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Read a Transcription of our Podcast Interview with screenwriter Neil Forsyth.

Your questions were answered by Neil.

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***If you haven’t watched Guilt, please find it on 大象传媒 iPlayer now as there may be spoilers within the Podcast***

Neil Forsyth Podcast – November 2021

Hello and welcome to “Ask the Write Questions” with Neil Forsyth. A podcast from 大象传媒 Writersroom. If you haven’t watched Guilt, all episodes are available to view on 大象传媒 iPlayer now or there may be some spoilers. We asked you the viewer to send in questions for Neil about his latest show and writing career. Thank you for sending them in. We’ve collated all your questions, thrown them into a bowl, and we’re going to ask Neil to choose them now at random.

Hello, I’m Neil Forsyth, I’m a writer and I’m here today to answer your questions about writing my television show Guilt, I’ve also written other shows including, Eric, Ernie and Me, Urban Myths, Bob Servant and various books before that, so thank you very much to everyone who has sent in a question for the 大象传媒 Writersroom podcast, I’m going to pick them at random. Lots here to get through so first up; Here we go, this question was sent through on Instagram.

How did you get your break?

I think, a couple of things happen that were very helpful to me early in my career when I was in my mid 20s I was working in a pub in Edinburgh and on the, side trying desperately to have a professional writing career and one of the things I did was I wrote a humour book called Delete This at Your Peril which was a collection of genuine email exchanges I’d swap with Internet spammers when I pretended to be an elderly Dundonian cheeseburger van vendor. The book came out of a tiny publisher, blink and you miss it and then it was pretty swiftly out of print but about a year later someone said to me have you seen Esquire magazine and I went and bought it and they had a feature about the funniest books ever written. Irvine Welsh, a Scottish author and a great inspiration to me had chosen Delete This at Your Peril. Armed with that I went to a Scottish publisher and managed to get the book reprinted, largely with the cover quote from Irvine, very kindly provided off the back of that and it was the reprint of the book that then got into the hands of the 大象传媒 who then contacted me about adapting the book, so through various friends of friends, that book getting into Irvine’s hands and him publicising it and the book getting reprinted did lead directly to 大象传媒 Scotland’s interests and my television writing career, so a bit of a luck and serendipity there really.

As a writer myself I know how difficult it can be to create characters to give the audience every reason to dislike them, still find a way to make them compelling. No matter how bad his behaviour gets you managed to make Max relatable and human, with perhaps even a hint of decency in the care shows for Erin. Is this redemption or a deliberate choice on your part or has Max being carefully hiding a conscious all along?

I think whether a viewer finds a character likeable or unlikeable, or a show is dark or light is…comes purely from the viewer, you know, there's no generic kind of regulations on these fronts and I think it's about you and the person you are and the life you’ve had, how you relate to people and how you see the tone of a television show. So, Max feeling relatable and human, well I think , human, is ever character should feel human. If you look at say Downfall for example fantastic film about the last days of the third reich, Hitler is extremely human in that film and he’s not exactly a relatable or likeable character but you need to find the humanity in all your characters otherwise they're going to be superficial and thin. It’s not just about connecting with them, it’s about understanding them, people need to understand the character and understand where they come from, if they have got serious flaws, where do those flaws come from so humanity is always the aim and I think if you achieve that then people will find something in that character to understand at least, they need to understand the character and that’s the most important thing.

If you feel comfortable sharing it, which struggles were particularly prominent when you started out in the industry?

