Top 19 Michael Hirst Quotes

First episodes are difficult things to write.

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.

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

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.

You have to create characters – certainly in series TV – who people engage with. They don’t have to be nice; you don’t have to agree with them. But they do have to be compulsively watchable and believable and human, and you want to know what happens to them.

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

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

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.

I’ve found that using historical material and being rooted in historical material is liberating because I always think to myself, ‘Well, this actually happened, and this is fantastic!’ That’s why I don’t like fantasy, in a way. Because it’s sort of in emptiness.

When you’re making a TV drama, the showrunner is God, and so however onerous and difficult and consuming that responsibility is, you’re being treated with respect, so it changes your whole outlook to the production. You’re being asked about costumes, set design, music, every aspect of the show.

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.

People offer me loads of stuff, and some of it I like, but I just can’t do it because I can’t write it all. So I might get in the position where I have some sort of company and just write maybe the first episode, but these are love projects, in a way.

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.

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

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.

‘Downton Abbey’ is just one cliche after another, and it is a really, really poor piece of drama. But that’s only me talking. That’s just my take on it.

I only have one idol: John Lennon.

I got interested in the Vikings, and then you realize that there isn’t much to be read about them because they did not write their history. It was written by hostile witnesses, by Christian monks and so on. From what I could see and understand, I was really excited about it. I loved their culture and loved their gods.

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.