through the other actor's line... but I would find that difficult and I think there's very few people who can do it, when I see it, and I think, you know, I mean my favourite person who does it is John Cassavetes and I think Eastwood does it brilliantly, but I do think it's... they're people who have a great team around them. I don't think it's for me, that, I really couldn't do it.

The Deal

JM: Let's take a look at... you obviously played one politician with a secret, there, you played another politician with a different kind of a secret in this pretty extraordinary assignment, which also went out last year, which I'm sure everybody saw. I'm talking about The Deal [d. Stephen Frears, 2003]. Let's just take a look at a scene from that and then I'll ask you some more questions about that.

[Clip: The Deal]

JM: Another brilliant piece and, I'm allowed to say this, you are an inspired piece of casting I wish I'd thought of myself. I remember the first I knew about it was when you... the research that you were doing across all fields, as it were, you called me to get the low-down on Stephen Frears [laughter] ...

DM: ...I did, yeah...

JM: ... and I said 'what are you doing with him?' and you said 'I'm doing The Deal , I'm playing Gordon Brown' and I just exploded, I said 'that is such a brilliant piece of casting,' and it's a brilliant piece of casting, not because you have impersonated the man or would impersonate the man, it's just simply that there is... I think it plays incredibly to your strengths, that part. There's something so hidden and so withheld about the character, and yet at the same time you see into his heart, and I think it's a particularly good demonstration of what I was talking about earlier about the way you immerse yourself in a character and become the character. It's quite uncanny actually, sitting here talking to you, and then watching this, that close up, because this is somebody we all have a sense of, we have a sense of who he is, from television, and yet we have absolutely no idea about who he is because he withholds himself...

DM: He does, yes...

JM: ... you see this extraordinary uncomfortable grin on his face, whenever he's caught in any kind of public situation, and of course, no disrespect to Michael [Sheen], or to Tony Blair, but Brown's the part in that piece... it's a Shakespearean part, really, isn't it?

DM: Yeah, we always thought of it as a Shakespearean tale, really. You know, it's the man who would be king and his protégé taking over, I mean that's how we thought, but also the other thing about it was... I'd never done a piece that was so relevant, to the point where, you know, we were... during filming that scene... it took two days... overnight The Guardian had this piece in the paper about this fax that had gone from Mandelson to Brown, which he corrected, and sent back and said 'I'm not signing this, I'll sign it this way...' and what he... the little change he made was that it said that Tony would work towards social policy... which Gordon says there, you know... the health service and everything, and he corrected that and he put it down and he said he guarantees this...

JM: Yes, and that fax turned up while you were shooting...

DM: ... and that fax turned up, and you think, well, for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to have to remind the Labour leader to concentrate on social policy, is quite weird. But that's where Brown was coming from.

JM: Did you meet him?

DM: Never met him at all, no... and I've heard that he says he's never seen it so... but you very quickly had to... I mean the other thing that...

JM: Do you believe that?

DM: I don't mind, really. I don't care about that, really, because I think one of the things that we all, Stephen and Michael and Peter Morgan the writer, we all said, you know, 'this is as factual as we can make it, but it's fiction.' We weren't sitting in that restaurant... but, you know, it's corroborated by a lot of facts. And, of course, like with anything like this a writer will write it and the first person who'll go all over it is the lawyer, and so a lot... some of our restraints, writing restraints, were from the lawyers. But they came up with very weird... there was one scene where Michael and I are in a Select Committee... and because that's all in Hansard's or wherever, they... you had to say those words, and that was quite a restriction on the scene, but for things like this they didn't care about it, so it was fine.

JM: So there was no Hansard there, recording what was going on.

DM: No. Susan Tully was there though, but she didn't take notes obviously.

JM: Well it's an absolutely brilliant piece...

Marchant and Morrissey on the genesis of Passer By

JM: ... I want to move on now to the reason that all of you came here tonight, which is to see this amazing piece that Tony and David and David Snodin have produced, Passer By , and in a moment I'm going to give you a chance to ask any questions that you might have about it, because it's an extraordinarily thought-provoking and provocative piece, at a level that you don't usually see, I think... a film ... I don't know what to call it ... a two-parter, a piece that makes you ask questions of yourself at every moment that you're watching it. But before we get to that, I'd like to welcome Tony Marchant, the writer of this and other classics of television, up onto the stage with us... Tony Marchant. [applause]

I'm going to kind of hand this over to the two of you because the first thing I want to ask you about, each of you in turn, is just the process, well, start off with Tony, because... was the progenitor of this, obviously. Tell us a little bit about where the project started for you.

