“Go to Edinburgh until you don’t need to go anymore”

Recorded four days after the 2026 Emmy nominations were announced. Richard Gadd was nominated that week for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series for Half Man. He does not mention it once.

Six writers and directors on the years between an idea and a greenlight, and what the business asks of the people who make it.

Edited for length and clarity.

How did you start?

Tony Grisoni: I come from a particular generation — we never thought we had to have a career. It was really doing what we did as kids, which is play.

It took a long time to get back to that. I did lots of different jobs in filmmaking. I was a runner. I was an assistant director. Eventually I decided I wanted to be a writer.

But it took ages to get back to the idea of playing, where you weren’t scared. Where it was just about enjoyment, and telling someone a story as clearly as possible to make them as enthusiastic about it as you were.

Whenever I was trying really hard, it went horribly wrong. Because I was trying to succeed too much, and the fear of succeeding got in the way.

Gurinder Chadha: I had no plans to do anything I’ve done. At school I said I wanted to go to university and the careers officer said, oh, I think you should go to secretarial college.

I said I don’t want to be a secretary.

She said, men really need good secretaries.

That was probably a defining moment. Then I became a journalist, because I thought — why do you want to change the world? I thought I could do it as a BBC journalist.

Wrong.

Then I thought, actually, I’d like to tell the story of who I am, because people like me aren’t represented. Having grown up with the whole National Front thing in my teenage years, I was looking for ways to combat prejudice and racism, and I decided the way to do it was through storytelling.

So it became a political thing for me, rather than I want to be a writer. I never planned on being a writer. I never planned on being a director.

Storytelling for me is about having something to say, and knowing you have a reason to say it. If you have that, it’ll get you through the highs and lows.

Matt Charman: I used to put on plays in the garden and at school, and I didn’t really know why.

Then I studied English at UCL, and before 9/11 you could wait outside a theatre for people to come out for a cigarette at the interval, and creep in after them. So three or four times a week I’d see the second acts of all these shows.

Then I’d lie in bed in halls thinking — okay, I wonder if they were married. Is that why they broke up? And the next day I’d go to the library or to Samuel French and read the first act, and find out how close or how far away I was.

I had no idea why I was doing it. Probably I was quite lonely.

But I started noticing the same directors’ names coming up, the same writers, the same actors I’d seen six months earlier. And I realised: this is a community. There’s a group of people who make a living doing this. It’s not a one-off thing.

That’s what made me think — I’d quite like to do that.

It started with illegally creeping into shows.

Thea Sharrock: The moment I knew was when I decided to leave university early to change my path. That was a big thing. I had to present my parents with this new idea that I was going into — I didn’t say storytelling, but basically storytelling. They took it very differently.

That was when it became a career I was looking for, rather than the playful side of it. When the child became the adult.

James Watkins: I grew up loving movies, obsessed with movies, wanting to get into that world and not knowing how or knowing anyone.

I came down to London and started as a runner, doing odd jobs. A few people asked what I wanted to do, and I said I want to tell stories, I want to write, I want to direct.

And they said: well, if you want to write — write.

So that’s what I started doing.

Richard Gadd: It’s like loads of little turning points. Looking back, I was always writing as a kid. One of my earliest memories is my dad buying a PC — one of those chunky ones you had to squeeze through the living-room window to get into the house.

What did being a runner teach you?

Tony Grisoni: Being a runner is the best job in the world, because you dip in and out of every activity on the set. You understand how a film comes together.

This was the late seventies and eighties, when BBC television drama was extraordinary — Play for Today, The Wednesday Play. Films for television, essentially. Alan Clarke would come over and say, oh, did you read that? And you’d go away and come back with notes. Everyone was polite and sweet about it, so you felt genuinely part of it.

There was a producer called Tony Garnett — the best producer I ever worked for. Someone asked me to get prop cigarettes for a scene, and I knew enough to buy five packets in case a pack got opened on camera. And nobody said what brand, so I got to choose the brand for the character. I felt almost responsible for the whole drama.

I ran up the hill and passed Tony Garnett, who asked where I was going. Prop cigarettes, I said.

He said: do us a favour. Get me a packet on the budget.

I came back down, delivered the props, handed him his cigarettes. And he said: thanks very much. That’s a lesson. That’s what you call corruption.

He was a great producer like that.

What did theatre give you?

Thea Sharrock: I took a gap year and spent half of it at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, literally doing anything anyone needed doing — which meant I ended up in rehearsal rooms watching a director. That’s when I realised what I wanted to do.

