Sharman Macdonald

Sharman Macdonald is an accomplished screenwriter and playwright whose work includes After Juliet, The Winter Guest, Borders of Paradise, Broken Hallelujah, and The Girl With Red Hair.

Her new film The Edge of Love starring Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller is out now.

What interested you in writing about Dylan Thomas?

I was nineteen, and I was at university in Edinburgh, and I was in "Under Milk Wood" at the Traverse. I absolutely fell in love with his words then. And then seven years ago Rebekah Gilbertson came to see me and said, "My grandfather, William Killick, was accused of attempting to murder Dylan Thomas" – well that's pretty gripping for a start. And she said, "I wonder if you'd be interested in looking at the story of this." And I grabbed at it, because I thought it would be a fascinating story, and that I would have the rhythms of Dylan Thomas and the words that I loved to always be my safety net if I came apart in the writing of it.

It's a difficult and complex film. Where did you start?

By taking liberties. I suppose I decided, since my son hadn't heard of him, that I could regard him not as an icon, and take liberties with him. There are a generation of people who've actually come up to me and said we know nothing about this man, we're so glad to have been introduced to his poetry. It's the under-twenty-five-year-olds, which is really lovely.

And so I told Rebekah that I needed permission to be able to take whatever liberties the story demanded of these characters. And although there are central events which are true, which is the shooting through the walls of the bungalow and the subsequent trial, the rest of it is not true, it's surmise on my part, it's a fiction. And although I had access to Rebekah's family papers, actually I made it up. I said "You have to imagine the worst that I could possibly write about your beloved grandparents" – and they were her beloved grandparents – "and you have to go away, you have to think about that. Take a week, and think about it, and if you still want me to go to all these bad places that you can imagine, then if you come back at the end of that week and say go ahead I'll go ahead, but unless you take that week I'm not touching it with a bargepole."

Some writers, writing about real people, worry about putting words in their mouths. Does that matter?

You have to get over the feeling of guilt. And there are feelings of guilt, but you really do have to get over them, because none of us know what people said to each other. We can't know that and yet we're writing about that amazing circle of daily life. So we have to get over the guilt, otherwise you'll never get anywhere with it.

Actually, I never thought of it as a biopic, I thought of this as a story about four friends set against a background of the Second World War, in which two of them happen to be Dylan and Caitlin Thomas.

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