I thought the Lost king was many things, but for me, I took it
as real story of the underdog.
And now Steve is going to ask you first, has it been
part of what's part of the appeal and telling his story?
He was just letting the world know that a lot of this all of this was
Philippa is doing.
Yes. Is the simple answer to your question.
When Philippa told me her story, I was incensed that the due credit for her
search for Richard, that which she led alone,
had not been properly acknowledged and she hadn't been given the due respect
for her crowning achievement.
And so I part of telling the story, certainly
for Jeff Pope, my co-writer and I was that
we wanted to redress that and wanted to put a back up,
put Philippa up where she belonged and redress that that story because it was
you know, I even said to Philippa , I said,
the end of your story will be this film.
This film will will
right the ship, which is listing the wrong way, shall we say.
And Philippa , I'm sure everything of it.
But many of this has been sort of quite surreal from the moment you
first started doing research into convicts fight up to where we are now.
you've now
got one of Britain's best actresses, Sally Hawkins, playing in a movie or sat
next to Steve Coogan at a press tour.
Has it been quite overwhelming?
Has ever been a moment you just sort of sat back and gone, Blimey.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
And it started for the first time, you know,
you got a phone call saying Steve Coogan would like to take you to lunch.
It starts from there.
And then I met him, you know, and he was really surprising for me
because he wasn't the lucky jokey about that.
I almost kind of expected, you know, very serious,
very intelligent, very journalistic with me and.
Yeah, and then he brings on Jeff Pope.
So you're thinking, oh, gosh, this is the Philomena team.
And then they told me Stephen Frears is really fascinated by it.
And then when they say Sally Hawkins, is it?
Yeah.
You know, by this time I'm on the floor basically.
So yeah.
I mean, the collaboration of creative Minds that was so successful
for Philomena.
When you get back with Jeff and back with Stephen to write again,
is there a confidence and kind of comfortability that leads the way?
Well, hmm.
Well, it's a double edged sword, because on the one hand, you think,
well, we we we know we can if we if we're diligent, we can do a good job.
That's certainly the case.
But also is the fact that you you feel like, well,
you know, we sort of struck gold as Philomena.
And so that's quite a high benchmark.
And but that's very good.
It's good when you're competing against yourself.
It's a nice problem to have.
So but certainly there was a case of I mean, I never stopped working with Jeff,
to be honest.
We wrote something else in between this and Philomena
and I and I worked with and I did a film that he wrote for Stan
and Ollie that I didn't write or produced, but I was in it as an actor,
so I always have something on the ball with them.
And this
the story, Philippa's story ticks
all the boxes about, like you said, the underdog up against the establishment.
We always gravitate towards those stories.
And so so yeah, we sort of roll up our sleeves up and got stuck in.
I mean, it's very textured screenplay, very subtle
and it has kind of profound moments, kind of peppered across.
I was wondering
what the writing process is like because when you get to comedic events out
to be a comedy always imagined, they kind of sit in a room, they sort of
riffed or jokes off each other and they kind of find what works for.
Maybe if it passes the laughing test, you can kind of see how,
you know, Matt Stone and Trey Parker could write South Park.
But when it comes to writing,
a subtle drama like this, how was that kind of a process?
You have to kind of allocate parts to each other.
How did you kind of get it done?
We literally Jeff and I literally sit in the room
at the same time and we bounce ideas off each other
and we talk things through, talk them out loud, you know, play out scenes.
And, you know, we do have a laugh.
I mean, we have a laugh about things to do with the script
or we have a laugh about,
you know, we go off on tangents like anyone doesn't talk about.
We just gossip, you know, for the first half an hour before we just
before we even write a word.
But certainly it's
when you're writing a drama, you humor is
comedy has to be much more interesting
and useful as a tool in your arsenal
to use to, to, to, you know, sweeten
difficult subjects and make them more accessible.
The real
kids, when you had to choose when not to do the joke when you want
have moments of sincerity and authenticity
and and and being kind
a lot of drama is about conflict, tension, dysfunction.
And I'm drawn towards decency
and kindness and
and thus I think a lot of that in in this film, it's sort of a story.
And of course, I always appreciate the need for a kind of creative license,
you know, the kind of visions that the character has of it came into the flood.
Was that something you had?
Did you feel like you connected to him on a kind of ethereal kind of way?
Certainly.
I don't talk to dead people, that's for sure.
It's just a dramatic invention.
But I think it was really, really useful.
I think in terms of the story that Steve and Jeff bring to life
on the screen, I think it's so it works so well.
But I think also when I researched which the third that's, you know,
one of my key research topics and you can see from the materials
that from his own lifetime, you can get, you know, from A to B to C to D,
but then there's a gap to get to G and you have to ask yourself
questions, okay, this was happening and then you got to there.
So how did you get there?
So they asked me that question.
They said, look, do you do you actually talk to Richard? And
I said, Well, not quite to Richard, but I do ask research questions in my head.
So they liked that.
And then I think
that was one of the things that maybe you were thinking of bringing.
Richard Yes, we were quite careful when when you as portrayed on screen,
have conversations with Richard, we made sure that those conversations
could have been
conversations that Philippa could have
an internal monologue in her head, as we all do from time to time.
Yeah.
And it would be consistent with that.
So there's nothing that the Ghost of Richard tells Philippa
in the film that she doesn't already know, so.
So that it can exist as a source of her own, her own thought process.
thank you so much for time.
So much appreciate guys thinking too much.