Well, I can only answer personally, the problem I had for much of my younger life was that I grew up in a provincial city, a great city, called Dundee, but it was a long way from the centres of the creative industries. I think when you grow up in a provincial city, from perhaps an unremarkable background, in terms of not having anyone in your family or friends who worked creatively it seems a kind of impossible and slightly indulgent dream to work creatively and to hope to have that kind of career, so a lot of the struggles were probably psychological in terms of this feels ridiculous that I’m attempting to do this and maybe I should have gone off and got a more sensible career, and I wouldn’t have been working in a pub when I was 26 still trying to send off little story ideas here and there but I stuck with it because it’s what I loved doing and thankfully managed to just about get there in the end. So I think personal struggles, in terms of the industry stuff, I think what was always very difficult, when I was living in Scotland was that, and thankfully this has changed, and partly through Covid I think, there was still this expectance that you would go down to London for a one hour meeting when you were trying to get script commissions and interest from production companies. And just having general meetings I’d have to get that Kings Cross train down the east coast, up and back in a day when I was still living in Edinburgh. And I think that is really unfair and it certainly counts against people who grew up in more regional areas. But I think that has changed. That’s a little bit different, and certainly through covid obviously that’s massively changed as well. So they were the things I probably I battled against.

Do you find it easy balancing humour and drama?

Well, I think they need to co-exist so it’s not really balancing them, it’s just making sure they are both being used in the right way. The shows I write just now are dramatically driven, that’s the most important thing, that, when I write an outline for example it is dramatic structure and skeleton of that story. There’s nothing in there that is funny in any way, and then humour within the scripts, it just needs to come out very naturally. It needs to be, this is how I think that character would react to this situation, and its the way they react brings a bit of humour into the show then that’s great but it has to be justified by the character. I never design story to create funny situations, I never go into a scene thinking of a funny line a character should say, it’s more about what is that character doing in that scene? What do they want? What’s stopping them getting it? Where is the conflict within that scene? And if there is a natural way for them to react in that situation using humour then that’s great but I think the biggest thing I do with my scripts is pare back humour. When I go draft to draft, I’m often trimming out more comedic areas because I don’t think it’s justified and it is detracting from the story as a whole. What you really want to do is have a few moments, really a few moments in a one hour script that are, that are really, that you feel are kind of funny and are funny within that character, and that feels more than enough to me because the rest of the time you’ve got to be addressing the drama of the situation.

I’m writing a six part drama series following a different story for each episode. Are there any important tips you can give when tackling a project like this? Thanks in advance.

I imagine this is a story of the week, perhaps more procedural drama where there is the unifying characters and situation but each week as a new story. I think tips would be, watch great versions of those kind of shows first and foremost, but I think you have to have some sort of character progression as well over the series. That doesn’t mean the character has to change significantly or their domestic situation alters significantly, it’s more about, you need to feel you’re, because you’re resetting the story each week, I don’t think you should be resetting the characters, I think you need to hopefully still be unpeeling that character over the six episodes so as the viewer does feel they understand and know more about them at the end of the show than they did at the beginning.

Did Covid have any impact on your writing for the second series.

Yes it did, it delayed filming slightly, it meant we didn’t have one of our main actors, Bill Patterson who as a man in his 70s quite rightly felt that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go up to Scotland and shoot a series in the depths of covid. So with the Bill Patterson situation we recast the role, I think we got away with it, we had a brilliant actor called Stuart Bowman came in and did really well. In terms of the writing, knowing that the show was going to be filmed under covid conditions, I tried to take that into scripts in ways that would help the production without kind of making any great creative sacrifices, so one of the things I probably did was have slightly more two hander scenes than I would have done otherwise, I had to really interrogate if we needed every actor in the scene for example because another actor in the scene was another layer of covid risk and everything else. So I did that and I didn’t mind doing that, Guilt is quite a theatrical show and two handers lend itself to that overall, tone and voice. The other thing I did do was cut out almost all driving scenes because they were going to be particularly nightmareish to film under covid regulations so if you watch the second series of Guilt, there’s a lot of people getting into cars and coming out of cars and so on, but in terms of driving scenes, I’m not sure there is any to be honest.

How do you make action lines sound less clunky and more fluid?

I think, I think there's nothing wrong with, not being pretentious, but getting some decent writing into your action lines, I think is not a bad thing.

