The Royal Speculator
With 'The Queen,' Screenwriting Nominee Peter Morgan Put Words in Some Tight-Lipped Mouths

By Bridget Byrne
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, February 18, 2007

PASADENA, Calif.

Whether dramatizing the life of Queen Elizabeth II or "The Last King of Scotland's" Idi Amin, British screenwriter Peter Morgan exhaustively studies the powerful, leaving few facts unturned.

Then, to create drama out of truth, he enters the realm of speculation, making himself quite right at home.

"I think it's fair game to conjecture what was going on in the queen's bedroom, what was going on behind closed doors, that sort of stuff," says Morgan, an Oscar nominee this year for Best Original Screenplay for "The Queen."

"The Queen," also nominated for Best Picture, chronicles the stoic monarch's reluctance to mourn publicly for ex-daughter-in-law Princess Diana -- and the pressure from touchy-feely Prime Minister Tony Blair for Her Royal Highness to join in their nation's grief. Much is known fact, but there is also a great deal about Her Majesty, particularly her feelings and thoughts, which can be known only to herself.

"You have to ask yourself as a dramatist, 'Do you believe there is a relationship between truth and accuracy?' It may not be accurate -- you don't know -- but is it truthful, is it truthful and fair, are you giving the character a fair hearing?" says Morgan, 43.

How, though, does he make truth dramatic without falsifying it?

"By having compassion, I suppose," says Morgan, who, clad in jeans and a casual sweater, looks utterly normal for an industry that invites image-seekers.

Helen Mirren, the Best Actress favorite for "The Queen's" title role, praises the "elegance, wit and restraint" in Morgan's writing. She singles out the moment when the queen, alone on the Scottish moors, comes face to face with a magnificent, endangered stag.

That "was the scene that made me agree to do the movie," e-mails Mirren, who has received numerous honors for the role, including a Golden Globe. "This scene took it out of a literal and drama/docu type film and into a work of imagination and power."

Kevin Macdonald, who directed "The Last King of Scotland," says by e-mail: "There are no heroes and no villains in Peter's work. Sometimes we argued because I wanted him to make characters darker -- but he resisted this because his [rare] view of human nature is a fundamentally optimistic one.

"On the surface, Peter -- as a person -- can seem like a cynic, but it doesn't take long to realize that he is -- not exactly a Romantic -- but someone with a genuinely big heart."

Talking about Idi Amin, Morgan says: "You are not born a dictator, you become a dictator, so it's only reasonable to show him as a human being."

Consider how Morgan's characters match up. The traditionalist Elizabeth II vs. new-age Tony Blair. The Ugandan despot Amin vs. the naive Scottish doctor. Moral do-gooder Lord Longford vs. amoral murderer Myra Hindley in the new HBO movie "Longford." And probing television host David Frost vs. secretive Richard M. Nixon in the play "Frost/Nixon," which travels to Broadway next month.

According to colleagues, Morgan embellishes those real-life emotional, philosophical, ethical and political conflicts, deepening them through smart speculation and imagination.

"He writes complex characters. You will find your sympathies fluctuating. You are drawn to them, then you see a flaw, and then you are drawn to them again," says Lindsay Duncan, who co-stars in "Longford," which explores the issue of faith and forgiveness in the face of genuine evil.

"Particularly at this moment," Duncan continues, "when moral debate is being devalued and devalued all the time, when the press will oversimplify and we seem to be reluctant in general terms to think seriously about moral issues, Peter writes with such intelligence. He doesn't tell you what to think, but invites you to think."

Although his works are often populated with presidents and prime ministers, dukes and dictators, Morgan insists he wields no partisan agenda.

"I write about politicians a lot, but I'm not a political person, I don't have a line that I'm trying to sell or push," he says. "I'm interested primarily in relationships . . . this odd collection of pas de deux -- dances between very different kinds of people."

