Michael Frayn

What did you mean by that?

is that people feel themselves helpless in the grip of particular styles of behavior that they're committed to.

They have to remain polite.

They have to stick by their religious principles and so forth, even though it makes life impossible for them.

And it took me years to see that I didn't really see the defining characteristic of human beings as being helpless.

It seemed much more that we're all trying to do things all the time.

We've all got a project.

We're trying to do good things.

We're trying to do bad things.

We're trying to advance our own careers.

We're trying to be kind to other people or whatever.

And often we make a mess of it and we're frustrated by the difficulties of the real world.

I think that's more what I see as a source of comedy, the gap between intentions and what we actually manage to achieve.

I don't think we see each other's first drafts.

We like to get to what we think is a finished draft and then show it to each other and then make comments on it.

And I've certainly made a lot of changes as a result of what Claire said about what I've had regarded as a finished draft.

Yes, absolutely.

And I think it was just the sort of ethos of her writing seriously about real people.

And the fact that we used to do some of the research together.

We used to drive to places she needed to go to.