Just, without being particularly florid, I think there's no harm in trying to keep the voice and tone of your overall scripts running through the action lines as well and making them not, as you say, clunky to read or you know if you've got a nice bit of dialogue and then a very kind of straight forward action line it can grab people out of it a bit. So no harm in putting a bit of writing into your action lines, and a little bit of thought into them as well and the other thing is, that can be really really helpful for the director and actor to just to give a little bit more about what's going on in the characters mind at that moment is really helpful

One of the funniest moments of series one is when Max sees Jake handing round sausage rolls at the funeral, it was an acting and writing masterclass, funnier than most sitcoms today, was that so funny because of the drama at stake or because of the ridiculousness?

I think a bit of both, I think high stakes people under pressure, conflict between the brothers, people panicking and desperate and reacting in a what is essentially a quite a ridiculous way is funny. I think the reason it works though is that you do believe it. From what you know of the character up to that point, this kind of touches on what I said earlier about using humour, you completely believe that Jake could have done that and I think that's really important. He was under pressure, he's a nice man so he doesn't like saying no, and he's very very nervous so when he's asked to hand round sausage rolls at the funeral he doesn't want to attract attention, he doesn't want to say no and he ends up doing it. So I think it's because you believe it that I’ts funny. I think that's so important

How did you pitch the show to the 大象传媒, what was your logline?

I didn’t have a logline because I sent the script. I think what really helped with Guilt is that another network which I won’t name, had commissioned Guilt originally as, as I think 2 scripts actually, Episodes 1 and 2, they then didn't make it because they said they had other another show that was too similar and that other show, I mean if I told you what it was I think you'd be mystified that the comparison, it wasn't a huge success I think it's fair to say but the great thing with that is that I had two scripts I then kept working on, got them in tighter shape and then I sent that to 大象传媒 Scotland's Ewan Angus who was the old 大象传媒 Scotland controller who was looking to put together the new channel and he originally commissioned Bob Servant and he really liked it and he put it into development and it went from there. So I think generally now when I pitch show I tend to write the first script and send that out along with a little summary of what the series is and I find that quite comforting I really like doing that because it means that I've written the show I want to write, this is what it is and see if anyone wants to make it. And I think I've kind of lept over a whole stage of development in terms of getting fundamental notes from people or having to have big fundamental debates about what the show actually is. I don't really want to do that, I want to just write it and then the show can stand or fall and on its own merits once I have written it.

What was your favourite TV show as a child?

I used to love American TV I managed to pick up. I always found America TV extremely exotic growing up in Dundee and I remember watching Cheers for example and Roseanne I loved those kind of shows and then in terms of British television I remember watching Our Friends in the North when I was a teenager and I thought that was just an amazing bit of television and the kind of epic scale of the story and the world was I didn't understand how you did that but I found it really exciting. And then Cracker, Cracker, Jimmy McGovern was a, was a massive moment for me when I was watching that show that just felt everything in life was there in one way or another and I thought God, I wonder how you do something like that.

I don't know if you like the word quirky being used describe your writing but it's one of the things I love about Guilt. Are the techniques we can use to create “quirky” in our scripts or is it a style of writing you're born with?

I think is very dangerous as a writer when you attempt to fundamentally tweak your natural writing voice to get in some sort of voice or take or outlook that you don't feel comes naturally to you. I think you just have to…The whole thing about writing is trying to find your natural voice, that clean writing voice when you write and I'm not saying it's good or bad but it's you, it’s your pure authorial outlook on life and I think if that's quirky in how people deem it as quirky, then that's great and if it’s not that's not a bad thing otherwise it's just something else, but I think you know as a writer when you're forcing it when you're perhaps imitating or aping or reaching for something that isn't naturally you, usually that manifests itself in your struggle to write, you become very procrastinating and you write slower and slower but when it comes cleanly and freely I think it's when you know you’re on to something that feels natural and real so just finding your own voice is the most important thing,

How do you create subtext? I really struggle with on the nose dialogue.

