MN: Well, what happened to me is that I very quickly became in all phases of my working life I became easily bored. And there was a man who used to run the drama department at one of the English companies called Yorkshire Television [ITV Yorkshire], who was a wicked old bastard called Peter Wills [PH], and he used to call me Flibberty. He was a gentleman and had spent four years of the war in prison camp, and he said, "There are only three kinds of people. There were the escapers, there were the collaborators and there were the theatricals. And I was a theatrical." And he would call me Flibberty because that stood for flibbertigibbet because I could never settle. And so I did--had this very fruitful chunk of career at the BBC where I got into a lot of very good, new writing and enjoyed it. And then a woman whom we both knew, a Casting Director in London called Mary Selway, phoned me up one day, and I said, "Hello. You're very famous, but I don't know you." And she said, "No, I know that. But you're going to have to pretend that you do. Are you available between such and such, and such and such?" And I said, "Yeah. I think so." And she said, "Right. Come to the Dorchester this afternoon, and you'll meet a Producer. He's American; he's rough and tough and possibly a little vulgar. And he's got a show, and he's just fired his Director and he needs another one really quick. You would have about four weeks to get into it." And I said, "Cor blimey." She said, "Can you read it by three o'clock this afternoon?" I said, "Yeah, probably, yeah." And she sent along THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK, which was written by an American Writer--gay American Writer called, I think, Bill Bast [William Bast], who I was very fond of. And so I read it, and I went along and she said, "What you've got to do is to pretend you know me." So she gave me a zonking great kiss, and there was Norman and he started to growl at me, which is something that continued for weeks and weeks. [INT: Which Norman was this?] What's that? [INT: Who, which Norman?] His name was Norman… I've got it written down here. I have to look. [INT: Sorry.] He's a, well he's a deal in my life, and Norman… Norman Rosemont, his name was. I suspect he's dead now, but he used to do particularly French classic 19th century novels for NBC as NBC specials. And they spent a lot of money. And this was THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK. This was Richard Chamberlain, and Ralph Richardson, and Jenny Agutter and...

MN: Ah, so, it [THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK] a great big heavyweight Cast, and they were going to shoot it on location in France. And god help me, the, I was going to get David Lean's Crew, and indeed did get David Lean's Crew. I got Freddie Young and everything attached to it. He's a mean old bastard. He hated me because I talked to him about Hungarian films that he'd never seen. And he just thought I was a clever asshole. "You've seen a lot of films haven't you?" And so Norman [Norman Rosemont] was in such dire straits that he hired me. And I phoned my Agent, and I said, "Look, honestly Dunkar [PH] I don't know whether, I mean, it's a bit lush. It's a bit, you know… it's a bit entertaining, actually, Dunk." He said, "Don't worry about it. We'll turn it down, and you can go on doing THIRTY-MINUTE theatre until you drop off the twig." And I said, "I'll do it." And so off I went. And it was David Lean's Crew: His designer, his First Assistant, his Cameraman, his Costume Designer, all of these people. And they were sort of terrifying. But you are either gonna collapse under that or you won't, and so I didn't. [INT: How did you find the strength?] The what? [INT: The strength to do it?] I found the strength because I can't remember how long the schedule was. It was very, very quick. It was about 30 days. We had these huge things, and these huge scenes, balls, and duels.

