Michael Hirst Quotes

For 'Vikings,' we have to do so much outside shooting, and it's normally - I think with American shows, it'll be 60 or 70 percent inside and a little bit outside, but with us, it's almost 70 percent outside, and that's huge and really difficult.

I'm very bad at delegating writing responsibilities, because I've never been able to do it; I've never had any help or looked for any help.

Nobody knows what really happened in any historical period. There are some periods where we know more than others, though.

I only have one idol: John Lennon.

People love cliches. If you can give people cliches, that's very good TV, then.

Once I engage in something, I really engage in it, and I love the process of reading and researching because I come from an academic background.

With 'Vikings,' I had the task of making these people interesting and, to a point, sympathetic.

My instinct is to absolutely recoil when talking about writing in a mechanistic way. Nothing could be dumber than writing a film or TV script based on prescriptions, on other peoples' ideas of what character should be.

It works better if your lead character is complex and interesting and not perfect.

When I did 'The Tudors,' there was massive information available and a ready-made market.

I felt that a lot of Viking culture had been caricatured and misconstrued. After all, they were far more democratic than the Saxons and the Francs, who were exercising really hierarchical social structures at that time. The Vikings had popular meetings where everything could be discussed.

The Vikings certainly didn't write anything about themselves; it was not a literate, but rather a pagan, culture. So what we get was written later by Christian monks. But there were occasional reportings and recordings of people who had traded usually with the Vikings.

I couldn't give 'Vikings' away - I mean, I love these people. And I'm not sure anyone else writing it would necessarily have the same feeling towards the characters that I do.

TV drama - not always, but on the whole - were pretty appalling and very secondary, too. No one expected it to be like watching a movie; that was the point. But I think when you start watching 'Vikings,' it is like watching a movie - you're taken somewhere else.

I wasn't setting out to write a documentary; if I had, I would have done it in a completely different way. I was asked to write a drama that would appeal to a big audience in America that had no knowledge or interest in The Tudors at all.

Everything in 'The Tudors' is initially based on my historical research, and the fact is that the most unlikely scenes were the ones which were probably most based on reality. I prefer to be as real as possible, and there is so much of that story that you just can't make up.

Of course I had written a film about Elizabeth I, and I loved the Tudor period, and I think at the time Working Title and I had debated on whether to do Elizabeth I or Henry VIII. I'd always wanted to do Henry VIII. Like Elizabeth, I'd had this feeling that it had never properly been addressed.

First episodes are difficult things to write.

The American obsession with 'Downton' amuses me slightly because it's such a fiction. I've always been questioned about my historical veracity, and 'Downton' just flies past, when it's completely made up.

The key for me with historical characters is they're interesting because they're human beings. A little bit of Hemingway goes a long way here, but journalists and writers should honestly look at their material and have a real interest, a real passion in what they want to write, and they should also have a lot of knowledge as well.