I think you create subtext by writing an outline of your scene where it says ‘Fred wants to buy Dave's car, Dave doesn't wanna sell Fred his car’ and then you write the dialogue and you don't have any of that in the dialogue expressly. So know what your character wants in the scene, know what the problem is, Know what the issue is, know what they're trying to persuade the other character to do, so as long as you know that, then in dialogue just don't expressly address that, find other interesting ways round it. Maybe you have to have a clear line towards the end of the dialogue a clear line of instruction, if you do then find an interesting way to get there. Does one character tell the other one an anecdote and it's unclear why they're doing so, then that crystallises into a message towards the end of the story. There's lots of ways to do it. Know what your characters want to say and then find interesting ways for them not to say it overtly.

What is your writing routine? How do you juggle family and other commitments?

You know I used to be quite precious about this, you know writing, an ‘this is the time I need to write and I need to protect it and everything else, I need to protect it from all invaders’ but really I’m a bit more pragmatic about it now and you know there's other things that you have in your life that you have to dedicate time to and work around and prioritise as well so I kind of take a bigger view in it as long as I get my overall hours in over a week and I'm in good shape, and I do, I make sure I do kind of quite conventional office hours these days really. I've got an office that go to and get to around 9:00 and probably leave around 16:00 and I do calls within that occasionally I'll have to go to meetings but by and large I will get proper days writing in and often writing on a Saturday morning as well and on a Sunday, I’ll always be emailing myself little thoughts I have for the script so I write everyday one way or another but that doesn't necessarily have to be that you’re putting pen to paper. I’m always carrying the script with me that I'm currently working on.

Was there any particular scene, line, character etc that you had early on and developed the series from like a seed which the rest of the series grew out of?

Yeah well the first series of Guilt I thought about that first scene, about the brothers running over and killing an old man and reacting to it very differently. One feeling a huge amount of guilt, one feeling no guilt whatsoever, that came to me fairly cleanly and I kind of wrote the show out from there. The second series, yeah I thought a lot about one of the bars I worked in Edinburgh when I was younger, in the Grange, which was a very smart area in Edinburgh and had these beautiful old Georgian stone houses and I was just thinking about something happening in Edinburgh that could then connect out through my existing characters or some new characters and I just thought about the sellars of these old houses and how thick the walls were and how something could happen in there the people would never know about it and I just thought about a gunshot sounding in one of these cellars and what happened and how that could spiral out and connect with my earlier story so again it was that sort of initial moment or beat that I thought about and wrote it out from there.

What writing habits do you find yourself unconsciously drifting back into?

Well I think it's quite a difficult question this because I like to think that I've progressed as a writer and I've become, I’ve developed a far better understanding of who I am as a writer and how I work best and the flaws I have that I’ve kind of worked on. So the flaws I have I’ve worked on, I remember when we filmed Bob Servant, which was my first television show, and Annie Griffin was a director, and there was a scene where it was the two main characters in the various other characters, so she asked me about one of the other characters ‘What does she want here? What is she doing here?’ and I said ‘I don't know’ and I thought that's a perfectly valid answer and she just kinda looked at me mystified and said to me ‘you know you need to know, you need to understand where every character is doing your story and who they are and what they want’, and that was fantastic advice from Annie and I think that is something that I've got better at but it has taken time. I think even the first series of Guilt, I think some of the other characters were a little bit thinly drawn. I think they were often just there to help service the main plot they didn't have enough story and agenda of their own and I think I managed to correct that quite well I think hopefully in the second series of Guilt. So writing is not about drifting back to writing habits I think it's more about knowing the flaws I've always had as a writer and hopefully tracking how I’m getting better at tackling them. Other than that my writing habits, I think; I've always been pretty hard working which has been thankful, so I think the habits that I have drifted back to are often good ones. The biggest one, the biggest tip I’ve had is knowing what I'm going to write tomorrow. That's always been my biggest writing advice. Hemmingway said ‘stop when you know what happens next’. I think my less eloquent version of that is, I write myself a note, that my every writing day ends with writing myself a note for the next day with ‘here's what you're starting with, here's the scene you’re going straight to work on, here's the character you're going to look at, know what you're going to do tomorrow and then it's never the tyranny of the blank page.

