Quotes from Ol Parker

It's the nicest thing when you're constantly surprised by your partner.

Sequels are hard. What people want is to see the first film again for the first time and that simply isn't possible.

Look, I'd take a suggestion from my grandmother if I thought it would improve a film I was writing.

I hired people who would help me, you know, like a director of photography who wouldn't blind me with jargon about ratios and pull-downs.

'Waterloo' was probably my favorite. That was enormous fun and we laughed a lot.

Bill Nighy has an idiosyncratic delivery.

I have no goals or ambitions whatsoever.

The primary relationship on a film, where possible, should be between the director and writer.

I mean, movies need distraction.

I have two girls and one is now nearly a teenager - it is terrifying.

The other night my daughter shouted: 'What's that flying out of the window? It's the rules!' So that's how we roll.

'Dancing Queen' was the hardest to pull off, all those boats and all those people dancing around the street with boats coming around the corner.

And Cher, obviously, can never do anything other than go for it. She's all in.

I have a brilliant memory of being driven back to school when 'Super Trouper' was number one in the charts in 1980. When it came on the radio my mum just drove right past the school gates! When you're 11 years old and meant to be going back to boarding school, that's a great feeling.

These are cynical times. Some of the romcoms I thought worked best in recent years were '500 Days of Summer,' 'Celeste and Jesse Forever' and 'Like Crazy,' all of which reject the standard happy-ever-after formula.

I think films are a really small target. They're really hard to make, and they're a really tiny target.

I wrote the 'Marigold Hotel' series and with the first one, people hated it in the U.K. but in America they really liked it.

I wrote a film for Tom Hanks and I wrote two films for Paul Greengrass that didn't actually happen. The paradox is that the bigger the film you write, the less likely it is to happen.

I wanted to write about love at first sight because I fell in love at first sight.

The trajectory of most movies is that you start off writing a sensitive movie about a couple in their 40's getting divorced, and then, three years later, you look at each other on set while you're making a film about lesbian cheerleaders. You're like, 'How did that happen?!'

Being a teenager anyway is incredibly intense and every moment is invested with ferocious importance.

The greatest moment of all was her on set, and she said, 'Would you mind if you change the order of the phrase?' Maggie Smith asking me if I could change the line, asking politely, using my name!

Cher can play Meryl's daughter, for all I'm concerned. Or her great-grandmother. She exists separate from time.

Meryl's Donna embodied the spirit of ABBA and 'Mamma Mia!' in the first film.