The real beauty in my professional experience has been friendships and collaborations with filmmakers.
I can't help slightly falling in love with every character I write about. And I quite like writing about people who are vilified.
As historians write more and more histories, it's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that other historians read their histories and then make synthesis, and certain things just get forgotten and left out and neglected.
The film 'The Queen' came about with a producer saying to me that he wanted me to write about the circumstances behind Diana's death. I think he was hoping that I would come up with some journalistic scoop that would identify an MI5 covert plot.
I wrote 'Hereafter' quickly and without mapping it out too much or being too schematic. As an exercise, I think that was incredibly important.
Barack Obama winning the election had an instant impact on everything - race relations, national self-esteem, tolerance. It also had an instant affect on 'Frost/Nixon.' At a stroke, instead of being a piece that reminded people of the agony they were in, it became an uplifting message about the agony they had escaped.