When is he going to stop mucking about and do the Jim McLean biopic?

Well if only, so Jim McLean was an iconic football manager of Dundee United when I was growing up, he died sadly last year and yeah that Jim McLean biopic would be the dream gig if any Hollywood movie finally wants to turn their eyes to that fantastic story.

What keeps you going when you feel like giving up?

Well, look if you feel like giving up writing then there's something, there’s something wrong that’s not necessarily about you being a writer. Often, if you're getting into the first stages of a professional setting, it can be that you are in the wrong structure, the people you work with, without necessarily being malicious or anything are just not the right people you should be working with, you've not made those creative connections that inspire you and excite you. So don't throw the baby out with the bath water on that one, just look for other people to work with and the other thing is you might not be writing the right thing. Sometimes when you start out you think ‘well this is probably the kind of show that could get made, I should have a crack at that’ or you see an interview where someone says ‘the 大象传媒 are looking for shows about X’ and you think well I go off and do that then and you hate every minute of it cause it's not natural, it's not what you should be writing, it's not you or the story you want to tell, it's not written in the tone that you want to write in and that’s when you think ‘Ah, I’m just going to Chuck this’ and again, don’t give up because it's not about you being a writer it’s about writing the wrong thing so the first question if you ever feel like giving up writing is ‘well is it because of what I’m currently writing or is it because of the people are working with’ and if it is then change them don't give up the writing.

Do you listen to music while writing?

Yes, It depends what I’m doing. If I’m outlining, I tend to do that in complete silence. That's such, that’s the real work for me is outlining it's pretty painful but you really really really have to do it. I've come to respect outlining a lot more than I did when I was a younger writer. It's the foundations of your house and you need to get it built properly and I think that, so when I'm outlining I really do need to concentrate so I kind of, I do that in silence and in my office but when I'm writing I do listen to music often before it, just to kind of get in that kind of the mood and tone of the piece or sometimes during it. I'm around music a lot when I just freely writing. I do find it really inspirational, I find it, there’s just something about that creative connection with a really well written song and a well written bit of music that I think does transfer to the page a little bit. Also I write sometimes you know for tone, so like with Guilt for example, music is a big part of the show and often I will put a song in the script and I know that might not end up being on the screen or we might not get the rights or we might disagree in the edit about the best music for that scene. But for example the end of the first episode of the second series of Guilt where we have into the valley playing over that, I played that while I was writing that scene because it just felt right to me, it felt really uplifting and sort of victorious and there was something about that moment of Max revealing his secret mission he is on in the second series that it just felt right to me. So I did listen to that while writing the scene and then stuck in the scripts and then obviously made it all the way through to the final edit, so music is a big part of my life and it's definitely an inspirational quality I think when you're writing.

How do you prioritise your ideas and choose which to focus on?

Well currently, very fortunately, I'm kind of going from one production to another. So that kind of makes that decision for me but in periods when I'm just developing and there’ll certainly more them in the future I'm sure, I try to prioritise the idea I’m most excited about with the caveat that you do have to have a slightly commercial head and think ‘this has got a chance of getting made’, but in my office I've got lots of white boards and on one of them I have written ‘do you want to write this’ and that's something I wrote up there in a state of perhaps duress, some point a few years ago when I found myself during a development that I knew would be extremely painful and I didn’t particularly want to do and sure enough it was extremely painful and I didn't enjoy doing it. But it was, I guess probably a financial decision at the time, but I've been really kind of militant since in trying to make sure I'm writing things like I really believe in and I'm really excited about and I think if you do that's when you've got half a shot at writing something good

If you were stuck on a desert island, what one luxury item would you take?