Then I got a job at the National Theatre Studio, which is an incredibly special part of the National. It’s the one place I know that really looks after writers before they’ve had anything put on. They get housed for six months. They’re given a room, a space for a computer, somewhere to go — so they can feel today I’m a writer, because I have somewhere to go. When you’re starting out that’s an amazing thing.

There were two of us running the whole thing. And in my time there, Patrick Marber came in on a Friday afternoon and said, Thea, I’ve finished this piece, it hasn’t got a name — would you read it over the weekend?

It was Closer.

Martin McDonagh arrived for a six-month stint and wrote his first play there.

What I learned, from Richard Eyre who was running the National then, was very simple: the writer is the most important person in the room. That’s the biggest thing theatre gives you. Whether the writer is alive or dead, they are the most important person.

I also met a lot of directors, nearly all of them men, and by and large they all felt they were the most important person in the room. Looking after those writers gave me a completely different point of view, which I don’t think I’d have had otherwise.

Matt Charman: The power of two actors, honestly.

I love genre. In film and TV you get boxes of tricks — you can do remarkable things with visual effects. But it doesn’t fix anything if the core isn’t emotional or characterful or truthful.

Theatre taught me early that, big shows aside, there are often no special effects and nowhere to hide. It’s just your story, your dialogue, your characters. And once you embrace that it’s liberating, because you realise there’s a reason your name is on the front of the script. Your contribution is paramount. You’re going to work with people who make it much better and add enormous value — but they can’t add value to a blank page.

The National Theatre Studio is a couple of chairs and a rehearsal room. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.

And what does theatre give a director?

Thea Sharrock: It’s a bit like being with a kid learning to ride a bike. There are moments where the writer has a great idea and you just let them go — you’re the one who pushes off, and off they go. That moment when they’re going is the moment you can step away. But as they’re about to go, you’re also there to catch them and say honestly: this is working, or it isn’t.

What theatre gave me was a sense of collaboration. And the thing that still throws me in film is that collaboration is not a word that comes up much. You feel very alone, largely because of the pressure — there’s so much money involved.

I feel lucky to have come from very small places. I worked at the Gate, where there was hardly any money, so there was a different kind of pressure. But it was more forgiving. The community was welcoming.

That’s why I left university early. I didn’t feel safe there. I didn’t feel stretched. I didn’t feel I was with my people. I’d met my tribe beforehand.

And taking that into film has been enormously helpful, because the relationship you build quickly with a writer determines how the film continues to be written. In film and television the writing never stops. Even once you think you’ve shot everything, you get into ADR and you need more.

Gurinder, you came from journalism.

Gurinder Chadha: I was a broadcast journalist, working in radio, and I’d spend hours at night doing little packages — which was effectively editing.

The five-link package was the thing everyone aimed for: an interview, a bit of actuality, another bit of interview, another sound. I was building little stories in the edit room, and I liked the way two plus two equalled five. One person saying this, someone else saying that, add a bit of music, and suddenly everything changes.

That was my eureka moment, in the newsroom.

What journalism gives me now is that I’m always asking: what is the point of this scene? What am I trying to say? What are these characters trying to say? What’s their worldview? It’s very tight in that way.

I’m in awe of directors like Lynne Ramsay, who is so evocative and lets the storytelling happen completely differently. I’ve always felt I don’t have that luxury, because I’m negotiating so many things I’m trying to say.

And I think what we all fear when we sit down to write is rejection. It doesn’t matter how successful you are. You already know what the notes are going to be from the studio or the producers as you’re writing. Journalism means I’m always second-guessing what someone’s going to say.

Richard, tell us about Edinburgh.

Richard Gadd: I owe the Fringe everything. If I pinpoint all the big turning points in my life, they happened at Edinburgh.

Baby Reindeer was born there — that’s what Netflix picked up. But even before that, Monkey See, Monkey Do was when I went full-time. That was 2016, and suddenly I was a full-time creative, which took so much to get to. I’d been working in a bar.

It’s an incredible place to hone your craft. You perform to an audience and get feedback that makes you better, and you almost start to understand on a subconscious level what people want.

And on a practical level, the entire industry congregates in one place for a month, literally seeking out new talent and new voices.

People ask, should I go to Edinburgh? And I say: go to Edinburgh until you don’t need to go anymore.

I’ve never known anyone go and not have something happen that made their career better. You can have a wretched month where the shows don’t go well and nothing turns out how you wanted. But I guarantee you’ll have met someone, shaken the right hand. And even if it isn’t professional connections, there’ll be personal moments of joy along the way that make it worth it.