He somewhat undercut that claim days later, however, when picking up his screenplay Golden Globe for "The Queen." He suggested to the live television audience that if millions of people taking to the streets managed to change Queen Elizabeth's attitude to the death of Diana, think what might be accomplished by millions more taking similar action over something much more important. But still, he didn't specifically spell out what has importance.

Morgan's scripts are like that, providing people with information and ideas, but also the chance to be open-minded.

Morgan, a father of four young children, is direct and unpretentious in manner. He could be your average middle-school teacher, although his own school days were not so happy.

A first-generation Englishman of German and Polish origin, he was saddled with the nickname "Fritz" by fellow students. "God, they are broad-minded English schoolboys," he says, with only a murmur of humor in his sigh. After his Jewish father died, his mother sent him to a traditional Catholic boarding school, Downside.

"I think Borstal would have been better," he says in the same tone of voice, referring to a British juvenile reform system, now abolished. One day, at 16, he just up and left the school. From then on, he chose his own educational path.

At Leeds University, he switched from studying English to fine arts, where he says he encountered "particularly inspirational teachers, who really turned a middle-class boy, a casualty of the public school system, inside out. It was like going into a wall at about 100 miles an hour. I was thrown in with extremely radical, politicized people who tore me to pieces. It was a very good experience."

He had aspirations to act but didn't consider himself good enough. But he knew he could write.

"I honestly think it's the only talent that I can say with any certainty that I have, because I've always known how to tell a story. I love telling stories and rearranging materials so they become a better story."

In the mid-'80s, he and fellow student Mark Wadlow wrote "Gross" -- a satirical play about lost young people. It won an award at the Edinburgh Festival. As a result, they were hired to write training films, starring Monty Python comedian John Cleese. After that, they contributed additional script material to the 1988 movie "Madame Sousatzka," starring Shirley MacLaine.

He says, "They couldn't afford Freddie Raphael," the talented screenwriter. "It's ludicrous to think, 'We'd like Freddie Raphael, but we'll go with these unheard-of kids,' " he says, clearly aware, from the start, of Hollywood's odd logic.

Now it seems everyone would like to work with Morgan. He's extremely busy, this surge of work following "The Deal," a 2003 British TV drama about the complex push-me/pull-me relationship between Blair and another ambitious Labor politician, potential successor Gordon Brown.

"Frost/Nixon," a drama based on a 1977 TV interview, stars Frank Langella as the disgraced former president and Michael Sheen (who plays Blair in both "The Deal" and "The Queen") as Frost. The play finished its London run this month.

While researching "Frost/Nixon," Morgan hit on the idea for the TV movie about the late Lord Longford, who had written a forgiving biography of Nixon. Longford, a liberal and devout Catholic, believed in redemption even for someone as apparently guilty of vile crime as the notorious Hindley, who was convicted for aiding her lover, Ian Brady, in the murder of numerous English children in the 1960s. Longford's efforts to get Hindley released from prison made him hugely unpopular with the British public.

Jim Broadbent, who plays Longford, is full of praise for the accuracy and acuteness of Morgan's research. "When the script arrived, there was absolutely not one word that didn't seem to be coming straight out of Longford's mouth. I mean the rhythm of it, the tempo of it, what he was saying and how he was saying it. It was entirely consistent with everything that I had read, and listened to, and watched myself."

Morgan admits that adapting the work of others is more difficult than creating his own original scripts. His latest challenge is the film version of Philippa Gregory's novel "The Other Boleyn Girl," about Mary, who like her ill-fated sister, Anne, was romanced by Henry VIII.

Despite the contemporary figures he's dramatized, Morgan would prefer never to meet anyone he writes about -- particularly the queen. That hasn't happened, yet.

He's also heeding the advice of "The Queen" director Stephen Frears, who Morgan says taught him: "The greatest thing you must do is to keep your lifestyle smaller rather than bigger."

Morgan says that he lives "in a very modest house, but I have every opportunity open to me. People seem to want to work with me and I don't need to take the big bucks. I never receive big bucks without it being complicated. I would rather write a radio play than have an attritional bad experience earning big bucks."