Frank Cottrell Boyce is a screen writer and children’s fiction writer. He was the recipient of the 2004 Carnegie Medal for his debut novel, Millions, which was based onhis own screenplay of the film with the same name. His novel Framed was shortlisted for the Whitbread Book of the Year as well as the Carnegie Medal. His recent novel, Cosmic appears on this year’s Carnegie shortlist.

In this interview he talks to Noga Applebaum about writing for the big screen and for children, and the value of giving children access to classic literature and high culture.

You were already an acclaimed screenwriter before you wrote Millions – what made you write a children’s book?

The honest answer is Danny Boyle. We had an evening out with a couple of people after being given the green light for the film Millions.  We were talking about books that we'd read. Danny is a voracious reader and was talking about  the highbrow books he'd read about the Middle East, and I kept talking about children’s books. Then he said, ‘why don’t you write a children’s book since you've read so many?’  I told him that I didn't have an idea for a children's books and he said, ‘two boys find a bag of money is a good idea for a book’.  I asked if it would be alright to use the same story as the film, and he said it would be great. He told me to go and write it and that's what I did. I always wanted to be a children’s writer but never got it together, and he gifted it to me; I genuinely hadn’t thought about making the script into a book until that moment. Danny thought it was good for the film -  and it was.

Do you read children's books for personal pleasure or because you have children?

Well, I do have seven children, but I actually do prefer children's books. If I listed my top five books, two or three would be children's books.

How does the writing of a screenplay compare to writing a children's novel?

 I think the big difference is that screenwriting is extremely constrained by convention right down to the nitty-gritty page counting. Writing for chidlren, on the other hand,seems to have no rules at all, you can do what you like.  For example,  Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines sequence is amazing. The film would cost $350,000,000 to make and as a result is would have to be extremely conventional in terms of the story.  Whereas in novel form he can do whatever he wants. It’s unbelievably liberating.

The other big difference is the audience. I do still love making films, but when you go to a film festival and people come up to you and say, ‘I really love your work',  you know it doesn’t mean anything. It is  completely different in the case of writing for children. I do a lot of face-to-face work with children especially with schools that are struggling close to where I live, and I love spending time there. In that situation you know that you are making a massive difference. You introduce something new because kids don’t really read that much anymore. When you write  a book and get them to read it, you are potentially  changing their lives – it’s far more rewarding to write the books than to do the films

Does your screenwriting inform the way you write, your style?

I wish it did. The happiest book experience I had was with Millions, where I’d already written the screenplay. I wish I had the chutzpah to just sit down, write the screenplay, bin it, and then write the book. But I never do that. That worked so well with Millions that I don’t really know why I haven’t done it again. Except that if I did, I would end up with tight three act books like screenplays, whereas Cosmic goes all over the place in terms of tone, location and so on – it’s more exploratory.

Writing a book is more unnerving than writing a screenplay. For instance, when you write a screenplay you know that  page 25 is the end of act one, so  a big change of direction is needed. With a book there is greater freedom.

Millions the film, and Millions the novel differ slightly in terms of the plotline.  For example the incident with Dorothy towards the end - in the first Damian sees her in bed with his father, in the second she runs off with the money, but returns – why did you change this scene?

That’s really interesting, I haven’t thought about it for years. We needed something quite big to motivate the plot – I knew I wanted an ending with people burning money. We tried lots of different ways to motivate it, and there are different takes of the film. The one we  collectively went with in the film was the scene in the bedroom. I had to show something that would make everyone understand instantly why Damian was upset. In the book it was up to me and it's easier to just explain how he's feeling:  if I write 'he was upset' then it speaks for itself. So in the book I wrote it as a weird scene which   could never have been done  in the film.  In the book that scene felt quite true somehow.

The book plays a bit more fast and loose with reality than the film does. It was written as we were going into production on the film, so I was editing it while we were shooting the film, so the film and book do inform each other. For instance, a  lot of the nice things in the book came from messing around on the set, like playing Jenga with cash – the real boys did play Jenga with the cash. I put it into the book and then told Danny about it, and he put it into the film. There was a synergy going on there.