MN: And Pat McGoohan [Patrick McGoohan] was a very…he's a terrific drunk, a big, big, big drinker. And you could always tell 'cause he'd start to sweat. And he didn't like me because he couldn't break me [on the set of THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK], and he tried. He tried to put a stuntman over a cliff. He was an absolutely brilliant sword fighter, and we set this fight up and then he attacked the stunt man at double the speed. He did all the moves, but he did them double the speed that we had rehearsed. And this guy got right to the edge of the cliff before we kind of hauled him back. And he, when he saw that he wasn't going to, he wasn’t going to break me, he decided that what he'd do is to put me behind schedule, 'cause he knew that for Norman [Norman Rosemont], that would be the ultimate crime. And he did it by saying that he wanted his cuffs, his lace, his cuffs and the front of his shirt and all that, he wanted them ironed between every take. Not between every shot, but between every take because he sweated a lot. And so Rosemont came storming in one morning and said, "Have you seen the time? You know where you are?" I said, "Yes, I do, Norman, yes. Well perhaps you might go and have a word with Mr. McGoohan about that because this is what is happening. Which you would know, Norman, were you not in Paris buying your antiques." And I described to him, and I said, "Look, just sit in the chair that's got your name on it, all right? Just for half an hour, watch us do a shot." And he did and he said, "Yeah, okay." And he went off into McGoohan's caravan, which is parked in the yard of this chateaux, and it was like sort of Disney cartoon. It went… And he then came out very red in the face. And I said, "So what did he say, Norman? Tell me." And he said, "He said you can fuck off out of here or I'm not gonna say another word of this awful script of yours." And I said, "And what do you intend to do, Norman?" He said, "Well, I'm going to take his advice, and I shall fuck off back to Paris and you can deal with him." Oh, it was… I tell you, it was like starting all over again. It was just great. And I'm sure it seemed awful at the time, but it wasn't. It's very, it's flowery in my memory, you know?

MN: And from there [UK] I came out here [US], and scored myself an Agent. Had the wit to turn down one film which was a snake on a plane movie, always a good one to turn down I think, but not the wit to turn down the other one. So I did the other one, and it was pretty terrible. It was utterly terrible. [INT: Which was that?] It was called THE AWAKENING. And it was Chuck Heston [Charlton Heston], whom I adored. I absolutely loved Chuck. He's a great big, "I thought I was really good in that take, Mike." He would come to all the rushes. He was at rushes every day. [INT: That's great.] And he said, "There's one thing you can always trust in me, I will always hit my, the key and I'll always hit my mark." And I looked up and I caught the focus puller's eye and he went… And he was sweet, and I enjoyed him very much. [INT: Well what's--] But it was miserable in the sense that it got recut by a very, very nice man [Monte Hellman].

MN: Yes. And he [Monte Hellman] was very, very, very nice and kind, but I'd had enough of here after that [THE AWAKENING]. [INT: Here being the United States?] Yes. Because it was a different system and I couldn't hack it. And so then up came this thing, this New Zealand film [BAD BLOOD], which was important because it was going to be something where I could do exactly what I set out to do. I was 12,000 miles from anywhere. You know, nobody--communications were bad. We were in the boondocks. And if I said, "It's gonna be like that," then it could be like that. And I got a lot of dirty water out of my head with that. And I was very, and I am very proud of it. It was about a farmer who goes mad and starts to kill his neighbors. And what the response to that is from people who believe that they, like New Zealanders do, that they can cope with anything. And then you chuck 'em something that they can't cope with at all and-- [INT: Who were your partners in all this? Who were the Actors and whatever?] The chief Actor was a marvelous Australian Actor called Jack Thompson who was SUNDAY TOO FAR AWAY. He was in BREAKER MORANT. [INT: He’s great.] He was big Australian Actor. And the Writer-Producer was a man called Andrew Brown, who died of AIDS, silly sod. He needn't have. He died of AIDS at a point where if you didn't do certain things, you didn't get AIDS. And it was, simply it was known. It was after the first panic. But he always lived on the edge, Andrew, and this one got him. But it was… I was proud of it because it was psychologically real, and it absolutely followed through. It didn't have to satisfy any preordained form of what entertainment might be. You could simply make it for what the story demanded it was, and the characters demanded it should be. And it was this little bush tragedy, which was elegant and looked an absolute bomb and came from somewhere unthinkably unexplored. So I had a very good time doing that, and then after that came DANCE WITH A STRANGER. I sort of learned a lot with that movie that I then put into DANCE WITH A STRANGER, a lot of how to do things. [INT: Yeah, it gave you a sense of freedom, the experience of BAD BLOOD, and freedom to trust yourself.]

INT: So what was, what were the challenges of DANCE WITH A STRANGER, which is a beautiful film? 

