How Peter Morgan wrote The Queen

My trigger was the image of Balmoral as a castle tucked away in a pine forest, in which everybody employed by the Royals conspires to create a false reality. The detail that set me off was the Queen’s instruction that the radios and TVs should be hidden away “for the boys” after Diana’s death. When I visited Balmoral, I realised that it exists as a fairytale Rhineland schloss, swirling mist around turrets that stick above the trees. It’s cuckooland. We rented a cottage on the estate and the Queen came up. It was amazing good luck.

I didn’t talk to her but she seemed a very ordinary, dumpy but accessible lady of a certain age, entirely out of keeping with the ridiculous protocol and pageantry around her – every time she got out of her car a band of 60 Scottish pipers would strike up. How possible is it to have power if you don’t have mystery? For the Royals, tradition is ritual and ritual is meaning. They really do believe that it’s God’s will that they are who they are. She wore rather naff clothes and had a ridiculously opulent Bentley. She’s not someone who appears regal. She’s more Blackpool than Versailles.

When Diana died, here’s someone completely isolated, while her people storm the streets of London. Andy wanted Helen [Mirren] to play her. She immediately started making physical and emotional connections between herself and the Queen. That shocked us because Helen is known for her beauty, sexuality, feistiness and modernity. “Oh, I know why you’ve come to me,” she said. “Look at my ankles – same as hers. And I’ve got big tits, she’s got big tits, and our smiles are very similar.”

I started writing and it was awful. After three months I was only 25 pages in. It was a woman in pain in Balmoral locked away from the world. I felt like I’d seen it before in Mrs Brown. I had originally thought it should be a binary story with her and Blair, but The Deal had been followed by satires and dramas about politics. The worry was that while it might appeal to a serious audience it might feel like a TV drama that had gotten above its station.

But putting Blair in a serious drama, not a satire, while he was still in power hadn’t been done. Without telling [the director] Stephen Frears or Andy, I started writing it with Blair in it, and it flew out in two weeks. While I was waiting for Stephen to be free, I met people on the Royal and Downing Street sides – Balmoral staff, journalists, biographers, family friends.

The scenes of the Royals stalking on the moors were based in truth – within 24 hours of Diana’s death they were blasting grouse out of the sky. And the Queen does drive an old Land Rover Discovery to let off frustration. My mother is one month younger than the Queen and so it’s easy for me to get into her mindset: stoical, doesn’t make a fuss, that generation that grew up in the war.

Most of the dialogue was guesswork: I don’t know what was said in Balmoral or No Ten. The Queen’s meetings with Blair were unminuted and they guard that unbelievably jealously. I’ll never know how much I did get right. I did speak to people who knew what Charles said. But my research was more: “If Blair was to call to the Queen, how would that happen?” “If he’s frustrated how does he express that?”

In many ways comedy or satire not based on reality is more honourable than what we do, where what is real and what isn’t is blurred. It plausibly dignifies characters but is also much more threatening as people really believe that what’s on screen actually happened. My aim is to illustrate the truth underlying a character.

My screenplay leaves you in no doubt that I think the Queen is a cold, bigoted, uncompromising, distant person you wouldn’t particularly want as a parent. However, the film is about her being hurt and because we are often hurt there’s a shared humanity. And there’s something fantastically complex about our relationship with the monarchy. Despite our parliamentary democracy, none of us interrogates the monarcy intellectually. We live with these Royals in a state of part abuse, part tolerance and part acceptance.

The film unlocked deep feelings in people. Stephen Frears said it made him realise that the Queen was the woman with whom he’d had the longest relationship in his life. She’s a constant factor, on our currency and stamps, an iconic thing. To see her humanised, made vulnerable, stirred people’s feelings; a lot of republican-minded people said they were moved. It was a film about elected power and inherited power in conflict.

It takes two or three months to find the kernel of the story. Then I map out the story over 15 pages. It’s too depressing and frightening not knowing where the story is going. I’m less anal than the writer of Little Miss Sunshine, who sent scenes out to friends to comment on, and less free-associating than Guillermo Arriaga, who wrote Babel, who just writes from the gut. After 15 pages, I’m unable to contain myself and have to start the screenplay. Then I “word it in”, as the writer Hugh Whitemore termed it – put colour in. The first draft of the script takes about a month. Writers should remember that films are dictatorships and the dictator is the director. Either you have a munificent dictator who accepts you as a film-maker and co-author, or one who prefers to be left alone. I like to be involved; it pays dividends.

But if you’re working with a director who doesn’t welcome you on set it is an excluding, bruising experience. I think writers are great in the cutting room – it’s small, dark and private.

The greatest danger is writing too many draft scripts when a director isn’t yet attached to the film, so when one does come on board you are too overcommitted to your version to be of any use. Just do two drafts. Don’t sell your script early. Don’t be greedy. If you’ve come into screenwriting to make money, you are in the wrong job. Make less money and work with people – in England – who are good. I could be making a huge amount but I’d be unhappy. Every experience that isn’t for the love of it diminishes you.

Success does bring pressure. I wish I could take risks and fall flat on my face, and I’m tempted to write under a pseudonym because if you can’t take risks you’re f***ed – and, anyway, most writers think they are failures. It’s a genetic default. I never did any courses. I just practised. You will probably write a good screenplay on your eighth attempt. I’ve never had another job. I’m 44 and have been doing this for 20 years. I’ve been successful only in the past five. Be patient, tenacious.

Now I’m writing a film about Brian Clough – it’s a story of power and rivalry again, this time with [Leeds United’s] Don Revie, and Clough is very alcoholic and furious, which I like, and lost and angry. Michael Sheen [who plays Blair] will play Clough – who else? If I ever did a film about Britney Spears he’d play her. I’m also writing a film about Blair, Clinton, Kosovo and liberal intervention. By the end of this film I hope there is nothing left to say about him.