 Which one do you prefer?

I can’t be objective about the film at all, because working with Danny was just the most wonderful thing and I felt really happy when we were working on it. It was a glorious summer, it was on my doorstep - I can’t watch the film as anything other than a record of a really happy three months. If I go to a screening, I’m not looking at the film, I’m thinking ‘that was the day we…’ or ‘do you remember when?’ – it’s not a narrative but a souvenir.

You are also adapting Framed for the big screen. In general how do you see the relationship between your books and the films?

I wrote Framed as a book first and we finished shooting last week. It is directed by Andy DeEmmony for the BBC as a prime viewing slot for one of the bank holidays. I’m not J.K. Rowling where people fall over each other to make my films.  There are not being filmed by acclamation, or because they are so popular that  there has to be a movie. They are filmed because I’m willing to go and make the movie. If I didn’t make it, nobody else would. I got such a lot out of the fact that there was a film of Millions – it gives glamour to the book and it gives it a life. So even though it is not a franchised book with a glossy cover about spies, the film gives it a kind of visibility that it would not have otherwise

Moving to Framed, you mention in the afterword that your children helped you choose the paintings which feature in the novel – to what extent do your own children influence your writing?

They had a very big influence on Cosmic, because I read it to them when I thought that it was finished and they said it was crap. My daughter Chiara, who was sixteen at the time, said ‘I hate that kid in the book’. She was right. I started again.

I consciously don’t write about my children because I’m uncomfortable about people writing about other people who they know, but after the fact I sometime notice things.For instance, in Framed Dylan is the only boy in his town, and I’ve got a son who was ten when I wrote the book and although he has three brothers, two are much too old to play with and one is a baby, so he was a boy surrounded by girls and he had a need to find another boy, to have male company, just like Dylan.

Pierre Bourdieu developed a theory that artistic taste is influenced and perpetuated by class. Framed seems to contradict that. Do you think art, including literature, are truly accessible to anyone beyond education and means?

I really hope so. It’s something I think about a lot. All I can say is that as a children’s writer you get asked to visit schools and I specifically hunt out schools, and I don’t know what the polite word is for it, but schools that have a large working class demographic. Particularly in Liverpool, because there are large areas of deprivation there.  I make really big demands, and they are always met. I don’t go into schools to talk about the Ninja Turtles or popular culture. I go and talk about Leonardo, Michelangelo, and with Cosmic, I’ll talk about physics. They love being stretched; that’s my experience. I know there is also a whole nexus of advantages to the fact that I come with the glamour of film, which is a big deal to them.

I believe in culture, and I think popular culture is great, and there’s wonderful work going on there, the artistic standards are amazing, but popular culture’s ultimate mission is to make you feel crap so that you buy stuff. It’s addictive and designed to be unsatisfying. I worked on soap operas and big Hollywood animated films. The bottom line is, if you’re working on a big Hollywood animated film, that there will be meetings about the marketability of smaller characters, what the doll will look like and so on. I’m not slagging anyone off but the bottom line is that it’s got to sell. That comes with a lot of philosophical implications.

With older art you have the freedom about how you interpret the picture, which you don’t have about Hello magazine, or Pirates of the Caribbean or Spiderman. No matter how brilliant those works are, they are not yours. If you look around the National Gallery, a lot of the pictures are tat, like Hello magazine, they were painted to flatter rich people. Because they are old, they are displaced, and it gives you the freedom to interact with them. It’s not that Velasquez is necessarily a better artist than Stan Lee - just that timehas  liberated us from having to buy something from him.

I do firmly believe that we can ask a lot of kids and I really hate the whole thing of ‘start from where they are’. I go to schools that proudly display book reports that the boys have written on a Wayne Rooney biography or the Manchester United story. I just think that’s selling them short. It’s not true that whatever you read it’s still reading. Read whatever you like in your free time, but in school you should be given what the market isn’t going to give you. There’s a big fat selling machine very well armed with geniuses and money getting you to read one particular thing, do one particular thing with your life. School should be doing something different, otherwise what’s the point? Why not just stick them in front of the telly?