Well I wonder, I’d probably ask to take my laptop. That's really depressing but I do love writing and I’m very fortunate on that front. I do enjoy it, it's like, it feels vocational to me, something I would do for free, I've often done for free and I’m sure I will in the future. So there's something really important to me about writing and it satisfies something within me and makes me feel comfortable and calm and at peace, so I think I would take a laptop and of course use that to speak to my family; Presumably they’re not on the island so I’d probably check with them occasionally too.

Guilt is unapologetically complex, intelligent and tight. In an age of strung out spoon fed box set dramas, did you have to fight for these principles?

I had a period about six or seven years ago when I was going to Los Angeles a lot and I was getting pilot script commissions to write sitcom pilots for these kind of quite big American studios and networks, all very mainstream work, that was financially very welcome, creatively increasingly dispiriting and I found it really, really difficult. One of the things that I had an almost visceral traumatic experience with was this repeated American television executive note of ‘could this be clearer’ and they would just go through the script and it was ‘could this be clearer, could this be clearer’ and my feeling on that was well of course it could but why is clearer better, why not trust the audience? Why not engage the audience? So let them work things out, let them have theories that might turn out to be wrong and try and follow threads, so maybe you have to stop and lean in and rewind and rewatch you know ,what's wrong with that and that's the way that I think life is. Anyway, they disagreed and that was probably why none of those shows got made, but I've still got that stubbornness within me, that No, things shouldn't be clearer, things should be murky and interesting and you know that the viewer should feel engaged and feel like they're coming on a little adventure with you and trying to work it out as they go I think that's the key I think you should send the viewer into the forest. You shouldn’t hold their hand and take them in and guide them out again. So I think that's what I find exciting and what I find exciting about, as a viewer as well. So I I've always fought that thought and I'm glad that I'm allowed to write shows now where I don't have to engage in that debate.

Best TV character of all time.

Tony Soprano without a shadow of a doubt. I've just actually started going through The Sopranos all the way through for probably the third time in my life and it's just incredible. About 10 years ago I was in New York and I’d had a couple of books come out and I was getting quite lot of journalism work at the time and I went and lived in New York for a while and ended up living in this tiny apartment in Brooklyn and I was fairly depressed probably but I kinda pulled myself out of it in a couple of ways, one of which was I went to the New York film Academy and did a short screenwriting programme, which really opened up this whole window to me into screenwriting and thinking I really think this is something I could do and the other one was I watched the whole of The Sopranos right from the start to the end and while living in New York and it just felt this really exciting experience and just the writing in that show and the unapologetic intellectualism of it really married to the action and the story and everything else. I just found so seductive and I found it really inspirational watching that show and I still do. And I think you’re never gonna write anything as good as that, but what a thing to kind of aim for and to aspire to that kind of television, that plateau, really I think that that show exists on all by itself. So Tony Soprano for me,

What have you got coming up next?

I'm just finishing a new television series called ‘The Gold’ which is a six part drama, which will be on 大象传媒 One and then it'll go out internationally on Paramount Plus streamer and that's something we're filming next year and it’s going to go out in early 2023. The story begins in 1983 with Brink’s-Mat robbery and then it runs through the 80s. I think it's a really interesting story inspired by true events. We’ve spent six months researching it, then six months writing it. It's been a big undertaking but I’ve really loved writing it, I think it's hopefully going to be a really good piece of television and were filming that next year, so that’ll be out in about just over a year’s time.

Thank you for listening to ‘Ask the write questions’ a podcast from 大象传媒 Writersroom. All episodes of ‘Guilt’ are available to view on 大象传媒 iPlayer now. Find out more about 大象传媒 Writersroom and keep up to date with news and opportunities on our website bbc.co.uk/writersroom and follow us on social media. Thank You.