Tony Marchant: It was an idea, you know, just for the basic scenario of a man on a train seeing something like that, and what would he do? And obviously in my head I knew that he would do what he does... what Jimmy does there... and I took it to Laura Mackie at the BBC and it was just a story idea then and just...

JM: How does that sort of idea come to you?

TM: I've no idea, really, I think I just thought about stuff that happens... Writers are very good at making the small things that happen to them the most important things in the world, and then call it art, but I think that it was really just that bare idea, knowing that it was a very good idea because it was an everyman situation, and obviously what you're always trying to do with work is try to make the specific universal. That's why I thought that this spoke to all of us really because although, ostensibly, in some ways it's a story about a crisis of masculinity, it's bigger than that, it's about citizenship, you know, but you have to find a way of...

DM: It's about responsibility...

TM: Yeah, and it's about, like you said, whether there is such a thing as a social contact any more between us. Whether that's been eroded for a variety of reasons. And then I just worked it into a story, which was... because the way I work is I do very detailed treatments.

JM: Did you know that you were going to do it as a two-part piece or...

TM: I did, yeah, because I didn't think it had the legs for any more than that, and although I've written three-parters mainly and then obviously where I worked with David, we did Holding On , and that was eight. But it always felt like a two-parter to me, you just have an instinct for the right length.

JM: Now obviously one of the first decisions that you come to when you're thinking about something like this is, imagine, first, are there any actors that you have in mind when you're writing something, and secondly who you might get to direct it, or indeed to produce it, but because you have a strong relationship with David, I imagine that was a foregone ... David Snodin, I'm talking about ... that was a foregone conclusion?

TM: No well he... I think if you're a writer I think you should avoid trying to think about people who might be right for it, because then you end up writing for the actor's strengths and not the character's, and that's kind of, well, a reductive thing to do. But I think that if you're honest, you like to work with people that you admire and respect, but it also helps if they're your mate, to be honest, I think [laughter] . And that sounds kind of ridiculously... but, you know, it's true, you know, life's too short to waste time with people who are... you know, you could work with a talented wanker, or you could work with someone who's talented and is also a nice bloke, you know...

Bringing Morrissey on board

JM: So, in the situation with the occasion of tonight's evening, as it were, with David, you worked with David Morrissey, who is also an incredibly talented wanker [laughter] . How did you... you obviously knew him primarily as an actor, you've worked with more than once, haven't you?

TM: Yeah, we did, yeah.

JM: And you presumably were aware of his work as a director. Were you part of that decision with David?

TM: With David Snodin, absolutely, yeah, yeah, because, I mean in some ways this was... because David's talked before about the kind of work that he's known for and when we did, we did two shows together, one was called Into the Fire [d. Jane Howell, 1996], which was about a man well... quite complicated story, but David's part was a loss adjuster who had such a strong sense of moral right and wrong, he was so convinced of the rightness of his case, he was a character that couldn't bend, so he broke and then we did Holding On which was a much more complicated journey that the character went on. He was a man who had a monkey on his back and it was about his unravelling over the course of eight episodes and us finding out what his secret was, and in a man who had reinvented himself once and then, in the course of Holding On , reinventing himself a second time. And in terms again of what Passer By 's about, it's exactly that kind of journey, and I thought that it would be... David and I thought this is a man who knows this character's journey, you know, inside out, because he's played similar kinds of journeys, within albeit a different context.

JM: And also knows your writing very well.

TM: And knows my writing very well, yeah. And obviously what was really great about the collaborative process, like when we were sitting down talking about the script, was just that sense of a shorthand that came straight away.

JM: Was there much work done on the script after David became part of the process?

TM: Yeah, because I think David just read the first draft, and it ended up having probably five drafts and probably the bigger changes were... the most obvious one I remember is that the part of the wife, Siobhan Finneran, was that she was more judgmental earlier on in the story, which seemed wrong to us, and we kind of made her obviously more complicit, in a good way, because she wants to believe the best, and it makes it more painful when... the slow realisation that he's not the man she thought he was and the front he's presenting is not how it happened. And that was quite... one of the changes that we made. I also wanted, I think, to... I needed, to move from the first draft, for instance, the second and third drafts, to get a sense of Joe going out into the bigger wide world, so what you see in the second episode is that when he unravels he doesn't just unravel within the confines of four walls, you know, that he unravels at work, he unravels in a public place and he can't go home, so in that pub scene, for instance, you know, this was a man who was falling apart in public, as well as in private.

JM: It's a fantastic scene. David, tell me a little bit about what you felt about this when this came to you as a directing project. What attracted you?

