My Books. Buy Them
Touchstone (3. All the Time in the World)
Baby, baby, baby… you’re out of time… Rachel, lost and alone... read more
Ghosts on the Moor
Three women spend Christmas in a remote cottage on Dartmoor to escape problems... read more
Lovers in Paris
Can your love live up to the most romantic city in the world? It’s Disneyland... read more
Touchstone (2. Family at War) – a time travel Blitz story
The unforgettable fire… Continuing the adventures of Rachel and Danny, a... read more
Meet me in Montmartre
New Year’s Eve. An English girl. A French boy. A blind date. A kiss... read more
The Striker’s Fear of the Open Goal
Get a life. Get the girl. Get to Wembley. Ewan Glumie was born on the day Man... read more
The Budapest Breakfast Club
This summer: Go to Budapest… Make a movie… Have an affair. Ten... read more
The Very Thought of You
What happens when you fall in love with a woman who died before you were born?... read more
Train Can’t Bring Me Home
Love. Literature… and Tom Waits. Lots of Tom Waits. 1993. The former... read more
The Girl with the Bomb Inside
School is shit, your hero killed himself and your girlfriend’s pregnant.... read more
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Tag Archives: cinema
Why Hollywood wants your ebook
Today is a day of conflicting emotions. You see, my good friend Jonathan Turner, the man who wrote the best spec script I’ve ever read, is at the 2011 Screenwriting Expo in LA, and I was supposed to be there with him. I don’t feel too bad. It wasn’t a concrete promise. In fact, it’s something we’ve promised each other to do every year since we met, rather like the Jews of the diaspora who every Passover say ‘next year …
Arjun & Alison: the trailer is out!
Been waiting all year for this, and it’s finally here. The trailer for Arjun & Alison, the indie feature film I was hired to script in February 2010, worked on all that year and saw shoot in Birmingham last November. It’s been in a Mumbai edit suite most of this year and this is the first glimpse of what the film might actually look like. (The security guy with his back to camera is me, by the way).
Jimmy Sangster 1927 – 2011
I suppose it’s normal that most screenwriters who pass away go to that Underwood in the sky with little ceremony. Sometimes we don’t even notice their passing ourselves, and often we don’t realise how much certain screenwriters mean to us or what they’ve given us over the years. Jimmy Sangster was a self-effacing screenwriter, director, producer who, while giving DVD commentaries recently, seemed surprised that anyone would be interested in his life’s work. But to this screenwriter, he was a …
The crime is in your mind
The cries go out every week in the filmmaking community: everything is being dumbed down, there’s no space for complexity any more, films aren’t as demanding as they used to be, we’re all going to hell in a flatpack assembled handcart. It would be a matter for grave concern if it wasn’t total bollocks. Last night I went to see Inception at my local multiplex. As I bought my ticket, the ticket teller warned me that the film was three …
Back to bass
It is February 1977. I am eleven years old and my family have moved from Rochdale, Lancashire to inner city Birmingham. But we haven’t just moved from a small town to a big city. We’ve crossed other borders. We’ve moved into a more socially diverse place. We’ve moved from Britain’s homogenous past into its multicultural future. I’ve left a school with one black pupil on Friday and, on Monday, walked into a school where black kids are the majority. Straight …
A team, a road, a prize…
There are people in the world who believe that film and television fall into two distinct camps: on one side is the noble documentary and its upstart sibling the reality show. On the other side there’s all that made-up stuff. But as a fiction writer who worked for years in factual TV, I know that the best documentaries mimic fictional story structures. And nowhere is this more obvious than Man On Wire, which is a heist movie pure and simple. To …
People are strange
Alfred Hitchcock once famously predicted that in the future there would be no more need for movies: audiences would be hooked up to electrodes that would give people jolts of various emotions: suspense, fear, sadness, love. He was wrong. We just started making movies that replicated that process. We see this most obviously in the big genre staples like action/adventure, thriller and horror. Many of which play like a piano-roll of random key notes with a few cardboard characters to make …
Do the rite thing
What were you doing in the summer of ’94? I was making the long journey from England to Hungary in a clapped out Mitsubishi with two Hungarian students and no leg room for three days as we sped across Europe praying the car would hold together and listening to tapes of Tom Waits and Bill Hicks non-stop. I was going to live with a Hungarian girl, and teach English to Hungarian kids, and write a Hungarian novel and make a …
The turn of the screwball
There was a time when the word ‘screwball’ conjured up a plastic cone of cheap ice cream with a ball of chewing gum at the bottom. Mine were served to me by Anita, the young woman who once got bollocked by our headmaster for exploiting us kids by parking her ice cream van at the school gates every lunch time. He didn’t know we wanted to be exploited by Anita… and that it was more about her hotpants and pigtails …
Tired and emotional
It’s been a while since I talked about a movie here. And it’s not just because I’ve been too busy networking to get out to the cinema much. I did manage to see The Dark Knight a few weeks ago, but it was such a desperately disappointing experience that I decided to keep schtum about it. I’m all about the positive vibes, as you know*, and see little need to mong off about something everyone else is enjoying. But this week …
