AUGUST It is the second day of August when Sara and her husband Richard go to the funeral. It is desperate. The woman had died suddenly from a cerebral aneurism leaving a shattered husband and two early teenage children. Despite being barely forty, the widower looks a hundred years old as...

The trial of Breivik feels to me like a liberal fantasy trying to dismantle a grotesque nightmare. It has pulled me up short. I have always believed that our systems should be open. Open societies, with open courts, open politics, uncensored media seemed to the logical way to go. I've...

It's not really cool to admit a life-long love of the Grateful Dead. It tends to file you (me, actually) under 'rather daft, if not very short of taste'. It has been this way for many years. I remember – about the time Elvis Costello was first emerging – going...

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA is a remarkable, haunting movie directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Slow, almost remorseless, it tells the story of how, over one night, a group of policeman, a public prosecutor and a doctor search for the body of a murdered man. One of the murderers...

So this is it. THE WEBSITE. Why bother? I do a lot of different things. I write, I develop material. I direct. I work in the theatre. I take photographs.  I wanted to find a way of pulling all that together so here we are. I hope it gives you a sense of...

Arriaga Masterclass     Script writing courses aren't me. I did the Robert McKee course many years ago and while I found it energising - and him formidable - it also blocked me. Stories seemed to have to behave themselves in the face of McKee; characters never quite broke free of the plan....