I did ten years in a row. Turning out a show every single year trains the muscle. It’s a lot of pressure to put on yourself — but then you hit production and they say, get the script round next week, cut ten scenes, change that bus stop to a pub, make that night scene a day scene.

So it’s good training for writing under production pressure, too.

Was Baby Reindeer a hard sell?

Richard Gadd: In a lot of ways the play version had real commercial potential. Me standing on a stage talking about being stalked. If you pull the themes out from a bird’s-eye view — stalking, complicated interpersonal dynamics, hidden backstory — the play was innately televisual.

Then you play it out for real and it becomes far more visceral.

I think the more idiosyncratic the work is, the more freedom you’re sometimes allowed. Writers get commissioned for a tone of voice people haven’t heard before and find interesting, and as a result you can side-step a lot. Sometimes you’re not over-noted, because they want to preserve that.

At the time it was the cheapest drama Netflix had ever made. So I got a lot of freedom. It was an artistic risk — on the artistic end of the spectrum was the phrase that got used a lot.

I never expected it to blow up the way it did. But I don’t want to sit here going, oh, I didn’t know, I didn’t know. I really believed in it. I thought it was saying and showing things that hadn’t been seen, or hadn’t been seen in a while. I thought it would create a conversation at the very least.

The only key to a hit is overriding authenticity.

Look at Adolescence, which followed and captured a huge worldwide audience. It’s about a fifteen-year-old boy killing a schoolmate. None of that screams commercial hit. But when you watch, something cuts through that makes you feel like you’re watching a soul. It’s transcendental and hard to describe.

If I think about the zeitgeist hits of the past few years, they show you something you didn’t realise you needed to see. A priest and a sex addict falling in love. A mob boss with clinical depression. A chemistry teacher with cancer cooking meth.

You can boil them down to a simple, intriguing sentence that makes you go: oh, f*ck, that’s such a good story. I didn’t realise I needed that.

Can you chase the commercial?

Matt Charman: I don’t think you can. But you have to be mindful of your audience.

It’s an exciting time. When I started there was a phrase in Hollywood — same but different. Somebody makes a hit, and they want that again but slightly adjusted.

What’s happened now is that a lot of the more generic material has migrated onto streaming platforms. And so in cinema, what people want is singularity. This is the letterboxd generation. They want something that cuts through, because there’s so much noise.

Anything with a bit of grip on your imagination, anything slightly different, is genuinely being sought out now.

And if you chase the zeitgeist, you’ll miss it. It’s gone by the time you catch up. You chase the commercial idea — nobody knows what that is. If they did, it would be bottled and mass-produced.

The only thing you can do is use your friends and your family, and tell stories.

Sit down with someone and say: I’ve got an amazing story to tell you. Then tell them the story.

I promise it won’t be very good the first time. But it gets better and better. That one-person audience teaches you an enormous amount, because as you pitch it you’ll come up with something better just as it’s coming out of your mouth.

And that’s the clearest way of knowing whether something is commercial. You have to be brutally honest with yourself and with their feedback. If you see them checking their phone, it isn’t commercial. If they’re going go on, go on — and the phone rings and they answer the door and come back and say go on — that’s a commercial idea.

Commercial just means that people want it. That’s all it means. It doesn’t mean gross. It doesn’t mean some horrible Hollywood knockoff. It just means people want to see it.

Gurinder Chadha: I always ask people: would you spend seventeen pounds going to the cinema to watch that? How do you expect other people to spend that money? Is your idea worth it? Can you sustain it?

People write to me saying, I’ve got this really good idea, it should be told. Everyone’s got a story. My response is: anyone can have a good idea, but can you sustain it for ninety minutes? What’s going to make me still be there after thirty pages? After sixty?

Writers often feel, especially starting out, that I have such a brilliant idea, the world has to hear me.

And sadly the world doesn’t give a sh*t, really — unless you pitch it well. Unless you bring yourself to it and write about what you know, and bring an authentic emotion so that you demand our attention.

Why should we sit and listen to you? Because you’ve had a hard time? We’ve all got that. What is it about your story that makes us go: oh my God, I’m hooked.

On structure.

Gurinder Chadha: I did the Robert McKee course very early on, and I’ve stood by it. That three-act structure is the best advice I give young writers.

