Simon Moore

Simon Moore: If you do a conventional series and it's in some way political, then the audience tends to respond in terms of what their views already are - if they're left wing, they're right wing. The great thing about Fantasy is nobody quite knows what's going on, so I think you can get to an audience in a different way. I think their guard's down and half way through they realise that in some way it might be criticising or questioning some values that they hold. But by that time you've got them, hopefully. So I'm always attracted to Fantasy for those very reasons, I think it's a way to powerfully play with ideas.

Simon Moore: I have a curious way of working in that I like to work on the whole thing all the time and of course what everybody wants is, 'when are we going to have the first episode? The bizarre thing about scriptwriting is I think to be any good you've got to be very objective and very subjective and you can't do both at the same time. It's like, where do you stand to paint a painting? Well, you've got to stand that close to get the detail right, but if you stand that close you can't see what you're doing so you have to stand 10 feet back. The mistake is that a lot of people conclude that the best place to stand is five feet back which is useless, it's neither one thing nor the other. So I tend to go through a very long process with something like this where I'm not writing anything at all, just sitting with the cards on the table for weeks and weeks and weeks and I'm just moving them around trying to see the whole thing the whole time. Then quite late in the process I start to write, and hopefully by that time the writing comes pretty fast. But it's really a matter of planning, and to me it's the most exciting thing because it's not like somebody saying 'you can have an hour of episodic television', it's saying 'supposing we gave you 10 hours, what have you got to say?'