MN: The script was very good, and I had a wonderful relationship with Shelagh Delaney, who was a curious, eccentric, theatre Writer, working class girl from Salford [Manchester], rather handsome. [INT: Calm down, Michael.] Sorry. And she had this… so she was writing a story about a bad girl. And we both knew that there would have been no, nothing tragic would have happened if she had been prepared to knuckle under. [INT: In life, yeah?] Yes. Yes. But she was not prepared to do that, not least because she was very much like my wife and was led by--that's why I was smiling, was led by her mouth. And she could not forgo a smart, effective, very intelligent and wounding response to a particular… and so she was known as trouble. And she was a whore, she ran these sleazy little nightclubs immediately after the war and she fell for somebody whom she actually misread as a gentleman. He wasn't really a gentleman. He was, he came from stockbroking folk. He was actually not unlike Cameron [David Cameron], same sort of milieu, you know? And we couldn't cast it. But what Shelagh had, this is what was important, what Shelagh had was she had this woman's voice. She absolutely got her voice. She got that kind of whiplash tongue, and she got her only being happy when she's on the thinnest of social ice. “Go on then, watch me fall through.” And she had that in spades, it was wonderful. Then, of course, I started to bugger about with the script, and then looked at it a week later and thought, I have utterly damaged this thing. And I put it all back the way it was. Actually, the problem with Shelagh was that she wrote for the theatre and not for the movies. So what we did, really, was to sort of tickle her theatre script into a movie script. But the voice I restored because I had spoiled it. And we found Miranda [Miranda Richardson], after a very great deal of trouble. Everybody wanted me to cast this promising young actress and that promising young actress and this one that they had heard of on a television series and so on, and so on and so on. And I couldn't do it. It wasn't there. Now that I knew what the voice was I couldn't depart from that. And we were in complete despair, and somebody said, "There's this girl at a rep," again a rep, "in Lancashire," again Lancashire, "who's supposed to be very good." And I said, "Bring her down." And in she came to a little Casting Director's office in the middle of SoHo. And as she came in, a police car was going past outside going be-baa, be-baa, be-baa, and she went tripping across the room and said, "Oh, I like a bit of trouble." And I thought, right. [INT: This was Miranda Richardson?] That was Miranda.

MN: And then we cast [for DANCE WITH A STRANGER], very much not sensibly we didn't cast… oh gosh, who's the one who takes three years to say no? Oh, the most famous 50-year-old Actor there is now. It’ll come… Daniel Day-Lewis, who gave a blistering reading of it. It was absolutely marvelous. But what the distributors wanted was something to hang their hats on, and they couldn't hang their hat on Miranda. She'd never, you know, she'd only been in one TV sitcom. Apart from that, she was doing a rep in Lancaster. And there was Rupert, and Rupert and I fought about the interpretation of character. [INT: This is Rupert Everett.] Sorry? [Rupert Everett.] Yup. And he thought, probably with a great deal of justice on his side, that I was a complete twat. He said, "Oh, he's so boring, so BBC." Entirely right. And finally he gave a performance because of his--it's a real movie lesson, because he is so stunningly beautiful. And if you can't get 'em beautiful in the movies, then you need your head testing, you know? And I had overlooked that factor and shouldn't have. [INT: When did you realize the film was gonna work?] First set of rushes. [INT: Really?] Yeah. She was so good.

INT: You talk about finding a voice. Is that something that happens with every piece of casting in--[MN: A bit.]--some degree or other? [MN: A bit. Yeah.] How do you define it? 

