Frank Cottrell Boyce

Award-winning screenwriter and children’s author Frank Cottrell Boyce, whose credits include Hilary and Jackie and 24 Hour Party People, always knew he’d be a writer. “I imagined myself in a bungalow in the Hollywood Hills, furiously typing away while someone shoved cigarettes in my mouth and I shouted, ‘Match me, Sydney!’  Or writing bits and pieces for The Paris Review." 

Cottrell Boyce and I are chatting in the distinctly unglamorous surroundings of a café on the concourse of Euston station. Cottrell Boyce is on his way back to Liverpool, where he has lived for most of his life, after a script meeting for a new film with Colin Farrell, although he tells me that these days he sees himself first and foremost as a children’s author. "I will take on projects that are too good to turn down, like this one with Colin about the Homeless World Cup, an international football tournament for the homeless, but I’m not trying to initiate any scripts.”

His first children’s book, Millions, which won the Carnegie Medal, is based on his own screenplay for the film of the same name and he adapted his second novel, Framed, for a BBC television film which can be seen on 28 November at the Barbican as part of the London Children’s Film Festival, of which Cottrell Boyce is a patron. His third book, Cosmic, has not yet made it onto the screen, although he hopes it will at some point.

“I think there’s a common perception that books and moving images are somehow in competition with each other but I don’t see it that way. I went to the pictures every Saturday morning as a kid but I also loved reading. My daughters read Jane Austen because they enjoyed watching Gwyneth Paltrow in Emma and I’m aware that the films of my books give them an extra glamour and encourage kids to read them. There is a synergy there.”

Cottrell Boyce read English at Oxford, where he also wrote a thesis on pamphlets and politics in the English Civil War (“I thought it would bring down Thatcher. I honestly did.”) but returned to his native Liverpool when he was offered a job on Channel 4's soap opera Brookside - not exactly the Hollywood Hills, but it was a start. “I think they would have taken anyone who lived locally just to keep expenses down.The turnover of writers was incredibly rapid; they’d give anybody a chance but they were quite ruthless about chucking people out.”

It was during a sabbatical at Thames TV that Boyce met Michael Winterbottom, a trainee editor on schools’ programmes, who was desperate to direct. “We were both very bored and looking for a way out so I wrote a script called Delirious for him." At one point it looked as if it was going to be made and in a fit of optimism, Boyce left Brookside. When it became clear that the film wasn’t going to happen, he got a job on Coronation Street.

Fortunately another script, Butterfly Kiss, which might be loosely described as a lesbian killer road-movie and Cottrell Boyce cheerfully refers to as ‘Coronation Street gone barmy,’ did get made. “I acquired some very bad habits on soaps that took a lot of time to unlearn,” he says. “I don’t know why, but British soap operas will persist with the illusion of real time so you start off with breakfast at the Duckworth’s and end up with last orders at the Rovers.If someone walks out of the door to go to the newsagents, you have to cut to another scene to give them time to get there, you don’t follow the story.It took me ages to forget all that.”

Nevertheless, it was the first of a number of successful collaborations with Winterbottom such as Welcome to Sarajevo, set during the Bosnian war and 24 Hour Party People, a dramatised account of the Manchester music scene. Other directors he has worked alongside include Alex Cox on the Revengers’ Tragedy and Anand Tucker on Hilary and Jackie, the biopic based on cellist Jacqueline de Pré’s relationship with her sister Hilary.

He explains that he is drawn to scripts based on real events because “it gives you a court of appeal when you’re kicking against the formula. I have no time for character arcs, the idea that a person has an experience, learns from it and moves on. It’s just ludicrous. I mean, obviously sometimes people do change but I think the idea that people are rational is bizarre. What’s really riveting about a character is that they don’t change. You keep throwing more and more stuff at them, thinking that this will finish them and they just keep coming back with their illusions intact. That’s what was attractive to me about Tony in 24 Hour Party People; everything went wrong and he absolutely refused to believe it was anything to do with him. He just heroically carried on being himself. That, to me, is fascinating. It’s actually one of the things I do like about soap operas; the characters keep on making the same mistakes over and over again, just like in real life.