 In your latest novel, Cosmic, you depict four dads and their children who win a unique opportunity to explore a secret and exciting project – the connection to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is obvious – is Roald Dahl one of your inspirations? At what stage did the idea to ‘pay homage’ to his work come into play?

Quite late! The book was about space before it was about dads. I do love Roald Dahl and I think the first movement in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is actually one of the finest pieces of writing. It’s like a football match – watching those tickets go, it’s absolutely fantastic. It’s only a little gesture in my book. I consciously nicked it.

Apart from Dahl, you seem to be influenced by E. Nesbit, especially her Treasure Seekers, as the double layered narration style of Millions suggests. Do you think authors today should look more towards the classics of children’s literature as a source of inspiration?

I’m hugely influenced by Edith Nesbit, but I don’t want to tell other people what to do. For me, writing children’s books is  a joy, and part of the pleasure is getting to play with Edith Nesbit because I think she’s fantastic and underestimated.

Is this what you read as a child?

 I have a terrible memory. I don’t remember her being important to me as a child. I do remember being in love with her when I was reading to my kids, because her books read aloud so well. They are quite a stretch because they are set in the past  but when you read them aloud she’s so funny. I don’t think there is a book in English as funny as the episode in The New Treasure Seekers where the children try making a Christmas pudding following a recipe. “It said wash the raisins, I’m not sure we got all the soap off those raisins” – it’s brilliant I think. Today nobody is doing what she did – people write fantasy or they write real life and it’s always gritty and dreary and miserable, nobody does the enchantment of the real. I know she has fantasy elements in her books but they are always subject to the rule of daily life. Actually, she’s at her best when she’s writing about getting through a day – The Railway Children, The Treasure Seekers and The New Treasure Seekers – they are her best novels. I love the Psammead, but there’s something special about these three books.

Speaking of narration, Liam in Cosmic has the vantage point of being both a ‘father’ and a child simultaneously, and he makes observations from both perspectives. Is he in some way a reflection of yourself as an adult writing for children?

I guess so. Because we had such a spread of children I am aware of  what a different dad I was to my 24 year old, to the kind of dad I am now to my four year old. Occasionally people ask, do you not want the child rearing phase in your life to end, to be able to go off and do stuff? Anything I’ve ever done without my children feels somehow diminished. I like being out with the kids, because you do things you wouldn’t do otherwise, like wandering round a castle or going to Centerparcs. If I didn’t have kids I wouldn’t do all these kiddie things, and I do genuinely like thrill rides. If you’ve the confidence to enjoy it, then they licence childishness in you and at the same they make you feel how cool and important it is to be a grownup.   It’s good to be an adult, but the writing is a way of not growing up – it’s wish-fulfilment for me – going to space, having lots of money.

In Cosmic, Liam’s success, and even survival, depends heavily on the skills he acquired while playing online games and using mobile phones. Many adults are worried, or even frightened, by children’s preoccupation with technology. What is your stance on this issue?

We have quite a low-tech household actually. I don’t have an internet connection in the house. It makes things a lot fresher and interesting. My kids have not been addicted to World of Warcraft or games like that. I interviewed people about World of Warcraft and it’s interesting what they learned. I think the whole thing of people being in their own room is quite depressing and sad, but I’m not sure that the content of what they are doing is bad. The stuff about the skills that you learn is true. I love the internet, which is why I don’t have it in the house, if I had a wireless broadband connection I wouldn’t write a word. 

I think my stance comes from being ambivalent about technology. A lot of people bought it and regretted it, but I haven’t, so I’m still interested in it. And of course my connection to film. Working on Terry Pratchett’s Truckers with Danny Boyle, I saw what people do in animation and it’s amazing.