DM: Well, you know, the first and foremost was the central character's descent really, into hell, really, because I think one of the things that happens to Joe, Jimmy's character is that he makes a decision, you know, he says it outside the police station, he says, you know 'my one night off... my one night off and I'm supposed to take some responsibility for someone I don't even know,' and of course he gets off the train and then he doesn't press emergency, and the longer he leaves that decision, the worse it gets for her, and that just attracted me in the sense that it's quite an empathetic journey, there is a sense of... and that's why the show ends in the way it does, in the sense that you put the man in a similar situation and you say to the audience, 'well, you've just watched two hours of this man having made this decision before, what are you going to do?' and I do think there's a sense that, particularly in London, but in any major city, that we see things all the time like this, and there is a thing called bystander syndrome, which is about, you know someone getting beaten up on a busy street, and the police come to investigate it and no one saw anything, and it's because everyone thinks the other person's going to do something about it. And I think that what happens to Joe is that he's not like that, he's not able to just go 'oh fuck it, actually'... he'd sink from inside...

JM: One of the things that interested me as a viewer that made it so incredibly compelling was that, you know, we're all confronted with moments like that every day of our life, particularly living in a city, where you're walking past somebody on the street you feel you should be helping, whatever it may be, and normally, we're allowed to sort of disconnect those moments, they happen, you move on from them, you don't think about them. But I thought it was an absolutely brilliant moment which I knew, being the writer that Tony is, would come back to haunt him, obviously the moment where he doesn't press the emergency button, he presses the information button, because he knows he's already fallen, and he knows he's already damned in a way for what he's done, and so he runs away from the damnation and continues to run away from the damnation all the way through the piece. It's fantastically compelling, I think, from that point of view, and immensely rewarding at the other end of the experience.

Joes's fall

I feel that it's only democratic now to ask you whether you have any questions you want to ask either David or Tony about what you've seen tonight, because I can't believe that it isn't a piece that speaks to everybody at some level in terms of the experiences they've had, so if anybody wants to ask a question of either of them, please go ahead and I will mediate.

DM: Oh a forest of hands [laughter] .

JM: Yes, go ahead.

Inaudible question

DM: I think one of the decisions we made early on was the fact that it had to be real for the... you know, you had to believe this couple were real, but also they couldn't be... they weren't going to be alienating people that you felt 'oh that's not me .' And you know, you weren't looking at people and going 'oh they don't live in my world, I don't believe that they live in my world.' But I thought, you know, they inhabit this place which is obviously outside of London, and there's just the sense of, you know, you get your cameraman in, you do it... there was a choice about whether you do it in a very real, grainy way... that just never came to me, that choice, I just felt that, you know, here are these people, and the casting was everything, once you have the casting, you just went with them, really, but it wasn't... I never wanted to make it a piece that alienated you more than what was happening in the story, so that, you know, you felt that these people were people you would know, you would like and they're in a dilemma that you felt could happen to you. I didn't want to put anything between you and the story really. That was important for me.

JM: Well there's a certain classicism to the storytelling as well, which actually you don't want to get in the way of by putting a kind of overlay, a kind of stylistic overlay, which keeps you away from what's happening.

TM: But it was aspirational, and even in a way that I hadn't actually put in the first draft, and this was a trick I learned from Adrian Shergold probably, which is that ... who's in the audience tonight ... about making... you know, what else is going on in their lives... they're also having an extension built, which is not a big deal, really, except that it tells you a lot about the fact that they're aspirational in a sort of modest way, but it's another reason for you to invest in them when things start falling apart, even the kind of brilliant little moment where even the plans just start to kind of flicker, you know, so you know that this is a family that...

DM: ... it took ages though... [laughter]

JM: But there's something very satisfying which, I imagine, comes through ... I'm not sure if it was there to begin with, because of the skill you had in the first place ... but the way in which everything starts to... the ideas in the story start to become borne out at so many levels. It's incredibly impressive, in the piece, the way Jimmy's character was constantly being confronted with the very fear that he couldn't articulate to himself. Almost every other circumstance he found himself in, there was somebody actually pointing him at exactly the thing he wanted to point himself away from.

