Simon Beaufoy

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.

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.

When you haven't got a job, a joke is about the only thing that's free.

The recession of the late 1980s was a very visible humiliation. Cities across Britain had become the victims of botched battlefield surgery - surgery that involved the ripping up of factories, the flattening of buildings, and the razing of the Victorian heritage of heavy labour.

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.

Miley Cyrus twerking - is that really a model for your kids?

Being rich would be disastrous for me as a writer. I have always needed to write to pay the bills.

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.

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

India is desperately romantic, utterly unashamed of its sentimentality, its generosity, its fierce pride and massive heart.

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

The West has become very sophisticated, seeing love as a very complex thing. In Bollywood, it's not complex: it's an arrow straight to the heart.