MN: Happened with Jack, Jack Thompson. Happened with… happened with Al... [INT: Pacino.] Pacino [Al Pacino]. [INT: Do you mean it literally? Do you get them to read the script or is it just the way they deal with you?] Sometimes literally. Sometimes it's a metaphor. Al was very interesting because Al… it was obviously such a, here I was making an anti-mob movie [DONNIE BRASCO]. It was not the kind of Venetian glass and old velvet that Coppola [Francis Ford Coppola] did with THE GODFATHER. It was the sort of anti-romantic mob movie. And Al, who absolutely should have played it because he was Michael [Michael Corleone], he was the icon of the mob. And one of 'em said to me--'cause I got to know several mobsters really quite well, they're very entertaining people. And he said, "We all think we're Michael. We all think we have ice water in our veins, that we're calm and far seeing, and we're not. We're all Sonny [Sonny Corleone], and we get shot to bits at the beginning of the freeway." And he's absolutely right. And Al was, when we were casting that film, Al was in the middle of a sort of big Al phase where he needed to play everything very large. And I felt that that was absolutely not what the character wanted, although Al was absolutely the man to play it. And I didn't know how… I still wouldn't, know how to say to one of the greatest Actors in the world, "You're over the top." I wouldn't know what to say. And so what we did at his suggestion, and Al's a very clever man, who knows what Al knew. We table read it, and table read it, and table read it. And each time you’d do the same little kind of eyedropper note about the scale of the thing and all that kind of stuff. And then came the day when the props people, we were in rehearsal, we ought to talk about rehearsal. [INT: We will.] The props people brought in, the way they do, a tray of about 50 or 60 pairs of glasses for the character, and Al went through 'em and without a moment's hesitation picked out one pair which is the pair that he wore throughout the whole show, which made him look like a demented wasp. They had kind gold, fake gold accouterments and whatnot. And made him look very slightly boss-eyed. And they were a great, great comic coup.

INT: But how did that serve your agenda to bring him [Al Pacino] down, that choice of spectacles [for DONNIE BRASCO]? 

MN: Well 'cause he's working in detail, working in tiny detail, you know. And if he can choose those glasses and if he knows what the chemistry behind those glasses is gonna be on the screen--and of course he did--it was gonna be all right. I had no idea that it was gonna be all right. It took me weeks to find out that it was gonna be all right, but what he enjoyed himself… god he ripped me a new asshole one day. I never loved him so much as when he did that. We did a shot where it was all very elegant. It was on a crane and the whole gang was in their kind of their hideaway, and they were talking about the money that they ought to have made but didn't make and what the threat to the gang was and how they needed to make more money. And the camera went round and round and it was very elegant. And he stood up at the end of the shot and said, "You gonna do a close-up?" And I said, "No, you see, Al, I thought probably that I wouldn't do that, because you see, the thing about the shot is..." And he walked off the set. And Joe Reidy [Joseph P. Reidy] said, "Mike?" [INT: Boy.] And in I went and he screamed at me for 10 minutes, quite legitimately. What was I thinking? It would have taken me 20 minutes to do the close-up, and I need never have used it. Oh Lordy, but he's sort of sweet. [INT: Reidy is very famous.] What's that? [INT: Reidy is a very famous AD [Assistant Director].] Yes, I know. I know. Yeah. [INT: Is he terrific?] Yes, he is. He's wise and he's wise and he is, he's seen absolutely everything, and he's courageous and he gets on your wavelength. And I recently found another just like that, which was wonderful. It's marvelous when you find somebody. [INT: Who is it?] Yeah. Yeah. [INT: Who?]

INT: You talk about talking Actors down and you mentioned rehearsal. So how much does rehearsal and what sort of rehearsals do you do to prepare for a movie? 

MN: Well, I would do as much as I possibly could. And what amuses me is to say to the Producer and the Line Producer and whatnot that I want three weeks rehearsal and watch their faces go… Because if you say three weeks the chances are that you'll get 10 days. And it's enormously worth--well, you know. Of course it's worth having because they get to… there's that awful thing on day one if you don't have rehearsal where everybody's shoulders are up around their ears; they're so nervous. They can't commit to anything because nobody's committing to them. And if what you do is--it doesn't have to be rehearsal worth the name. It can simply be sitting round a table reading, and reading, and reading and reading. And everybody can talk. You don't have to--you know, the one thing you can't do is leave the room. But you don't make that a condition. It simply lets them know what the muscles in the writing are. So in the end it comes back to the writing. And I've always had ill luck when I haven't rehearsed and good luck when I have.

