Mark Bridges Quotes

Sometimes you have a period piece where you have to research around it but, if the writers have done their homework well enough, the information is all in the script.

When you are playing somebody who did exist, and there is good source material on them, whether it is a biography or archives or experts, you would be stupid not to delve into them. But there is a point in the process where you leave the books alone, and instead, you focus on the script and creating your version.

With period dramas, it's very easy to get excited because I love to do them. I'm a history nut and I love to immerse myself in the research.

I often tell people who want to write historical fiction: don't read all that much about the period you're writing about; read things from the period that you're writing about. There's a tendency to stoke up on a lot of biography and a lot of history, and not to actually get back to the original sources.

You don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies.

I love being in the archives, traveling, sitting in dusty places and looking at books with brittle pages. I love reading biographies and researching, to make myself informed about whatever political or historical time I'm writing about. From there, a lot of the emotional truths about my characters emerge.

I think that when you're making a story... that's based on somebody, the filmmaker has his duty to do his research.

History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.

For 'The Journal of Finn Reardon,' I traveled to New York City and walked the streets where Finn and his friends would have lived, worked, and played. I visited the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street and toured an actual flat in which families like Finn's might have lived.

A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible.

I love history. I love art. I like to mix it all together, but in the end it somehow has to all make sense.

I'm always nervous taking on a period role because it's difficult to research - you can't observe it, go out and see it. But it's satisfying because eventually you think, 'I got there.'

I don't separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they're all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past.

Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does. I'm always looking for source material.

I've been reading a lot of books on history, and watching a lot of educational TV. Wikipedia too, even though it is not reliable.

For me, the challenge of a period film is that, unlike a contemporary film where the character can be very free-form when it comes to the acting, there's a burden to acting in a period film because you have to stay within the character's historical background and the gestures of certain periods.

I always try to find a story in the margins of history, but I don't like to do too much that's improbable.

To be a good researcher is to be a good detective, and I enjoy ferreting out tidbits of information. For a diary book like 'A Coal Miner's Bride,' newspapers come in handy for small everyday details such as weather reports.

When I'm working on historical books, I'm much more organized. I usually read about 100 books to get the depth of knowledge I need.

It's hard when you're doing a film based on a true story to really figure out what all those relationships were.

I once did an event with Ian Rankin where he said he didn't really need to do much background research because his books are set in the present, and I just thought: 'You lucky, lucky beast!' because as a historical novelist, I live constantly on the edge of wondering whether tissues had been invented.

Films are always different from books.

History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.

I think any period in history can be adapted into interesting fiction, as long as you approach the actual history with respect.

With 'The Tudors,' I had a huge amount of material, I mean so many books and so much stuff about what they really said. So, in a way it was kind of trying to strip it out and find the stories inside all this material.