Morten Tyldum Quotes

I loved Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton's 'Inside No 9.' The way that they constrained each episode to a single location, then tasked themselves with including completely new characters every week, within a single half-hour.

Research is the historical novelist's map, constraint, and purest energy.

I've been told by people who write historical novels that you just sort of write the emotional truth first, the story at the core, and then you go back and research it at the end.

The difference between film and TV is the pace. You don't have the leisure of time in television.

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've done a number of things based on real people or true stories or based on books, and I'm a great believer that you have to be true to the script.

I became fascinated by the fact that people write to give away rather than write to be read. It's the difference between playwrights and novelists.

I really think the biopic thing so rarely works, because people's lives don't have a dramatic shape that can be satisfying.

My only responsibility as a playwright and a storyteller is to give you the time of your life in the theatre. I just happen to think that with Hamilton's story, sticking close to the facts helps me. All the most interesting things in the show happened.

I'm sure that everything you do contributes to the sort of novel that you write. A lot of actors have an understanding of drama and a good ear for dialogue and also the rhythm of speech. Similarly, my 16 years in radio drama has influenced me. You only have 45 minutes, or 7,000 words, to tell a story, so every scene has to have a point.

I tend to research as I write so that the narrative can take priority, which is important for a piece of fiction, I think, finding out facts as and when I need to.

If you gather a lot of stuff, then you write it, write in scenes with dialogue. Somewhere in the middle, rising from all this research like strong metal towers, is your opinions.

I enjoy thinking myself into other times and places. I don't like some of the conventions of the 'historical novel', but I think there's a way of doing it that has a lot of merit.

My first two novels were set in the past, and that freed me up in a lot of ways; it allowed me to find my way into my story and my characters through research.

The difficulty with telling stories about real people is you have to find a way of mixing yourself into the matter.

I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

You have 22 episodes to start from zero to hero; you can really take a nice, big, long arc. In a film, it's tough to do that - you only have 90 minutes.

If you don't generate tension in the film to begin with... you can't really make a purse out of a sow's ear, you know.

It's much better to write a book and stick to the research - that's history. In cinema, emotional truth and psychological truth is much more important.

As a writer, I can't be a heroic sword fighter like General Dumas, but I can rescue someone who's been taken out of history by using my writing to bring them back.

The short form, for those people who can master it - and I am by no means one of them - it is very admirable, because it is really hard to tell stories that can stick with the audience and still be between 5 and 30 minutes long. I think it's a real challenge.

I love to be able to tell a whole story in three-and-half minutes.

Drawing on real life is what novelists do. It's not the same as reconstructing real life, which is what historians do.

Films have to find a way to compress many anecdotes into one, or many events into one. Otherwise there is no way to tell it in two and a half hours.

When you do enough research, the story almost writes itself. Lines of development spring loose and you'll have choices galore.