INT: And do you use different ways to rehearse depending on the people in front of you and the material, or do you have a sort of set pattern for it? 

MN: Not really. Not really. That's the sort of theatre way of doing things perhaps. I don't know. I never did any… Well, I did one theatre job. It was terrible. No, it’s simply… you know, when we were little and first starting off, sometimes you would find, I'm sure it happened to you, that Actors would say, "Oh, I don't need to say that. I can do that with a look." Or, "You know, somehow I think if I sort of repeated... no, I don't need to say that." And the answer to that, which as one grew a little older and more courageous you would actually say to them is, “Very clever people wrote that line for a very good reason. Say the fucking thing. All right? Don't mess with me. If I want to cut it, we may cut it. But otherwise...” And you only have to say that a couple of times and-- [INT: And they get the message.]--the word goes round. So...

INT: So what about working with Writers? Is that something that's very important? Do you do a lot of it? 

MN: Yes. I do. [INT: Dare you...] I think we all do. [INT: I mean are you good at making suggestions and--] I don't know. I'll never know. There are people with whom I have wonderful relationships, Writers. I adored the guy who wrote my HARRY POTTER [HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE]. [INT: Steve [Steve Kloves]...] What? [INT: Steve?] Oh, THE FABULOUS BAKER BOYS. And he used to email me stuff overnight. And so we had a regular kind of catch up on what I'd read. And if I started by laughing, he knew we were okay. And he's a wonderful comic Writer. He's a marvelous comic writer. Yeah. [INT: So it's a part of the process you enjoy?] Yes. It may well be that as far as a Writer is concerned, it's a part of a process that's a pain in the ass for them, because there's got to be a big thing for them where what they will say is, "Yes, I know. Yes, I know." [INT: But if they are smart they know they have to educate us.] Yes. But of course the relationship that I have with the two Writers that I'm working with at the moment is very good, and I enjoy them very much, and I think they've written a very, very good script. And there is something in the muscles of the trade at the minute that would set us at odds. [INT: What do you mean?] Why is the senior executive at Sony not allowing me on the notes call on the draft, which I prepared, of the cut, which I prepared with them for her approval? What on earth is that about? What-- [INT: It's a--] --foolishness. [INT: --territorial nonsense.] Sorry? [INT: It's territorial nonsense.] Yes, it is. [INT: People protecting their backsides.] It is both of those things, yes. What they think, you know. [INT: And this is new, this kind of organizational involvement in script, corporate invasion of the script is something that's happened over the last decade.] As far as I'm concerned, darling, it's happened over, since Christmas. [INT: Yeah. But I mean generally throughout the industry. And it's very alarming.] And I don't quite know where it comes from. If it's a kind of form of "I could do that," then be damned to it. If it's keeping the workforce quiet by dribbling them out a little influence here and there, "Do tell us what you think." Then be damned to that too. Because the people that you and I worked for, the people who were the Producers, were either czars in a way or very, very subtle people and never had to… The size of a meeting in a TV show I found quite extraordinary. Probably between 30 and 40 people in a room. All with something to say. Probably all with, if it were ever unleashed, with an axe to grind. [INT: That's a tone meeting, they like to call it.] That's it.

INT: Just go back to something. When you did the, you know, the Patrick McGoohan thing, THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK, and you left it and you said, "I’m fed up with America. I've had enough of this," and then you found inspiration... 

MN: It wasn't that show that did it. What did it was THE AWAKENING. [INT: THE AWAKENING.] Which was specifically, partly at any rate, to do with being recut. [INT: But then you decided to come back to America in a big way. So what went through your mind? How could you cast away the shadow of bad experiences and come back here to work?] 'Cause there was the most wonderful woman who held my hand, called Betsy Beers. And she's now a very big deal executive at ABC I think. But after I made FOUR WEDDINGS [FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL], there was a happy time when it was a good thing to be a Director. And if you had a hit, then you had a little company financed for you, and I had a little company financed for me. And she was the script executive that we were immensely fortunate to find. And she and I, we just got on very well. And she found DONNIE BRASCO at the back of a shelf at the top of the… and it had been there for 10 years. You cold tell, I know Steve had had a pass on it. Lots and lots of people had and it wasn't picked up in the end because of, oh, damn it, a mob movie by Scorsese... [INT: GOODFELLAS?] GOODFELLAS. GOODFELLAS frightened 'em off. We can't do another GOODFELLAS. And we simply made a film, which was a little bit after GOODFELLAS, but flew at a significantly lower level. [INT: Yeah. It was a terrific movie, terrific.] Well it-- [INT: But doing--] --was lucky.