DM: Well just like, you know, that... when he... he constantly, I felt, with the character, and we spoke about this a lot, he would constantly get to a point where you sort of felt that it was over, that he was fine, like, and the first point is where he's reading the papers, there's nothing in the papers, so I can get on with my life, and he sees the yellow sign, and then what he does is he confesses to his wife, you know, and then he thinks well I can move on now, I've passed it on, and then she says 'why aren't you going forward?' and you're thinking 'oh Jesus Christ...' and then he has to do that thing in the car where he says 'this is the truth, I saw someone, and I thought I don't want any part of this. It's late, I'm on my own, you know...' and she says... and she doesn't do that thing of ... this is where she becomes implicit ... and she doesn't do that thing of going 'oh my god, come here,' she says, 'listen, I don't want to hear that, my husband doesn't do those things, you get in there now and you tell them...' and from then on, I think that was the one point that we thought he could be rescued, that if his wife said, 'go in there and tell them everything, tell them that you shit yourself, you didn't want to do it, and you're sorry that you've spent that long coming forward,' but she doesn't, she says, 'I don't want to hear that, you get in there now and tell them, they're not going to want to hear any of that...' and so then he has this... he's got to carry that weight further on.

TM: It's not enough to do your duty, do your bit in a purely civic, sort of legal way, for him, which he could have done and then walked out but I think that it was his little idea that, ironically he was... a lesser character would have actually been able to have kind of shut the whole experience out, the fact that he actually... what's redeemable about him, and also, what gets him into so much trouble is the fact that he does go further than he need do, but his conscience is telling him to go that little bit further and obviously he gets in real trouble the further he goes, when he gets into the criminal justice system. So the irony is that a lesser man wouldn't have got in any of that kind of trouble, obviously, because he would have just walked away from the whole experience, but, you know, Jimmy's character's innate sense of honour or decency is the very thing that condemns him.

JM: Yes, yes... The scene in the courtroom where he's tied in knots by Peter Capaldi is a beautiful piece of writing, but it's also so beautifully set up. The very things that the person he is, is what makes him incapable at that moment.

DM: And it's the card that Peter plays in the scene, he plays the scene that a man like you wouldn't have done something like this...

TM: Before I wrote that scene, I spoke to a QC, and I said 'look, you know, in a situation like this, what's the best way that you would nail him,' and he said 'well by being really really sympathetic, by being completely benign and sympathetic to his plight, and then just undermining him in a way that wasn't confrontational but was quite insidious.'

JM: Well it worked superbly, dramatically, because you don't want to see the guy fail a second time... yes, go ahead.

Going full-circle

Inaudible question

TM: I don't think it undermines what went before, in fact, kind of just makes it more complicated in the sense that when Jimmy's character thanks the policeman for his intervention, you know, there are some interventions which are in the public interest, but morally, and privately, quite hard to justify, and I think that it's about actually... it just informs the complexity of the moral choices that we make. He thanks him for an intervention which he knows is immoral, but which has actually saved him, and in a way, you know, this is a drama about intervention and different kinds of intervention. And not all interventions are benign, and some interventions which are malign actually have a good effect. So I don't think it undermines what went before I just think it just makes the stew richer really.

JM: You didn't feel that the damage to that character was on a par with the damage to the Emily Bruni character maybe, did you? Or did you?

Inaudible reply from audience

TM: It's interesting that, you know, Jimmy's character's completely appalled by the fact that, in the act of carrying out that violence he's watched, and nobody intervenes again, so, you know, that's the thing that actually, completely takes the air out of him, completely winds him, which is the idea that actually he's gone full-circle, that he's now being watched in committing an act of violence, and nobody's doing anything...

DM: Actually I don't think there's a sense that Jimmy is, in any way thankful of that, I mean he does say thanks, but he does say to the guy, 'I just want to get this clear before you leave my house, I did hurt that guy, you know,' and the guy says 'yes, it's fine, don't worry about it,' and then his wife comes up and he says, 'it's just the rules of the club actually. I don't know why, but actually what I want is... I want to be with you .' And, you know, where we leave Jimmy is not in that scene, we leave him on the platform going 'what are you going to do now?' and so even though other people behave like he did, he's not accepting that as the behaviour for everybody, he's going 'OK, I got off because somebody didn't pursue it, but what do I do now? Here it is, it's happening to me again, and there's people on the platform going 'actually I don't want to get involved in that...' so we leave him with the dilemma, but we don't solve it really.

JM: Yes, at the back...

A: Do you have any advice for people wanting to get involved in television and film directing?

JM: You go first, David!

