David Nicholls

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For my final book, I wanted to find a book about my other great love, which is screenwriting.

And the best book about screenwriting, I think, is Conversations with Wilder.

It's a series of conversations between Cameron Crowe and Billy Wilder, based loosely on the Truffaut Hitchcock book, which is also a wonderful book.

And this is an incredibly entertaining book.

If you're at all interested in the craft of directing and screenwriting, then you must get this book.

Billy Wilder himself is a giant of Golden Age Hollywood, and he's full of gossip, but also wonderful technical insights into the craft of screenwriting.

And Cameron Crowe gives a very, very skilled interview.

Page after page, we'll just zoom through it.

It's very funny, gossipy, but also deeply serious about the very difficult business of making film and all of the things that go wrong along the way.

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Well, I wanted to write about this theatre world from the outside.

You know, I didn't want it to be from the point of view of someone who thinks it's all fantastic.

It seemed to me that it needed to be written from the point of view of someone who finds it a little bit ridiculous and someone who's sort of a watcher, an observer.

And in Shakespeare plays, there are often these characters, the Antonios and the Sebastians and the Horatios and the Benvolios, who sort of stand at the edge and watch and observe.

And I thought it would be interesting to have both the central character of the novel

to be one of those watchers, one of those outsiders, and to have him play one of those characters within the play.

He plays Benvolio, who on the page is pretty unremarkable as well.

He doesn't really have