INT: But what we've missed out in all this is the movie that put you into the big time, which was the unlikely FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL. [MN: Yep.] Well tell us the narrative of that experience and were you surprised by how it turned-- 

MN: Totally. We were all absolutely gob smacked. I remember, you remember the awfulness of the public screening, right? The test screening. And what you always do is, you always leave the dub too late so that you're dubbing the blasted thing at five o'clock in the morning on the day that you're going to, by 11 o'clock, schlep down to the airport to fly out here to, and I remember sitting there at five o'clock in the morning in the dubbing theatre thinking this is the most pedestrian piece of straight line storytelling, and then and then and then and then, that I think I have ever seen. And really, I should take up another form of employment. What could I do? And we took it to the little, one of the little theatres in Santa Monica. And within the first 30, 40 seconds, somebody on the bottom left of the auditorium laughed at some daft piece of business that James [James Fleet] whatnot did and they didn't stop. It was just a piece of utter luck, utter luck. And it came because lots of rather posh people had turned it down, I think. Nobody has ever told me and I... [INT: You mean Directors, not Actors, you're talking about?] Yes, Directors. No, the Actor was, I was more responsible about for that. You know, a lot of people would say that they cast Hugh Grant. I would say that I cast Hugh Grant because what I said was, "I know he's gone to Australia to make another movie because we've got no money. What we should do is wait for him." And they said, "Why?" And I said, "Because it's a word script and the only person who can handle the words, who can speak the words cleanly in the mouth, is Hugh. That we know because we've interviewed everybody else. You know, we've read everybody else." And it was true. And that, there was a scene which, the last scene in the movie where they pledge eternal troth to one another. And it was under fire brigade rain where, you know, it comes down in chunks the size of your thumb. And so it was gonna have to, go just, unrescuable. And I thought, we will be, because of the way Hugh was playing it, that kind of “Yeah, [MIMICS HUGH GRANT],” we're gonna be at this for weeks. And he did it in two takes, because he rehearses and rehearses and rehearses and rehearses. He's a very smart man. He's a very sweet man. And I misjudged his technique and his technique is faultless. [INT: And the rest of the Cast, they were all great.] Yes, they were.

INT: Was that what you would call luck or did you really work them [Cast] when you auditioned them [for FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL]? 

MN: Well, we had, marvelous Casting Director, who took us into untrodden paths sometimes. Little girl who died who played Scarlett [Charlotte Coleman], she was a sort of, a very odd, anarchic person. But was, you know, in her turn, was absolutely brilliant. And then there was a kind of, I think people already understood that Kristin Scott Thomas was as she was and was a number worth paying attention to. But I don't think that she had ever come into her own territory. And she did with that film. [INT: How did you manage that? Through rehearsals or was it a, she picked up an instinct?] We rehearsed quite a lot. We had them, it was an ensemble and we had them all there and we did solid of 10 days worth of rehearsal. And Richard [Richard Curtis] was around a lot and he very properly said, "I will never write anything, I will never rewrite anything for the script that is not in the form of a joke. It will be jokes." [INT: What did you make of that?] You show me mine, I'll show you yours. He's okay, Richard. Clever.

INT: I mean how is it shooting a comedy? I mean how do you know; you can't be laughing the whole time. I mean in… [MN: Oh no.] I mean no, no, but shooting is such a pedestrian activity sometimes. [MN: Indeed.] How the hell do you keep, as a Director, the kind of the freshness of the humor? 