DM: How I got involved with it was I made short films, and there's a whole snobbery about short films ... it's like nobody ever watches them... now the technical side being so great, with HD, or DVD or whatever, DV cameras and stuff, I think the one advice I would give you, because I was sitting around, I was getting quite frustrated, not just acting, but I knew I wanted to direct and I thought 'how do I go about this?' and so I wrote a short film and did it. I just made sure that I got in the game, and actually it wasn't very good the first short film, but, you know, you get involved in the game, and I would say don't let anybody get in your way, so shorts is the prime example of how you start, because even in... even if you've got a budget of £1,000 and you've got two days' filming, you will have a microcosm of the same problems that you would have on a £45 million-pound set. It's always ... just start ... is the one thing. And then invite people, and then, you know, it is hard work, but just... it's about just getting into the game, and shorts happen to be the best way of doing that. Even they're projected on your telly at home for your mates, or whatever, it's just getting... doing it.

JM: I mean I would give exactly the same advice, I mean it's changed a lot since the days that I got in, it wasn't so easy to make... do your own projects then as it is now, because you had to make them on film really. Now the medium has become incredibly democratic and there's nothing to substitute for the calling card, as David says. When you say 'this is my work,' not only are you getting yourself experience which, as David says, the only way to learn how to do it is to do it, but also, you've got something you can say 'this is me, give me another chance,' or so on and so forth. I mean there are 101 routes into it but the only one that's really important is to do it... yes, anybody else?

TV at the cinema

A: I'd just like to say it's a pleasure to come to the cinema to see good television [laughter] ... I'd like to ask who thought up the shot of the son collecting the ball?

TM: I can't claim credit for it...

DM: We've got lots of outtakes of that where he can't trap it, which is fantastic [laughter] ... sign him for Wolves...

A: And how will the BBC promote this programme?

DM: Yes, that's a question I would like to ask [laughter]

JM: Who's going to answer that one, David?

DM: Very well, I think...

JM: Well, there'll be an enormous built-in audience for a Tony Marchant piece, for goodness sake.

TM: And Jimmy Nesbitt, his performance is superb and I think it's the best thing he's ever done.

DM: I think Jimmy... one of the things about having someone like Jimmy... he does have a profile, but what's wonderful about him as an actor, and how brave he is, is that he chooses to do something like this, whereas it would be very easy for him to, you know, carry on... but he does Bloody Sunday [d. Paul Greengrass, 2002], he does this, you know it's a really brave choice for somebody who is a household name, and seen as a safe person to let into your living room, to choose a subject matter like this, I mean, I think he delivers ten-fold for us.

JM: He does it magnificently, there's absolutely no question about it. It's particularly nice to see because one does get the impression sometimes, it wasn't so much true when you started, David, that... you know, often nowadays, the pieces you do are going to get made only if they're made with a handful of actors, not always people that people recognise. It's amazing how that's become true of television, it's always been true of movies, of course, but it's becoming increasingly true of television, rather depressingly so, not in this case, I hasten to add, but what do you feel about that?

DM: I agree with that on one side, but then, you know, there's this other thing about telly and people talking about the 'good old days' of telly, and I do think there is... some drama is actor drive, but then there's so much of it around at the moment that you just think this is... I think the last year on British telly has been a great one for drama, I think things like Second Coming [d. Adrian Shergold], you know, and stuff like that, has been brilliant. And I think it has been a high quality and it's, you know, I think we can get a little bit snobby about actors like that who drive things forward, but they're only... when you notice them, that's when it's bad, and actually there's a lot of good drama out there with actors in it who you know from more popular stuff, one would say, and actually you don't notice it's them because they're just... or you don't notice that that's why they're there, because they're good actors, they're there for a reason.

TM: Interestingly enough, the one genre of drama where you can cast unknowns is in drama-docs. And obviously, they depend, for their legitimacy, on you not being able to say 'oh that's so-and-so from Emmerdale and that's so-and-so from Holby City '. Although I've got very mixed feelings about drama-docs, the genre anyway, you know, you have to acknowledge that that is one area where you can use, you know, actors who aren't household names or household faces.

DM: It's tough though because you do, you know, working as we all are now in the industry, there is those stories of the 'good old days' that come through all the time and I just can't imagine there was ever a time where directors and producers sat around and gone 'you know, we've got far too much money to make this thing, and what are we going to do with that extra week they've given us?' Do you know what I mean? It must... I know that, you know, the single play and all that are sadly missed, but I do think this last year sort of does fly in the face of that.

JM: Yes, yes... anybody else got any questions they'd like to ask?

TM: Marvellous. Great.

DM: Can we go now? What time does the bar close?

JM: If at least everybody would like to join me in congratulating Tony and David and David Snodin, on an absolutely brilliant piece of work, which we'll be hearing about, I'm sure, not only when it's broadcast, but long afterwards, an absolutely terrific piece, so if you'll express your appreciation...

[applause]

JM: Thank you. Goodnight

DM: Thank you.