“So, if you’re writing about a real person, you can say at the script meeting, ‘Well, yes, he did have issues with his father and I’d love to say he’d resolved them by Act Three but sadly he hadn’t.' Films that are based on real events are often far more adventurous in form than ones that are entirely fictional.”

Neither does he agree with another sacred cow of scriptwriting, that dialogue should be pared down to a minimum. "I think dialogue is an underestimated pleasure when watching a film. Some of the best films, like Withnail and I , have great dialogue. When I watch Bogie and Bacall, it's just as much about the words as the story or the way it looks."

Cottrell Boyce’s children’s film, Millions, is about two brothers who suddenly have a vast amount of cash, having unwittingly become involved with a train robbery. England is about to join the euro so they have to find a way to spend the money as quickly as possible before it becomes worthless. Millions was directed by Danny Boyle, who went on to direct Slumdog Millionaire, and was released in 2004 - given that Boyce has seven children, aged between 24 and five, it seems surprising he hadn’t considered writing for a younger audience before.

“Millions was one of the earliest scripts I wrote, it just took a long time to find a home because if you’re trying to make a family film in Britain you’re up against people like Pixar, which is really tough,” he says. However, if getting Millions off the ground had been blissfully straightforward, Boyce would never have embarked on what has proved to be a hugely successful career as a children’s author.

“Danny is a voracious reader and one night he was spieling on about what he’d been reading, and without realising it every book I mentioned was a children’s book. So Danny said, 'If you’re so keen on children’s books, why don’t you write one? You could write one based on Millions. It’s going to be quite a hard film to place so it would be handy if there was a book'.”

Cottrell Boyce wrote the book in 12 weeks. “I was very lucky because I think that when most people write books they’re secretly hoping it’ll be made into a movie, which must influence the way they write. But I already knew this was going to happen so I could really let fly and write the story how I wanted.”

One embellishment was a chapter comprising entirely of one long speech by St Peter. “I wouldn’t have dreamt of putting that into a script, but when Danny read it he got really sulky because he thought it was the best thing in the book and it wasn’t in the film. Eventually he sulked his way into a reshoot – being Danny he found a way of shooting it – and it became a really good bit of the film.”

Boyce wrote his second novel, Framed, because he wanted to prove to himself that he could write a book from scratch, and in some ways thinks of it as his first. It was inspired by the evacuation of the National Gallery’s art collection to a Welsh slate mine during the Second World War, although Boyce has updated the story and in his version the gallery is evacuated to Manod in north Wales due to flooding. “I’m not interested in writing a historical novel; maybe it’s because I have lots of kids and I visit a lot of schools, but I’m hyper-aware of what’s going on there, and one of my strengths is that I write ‘modern’.”

There are certainly some neat touches. When uptight gallery curator Quentin Lester hears that one of the local children, Dylan, has called his chickens Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo and Donatello, he believes he has stumbled across a precocious interest in Renaissance art and decides to take Dylan under his wing. It would appear that Lester has never heard of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

“I find writing books really, really hard. Writing screenplays is relatively easy, you’ve got a lot of support - people have invested money in you so they're always ringing you up to see how you're getting on, but you’re completely on your own with a novel,” says Cottrell Boyce.

“My last book, Cosmic, took two and a half years to write. It felt like an illness although I was very pleased with the result. But sometimes I do wonder why I put myself through it.”

It quickly becomes very clear why he does. It’s time for him to catch his train, and as we walk to the platform, we have a very animated discussion about children’s books. Cottrell Boyce idolises E Nesbit and thinks that The Treasure Seekers and The New Treasure Seekers are the funniest books in the English language. We both agree that One Hundred and One Dalmations is genius and I wistfully remind him of The Little White Horse. “Hmm… bit of a girl’s one, that one,” he says doubtfully, before adding kindly, “although it is J K Rowling’s favourite, of course.

“You see,” he says, before he disappears through the ticket barrier, “look at how well we remember these books. We love them, they’re part of our hard-wiring. Why on earth wouldn’t I want to write for children?”

The London Children's Film Festival 21-29 November. Tickets and further information online here

Frank Cottrell Boyce will be giving a Q&A about the new television adaptation of his book Framed at the Barbican on 28 November at 3pm followed by a free screening of Framed at 3.45pm.