Used as intended, it doesn’t give you all the answers, but it’s a fantastic framework for looking at what story you’re actually telling. He called it the negation of the negation. For about twenty years I had no idea what that meant. What he means is: the worst thing that can happen to your characters — keep pushing it. Push it, push it, all the way through ninety pages.

Writing isn’t typing.

Tony Grisoni: One of the things that interests me about writing is that it isn’t typing.

I know I’m not the only one here who’s made the mistake of I must go and do some writing, and you sit in front of the laptop and put stuff down — better to put stuff down than not, because then you can rewrite it. But that’s not the same thing.

I got involved in workshops in France and Italy where they talk about something called pre-writing. Possibly French conceptual stuff, but it’s a beautiful idea: leave the laptop, leave the notebook, and tell the story. You tell it to one another.

Because when you’re doing that, you’re aware of an audience receiving it. And there’s a place where writing is also a performance of a kind. I’m not a performer by any means, but there’s a thing where you start to feel like one of the characters inside yourself, and you test out the dialogue, you take on their attributes.

The problem is you need someone else there, and we’re all so isolated by this industry.

Tony Garnett said something about the auteur theory. I said, oh yes, we did that at college. And he said: it’s just vanity. And he’s kind of right. It’s a way of selling something, and there’s a vanity in giving authorship to one person when you’ve got this beautiful thing that’s all about the dynamics between different people.

I remember thinking I’d never need other writers, and then forming a little club so we could meet — because on your own you’re so vulnerable and so weak.

Why is it harder now?

Tony Grisoni: Everyone’s worried about getting fired. There’s no money in town.

There’s been an expansion of middle management, from Tony Blair onwards — it got bigger and fatter. And of course those people are worried about their mortgages and their kids’ schools, so they hang on to their jobs. There isn’t enough work to go round.

So they’re between you and the idea. Always.

What do you know now that you wish you’d known?

Tony Grisoni: A really simple thing. When you tell a story, you connect the blocks with therefore, or and so, or but.

What you don’t connect them with is and then, and then, and then.

Thea Sharrock: Two things. Respect the people whose jobs you can’t do.

And deadlines. Allow yourself to procrastinate for a certain amount of time, but say to a friend or a teacher: I am going to send you something in two months. It’s definitely coming. And if I don’t send it, you have to make my life hell.

Commit to that. Because in two months you’ll otherwise say oh, I’ll give myself till Christmas. Particularly if, like a lot of us, you started by writing around the edges — I had crappy jobs and got up early in the morning, and it’s very easy to let yourself off the hook.

Write for that deadline. Pretend you’re in production. Pretend that friend needs the first draft to go and make the show.

And we’ve all got to the end of a day and created junk. Absolutely nothing of value. That’s okay. That’s going to happen.

James Watkins: Mine comes from working with actors. What does your character want, and what are the obstacles in their way? As long as every scene is about that, you’ve got something to hold onto.

Gurinder Chadha: You have to write for yourself. Be proud of what you’re writing. The world might not love it, the world is probably not ready for it — but as long as you do your very best to push yourself and write interesting, engaging, emotional stuff, you’re really writing for yourself.

It’s an absolute marathon and it’s really hard. If you want it badly enough, you keep going.

Richard Gadd: Always be aware of your motivations behind doing something.

So many things came my way early on, before I got my foot in the door of television. I was on that endless merry-go-round of the treatment stage — you’ve got an idea and it gets optioned. That word, I heard it constantly.

And the number of times I said yes and spent enormous time on things that didn’t speak to me in any way. It doesn’t serve anyone. It’s never going to work for anyone.

A big television producer who was into obscure live performance came to one of my comedy shows and got me in for a meeting. I couldn’t believe it. I got a haircut, a shirt, everything.

And they said: I’ve got this idea, I think you might be good for it.

It couldn’t have been further from me. It was about vlogging. Influencers, early on — people putting on makeup, saying so this is this makeup. And I said, sounds good to me, let’s do it.

I was up all night trying to understand why millions of people were watching someone put on makeup. I was trying to dig deep. And I just couldn’t get there.

It was one of those things that would not die. I was handing in crap in the hope they’d drop it, and it just kept going and going. At one point I thought: this might get made. And I’m f*cked if it does.

Every time I’ve taken something on because I wanted to work with the person, or wanted the money, or hoped there’d be something waiting at the end of it, I’ve only ever had a bitter experience. It’s only ever left me feeling I could have spent that time on something that genuinely spoke to me.

So: always follow your creative intuitions.

The only key to a hit is overriding authenticity.

Richard Gadd speaking on stage at State of the Story, BFI Southbank, London