The dads in Cosmic have different approaches to parenting, and it seems that the most successful is Liam who is not a dad at all but an exceptionally tall and hairy child. Are you suggesting that children can teach us about being adult, or that the boundaries between adulthood and childhood are blurring somewhat?

I don’t know. As a dad you model your own fathering skills on your father’s. That's something I'm quite aware of - your kids become you.  I thought my eldest spent his childhood not listening to  me, and now he's in his twenties I see that he listened to every word I said. He's a better improved version of me, of course. Liam becomes his own Dad and that implies that he was a good father, even though he didn’t have a big role in the plot. 

Your child characters are very resourceful and seem to operate best beyond adult influence. In Cosmic, for example, they venture quite far, yet manage to return home safely by themselves – do you feel that children’s freedom is curtailed by adult’s overprotection?

Yes, absolutely and completely. It is part of the tradition of children’s literature to get rid of the parent. All great books start with being sent away, or a parent dying. Today adults are over timetabling children, especially in schools. I do think children have fewer opportunities to explore than in the past. Given a chance, they nearly always come back safely and nearly always come back with something amazing. I find play-dates, and after school clubs – timetabling kids’ activities - a bit off-putting. I think boredom is really important. It is important to be at a lose end and bored, because that’s how creativity starts.

Cosmic is a celebration of fatherhood – in fact all your books feature strong and caring father figures. Do you feel dads generally get a raw deal in current children’s books?

 It’s not a political thing. It’s not about dads even, but more to do with maleness. I go to a lot of schools in Merseyside where there are very few male role models around, and the ones there are, are not very positive: gangsters, or footballers who are hopelessly remote. That’s why I think it’s important to sublime models that are good but not in a social worker kind of way.  There are a couple of schools that I visit where I know a handful of boys that I had a big impact on, and they are always in my head when I write. I ask myself ‘that’s clever, but would they get that? That’s funny, but is it funny enough to make them laugh out loud?’ . That’s who I write for.

Your books highlight charitable causes as part of the plot, which comes first – the plot or the cause?

The plot.

I look for charities to marry up with something. A lovely thing happened while making Millions – half way through the shoot, usually everybody gets a t-shirt of a hat or something, and two guys from the lighting department came and said it’s a stupid thing to do on a film that has so much heart – we should do something positive instead. So we built a well. Danny has a big foundation off the back of Slum Dog Millionaire.  You could do the same with books. Waterloo in Liverpool is twinned with Waterloo in Sierra Leone, and that came about when  I won the Carnegie Medal.  You’re supposed to give the prize money to your local library and I asked to give it to a library in Sierra Leone which wasn’t  yet built– it’s being built now.

Why does Waterloo, in all its geographical incarnations, feature in all your books?

 That’s where I live. I don’t know why I keep mentioning it – I guess it helps me to start with something I know. It must be on my mind, but you made me self-conscious about it now, so perhaps it won’t appear in my next book.

Faith plays a large role in your books. Why?

Faith is important to me - that’s who I am, I’m religious but I don’t mean religious faith necessarily – but strong belief. For example Dylan in Framed believes his village is the best place in the world despite the obvious evidence that it isn’t. With Framed it’s that Edith Nesbit thing  of saying  ‘this is Camden, it’s a magic land’ I love that. You live in a magic land, just open your eyes.

Will Cosmic be turned into a film?

 I hope so, but with Cosmic it’s a challenge because of the weightlessness. I visited Danny on the set when he was making Sunshine and filming weightlessness is really long-winded and hard, and more expensive. There’s also a casting issue, because you need a boy who looks likes a man or a man who looks like a boy. Tobey Maguire looks like a boy, but he’s not tall.

What are you working on at the moment?

 I’m working on a children’s book. It’s set in a hospital, and there are three or four kids in a hospital ward, one of them is convinced that they are not sick but they are hidden away by the government because they have secret powers. I’m about half way through. I don’t know how long it will take to finish. It took me three months to write Millions and three years to write Cosmic.

2009-06-20