MN: Well Hugh hated me. He called me Strindberg. "Oh, what does Strindberg think then?" Because, the only thing I ever said was, "It's not real enough." I was a dour, kind of donkey figure in the corner of the room saying, "Oh, I don't know." That's how I kept that straight. I thought that there was a, and I still do, I didn't necessarily think of it as a comedy. I know Richard [Richard Curtis] said, "I will only write in the form of a joke," but he probably said that after Hugh had complained to him, "Do you think this bloke has got one shred of humor in him?" [INT: This is you?] Which is me. And I'm sure that Richard would have said, "Um, uh..." But there was a proper psychological story to be told there. And it's not accidental that the idea of the commitment-phobe arrived with that film. The person who can't make a commitment. And that was a, it was a big thing for boys. It was a big thing for girls to deal with or sometimes for girls. It had a marvelous little bit of irony in it, which is actually in the movie. The line is in the movie about all this time we've been badgering ourselves about were we falling love and what was love worth and this and that and the other where we were being presented with an utterly successful loving relationship, it was just it was between two men. And there were… and so finally, at the end of it all, when in Richard's wonderful, witty way, Hugh actually says, "I wonder whether you could consider not marrying me?" You know, there's a, the whole movie's built up to that. It's the last line of the film, and it's built up to that. And so I thought it was real. I didn't think, I’m not fitted, I'm not able to make a straight kind of comedy. [INT: So it hit some zeitgeist in society anyway you think?] Yes. [INT: About commitment?] And I think it was about commitment. But it was also about friends. Because if you are lonely and wish to be successful emotionally and sexually and can't be, you can at least comfort yourself with the idea that you've got some good friends, a good friend. And what you were watching in that film was a group of friends, simply, so the audience could feel fulfilled. [INT: It was a wonderful success for you. You got--] Completely unlooked for. [INT: --the David Lean Award [BAFTA] for that one wasn't it?] Was it? I think so. I can't remember. Yes. [INT: And it made a fortune.] Yes. Yes. Absolute fortune. Well, hooray, hooray, hooray. I remember when the same happened to you. [INT: Yeah. Not quite as big as that, but…]

INT: FOUR WEDDINGS [FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL] is one of the great comedies. Which other… was there any work of another comedy Director that you looked at, that you used as a template for your own work? 

MN: In comedy? [INT: Yeah.] Not really. I mean everybody carries Billy Wilder around with them. Everybody carries that wonderful English Director who died out here, BILLY LIAR, [INT: Schlesinger [John Schlesinger].] What? [INT: Schlesinger.] Schlesinger, who I thought was the bee's knees. I loved Schlesinger. And, you know, how did BILLY LIAR work? Why was BILLY LIAR so funny? Why, from time to time, is that marvelous Hardy [Thomas Hardy] film that he made, FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, why is that so funny? There are things to be learned. And...

INT: So you're always looking for the underlying reality of anything, whether it be a comedy or whatever? 

MN: Yeah. I guess. I don't think it... [INT: I think that's right.] You know, that's what came into me when I was watching my parents have such fun all that time ago. What they were having fun with was great theatre plays, and in my father's case, great Irish theatre plays. He had a particular love of the Irish, and so therefore I can remember sort of line for line his production of...

MN: I can remember very clearly the production that my father did of a “Playboy of”, not “Playboy of the Western World”, although I remember that too 'cause that was a huge thing of his. No, Captain Boyle, "I seen him by hundreds in the streets of San Francisco." “Juno and the Paycock”, which is about a woman trying to keep this whole fucking family together while her husband, who was a stoker on the Liffey Ferry and pretends to have sailed the seven seas and had a wild life tells his lies. It's a very, very, a very funny play. So that was, that need to be real. In other words, it's not funny if Juno isn't desperately trying to keep the family together. Captain Boyle can't be funny on his own. And so that's always been a necessity, and that plugged into Denis Mitchell, and that plugged into that whole ethos at Granada [Granada Television], and it plugged into Jack [Jack Rosenthal] and the Writers that we grew to love. And on and on. It's all consonant, you know?