Quotes from Simon Beaufoy

'Slumdog Millionaire' is a fairy tale, but it starts in a place you really believe, and that came from spending two months wandering around the slums picking up stories and talking to people.

There isn't a more important issue in the world than global warming. Even the Cold War and the Bay of Pigs crisis were a notional threat.

I'm not interested in superheroes. What about normal people doing extraordinary things?

I'm not into being all 'film-y' and going to the premieres and parties. I tend to feel like the embarrassing uncle at a wedding.

The poorest people are so incredibly poor, and the rich are so incredibly rich on the other side. That is a kind of fascination.

If you don't have to get out of bed and do something every morning, that's kind of a curse.

It's a very weird thing, making a true story, because you need your freedom, as filmmakers, to do what you need to do.

If you work in the studio system in America, they've almost got to the point where a computer programme could write scripts. Effectively, they hire and fire enough writers until they get something generic.

I think you are doing a disservice to a novel just by transposing it wholesale onto the screen, because it doesn't work. They are completely different beasts.

Real life is messy, and drama is a shaped version of real life.

I'm very lucky. I actually like screenwriting. I rarely feel a sense of doom going to my desk.

I'm a documentary filmmaker by training. You got to start with the real people and the real place.

It's a huge responsibility writing about people who are alive. It's the thing about writing that keeps me awake at night: dramatising real-life events with real people.

Everyone hated the title 'The Full Monty' until they saw the film did really well and then loved the title.

After a while, you become really irritated that you're not recognised as the person who wrote 'The Full Monty.' Everyone goes on about how lovely the characters are. That's because they were written! 'What a clever title.' Yeah, that's because I made up the title!

I believe innately in the human spirit being a powerful and positive thing. And that just comes out, whether you like it or not. It comes out in the writing.

Repressed English writers have to write love stories because they can't say what they really mean.

I have a huge admiration for the ability of people to go, 'I don't care if it can't happen. I don't care if you say it's impossible. I am gonna do it anyway.' I think it's an amazing part of human nature. It feeds into faith and belief in human beings to not only do the improbable but almost the impossible.

British audiences are toughest on British films. So often, a British film is the last thing they want to see. If you please them, you really know you've made an impact.

You do need people. You can't live without them. We're all interconnected in some way.

For me, as a writer who comes from quite a naturalistic tradition, British screenwriting is quite delicate, quite small, and rarified in a way.

'The Full Monty' was my first feature script, and I wasn't that skilled at it.

As a child growing up in a grey-skied Yorkshire village, I would occasionally happen upon a Bollywood movie on the television. After a few minutes watching a bunch of sari-clad dancers cavorting on a Swiss mountain to tuneless music, I would switch over to some proper drama about housing estates and single mothers.

I guess my approach to adapting books is to treat them with a deep respect on one level and at another level part them to one side and go, 'I'm doing something completely different here.'