Cate Blanchett in Charlotte Gray

Jeremy Brock had it coming. After cutting his teeth as a writer in British television for over a dozen years, he vaulted into feature writing when Miramax saw gold in his original script, Mrs. Brown. Harvey Weinstein and company lifted the project out of TV land and 'did the Miramax number on it.' Assigning the project to director John Madden (Shakespeare In Love), and securing Judy Dench to star, they gave the picture a worldwide rollout. Mrs. Brown was Brock's feature debut, and it garnered two Oscar nominations and won the writer a BAFTA Award for Best Screenplay. For a film that started out as yet another project for television, it was, in the Jeremy's words, "a fairy tale."

With Charlotte Gray-his second feature-in release, Jeremy Brock has returned to the big screen with another complex and fiery heroine, this time played by Cate Blanchett. The story, set in WWII, is about an ordinary young British woman who goes behind enemy lines as a spy for her government, with the added-and secret-agenda to find her lover, a British pilot shot down over France. Directed by Australian moviemaker Gillian Armstrong (Little Women, My Brilliant Career), the picture also stars Billy Crudup and veteran English actor Michael Gambon. A very busy man these days, Brock is currently developing a script for yet another noted Aussie director, Scott Hicks (Shine), and preparing for his directorial debut, Jeremy's Bible, which he also wrote. He spoke with MM from his home in London.

Phillip Williams (MM): Could you start with a bit about your background, and how you got into screenwriting.

Jeremy Brock (JB): I went to University and studied English and Drama at Bristol. I graduated from that to writing all sorts of terrible, terrible kind of shopping-list-of-grievance plays that only your Mom and Dad see. Finally, after about four or five of those, I got a break working for the BBC as a script editor on some cop show and managed to set up a hospital series, Casualty, that's still running now, 16 years later.

I then wrote a few teleplays. Mrs. Brown was always going to be a play for the BBC until Miramax, in the shape of Harvey Weinstein, came along and saw it at BAFTA in London and bought it lock, stock and barrel. That's really how I got into films. Before that I was doing mini-series and stuff at the BBC and ITV.

MM: How did your involvement with Charlotte Gray come about?

JB: Douglas Rae, who is the head of Ecosse Films, approached me. We had been talking about various projects since Mrs. Brown but none of them had been quite right for me to do. He said, 'Have you read this book by Sebastian Faulks?' and I said, 'No.' He said, 'Read it, cause it's still in galley proof." I thought it was wonderful and that it had a great shape for a film. That's one of the things I'm learning: there are books that adapt and books that don't. I went with Douglas and his producer to a meeting with Sebastian and his rather wonderful agent and we auditioned, I guess you'd say. I talked about what I felt, and they were charming and incredibly open to the ideas that we had. That's basically how we signed the deal with them.

MM: How do you approach the work?

JB: The way I work is that I read the book a couple of times and then write a detailed treatment, usually of about 30 pages. It's not a scene-by-scene breakdown, but it's close. That performs the function of taking me away from the book so that it doesn't become too reverential. I don't wish to divorce myself from the book, but one of the things I've learned is that if you are going to try and own something you, at some point as a screenwriter, have to separate yourself from the source material to the extent that you can own it. With a book as vividly realized as Charlotte Gray, certainly in psychological terms, it was very necessary. From that we did some development work and then I basically went away for three months and wrote my first draft on my own. Then we approached directors, and we got Gill, after some hunting.

MM: Both Charlotte Gray and Mrs. Brown have very rich characters. When you are writing, how do you get into the minds of your characters?

JB: I think my friends would probably say-and this is kind-that I have a rich fantasy life, by which I mean I don't have a lot of trouble escaping into other people's worlds. To that extent, writing chooses you. I certainly do enact scenes in my head and I certainly do see them as I write them; sometimes close to how they are eventually realized, sometimes not. As you are imagining yourself inside the skin of a Charlotte or Julian or whoever, you are in a process of working out how that individual character feels. And it's another truism of writing, that there are no bad guys. If you are Hitler, in Hitler's skin you are not a bad guy.

MM: Is this work with character-whether you are adapting, as with Charlotte Gray, or creating an original story, as with Mrs. Brown-is it just a an outgrowth of your fantasy life or have you done any actual studying of psychology over the years?

JB: I don't think that you are analyzing it in any deep or psychoanalytical sense, but you are in the business of motive and subtext. Because the best writing rings with subtext-for me anyway-you are always looking for layers. I particularly like writing like Anthony Minghella's, where, when someone says a line there is almost always a kind of resonance under it. You are always trying to find the man behind the man, the line in the silence. I think it's one of the pleasures of writing, one of the really physical pleasures of writing. And when you see the actor deliver it-with consummate actors like Cate Blanchett and Judy Dench-what you are gifted is yet another whole layer of psychological insight because they bring theirs to what you've offered up.

MM: How deeply do you go into the history, whether for a film like Charlotte Gray or Mrs. Brown? Do you channel your inquiry in a certain way or do you want to know what they eat and how they sleep?

JB: It's a very good question. As a screenwriter you are different from a historian in this regard: you want to know more about their day-to-day life than any historian will ever want to know. When I get a researcher on a project, like I currently have on an original project I'm writing, the questions you ask them to research for you are not the big ones, because you are reading about those yourself. What you ask the researcher to do is to tell you what they ate, where they slept, how they slept, what the pop songs were, whether they joked, how they joked, what the in jokes were. You may not use it all, but you need to feel that you know it. The problem with history pieces is that, if you're not careful, they feel antique-they feel removed. What you are always endeavoring to do is to somehow release it, so that it's both anachronistic, because it's not entirely historical, but at the same time you know you're back in time. You are trying to play that game with the audience where, as in pieces like Gladiator for example, the dialogue is suddenly quite modern and it jars, but deliberately. Those sorts of things come from knowing the details and then deciding to go for something contemporary at that moment, because it feels right to you.

MM: Creating atmosphere, or creating the broad sweep of a picture can be easy and seductive at times, while actually nailing down the relationships between the characters and what happens between them is more difficult.

JB: And the truth is that in the end people watch the movie for the relationship between the two characters. You only have to look at any number of big movies that didn't get it right. It doesn't matter how big the budget, if the central love story or drama is not realized subtly enough or compellingly enough then people just don't buy it.

MM: Yet people sometimes go in droves for some pretty terrible movies.

JB: Well that's true. Sometimes those films we're talking about in that case, they just get the zeitgeist of the times right, and they are comforts. They are a kind of warm hug; sometimes a kind of warm, sticky hug.

MM: Can you talk a bit about what you've learned about writing dialogue?

JB: To a large extent, writing dialogue is the element of the craft that's intuitive and has most to do with raw talent. It's just about having a tendency to enjoy being other people and to some extent hearing other people and kind of copying it. But I don't think you can craft it in the way that you can craft character arcs or structure, or teach those things. There is a large element in screenwriting that you can learn and get better at but I haven't found that dialogue has much to do with that except confidence and letting go. It's the Zen aspect of writing; you have to not think in order to get it right.