About casting Colin Firth:

"Listen, it wasn't my idea, OK? I didn't insist on having Colin Firth, Mr Darcy, play 'me'; Liora Reich, the casting director, suggested it although I immediately saw she was right.

I felt I had heard and made every joke it is possible to make on this subject within about 10 minutes of Colin Firth's name first being mentioned; suffice to say that, yes, I am bald and he is not, he is tall and I am not, my ears and stomach protrude more than his ears and stomach, he looks good on TV in a wet white shirt and I... well, nobody has ever given me a chance, actually, so I'm not conceding that one.

The trouble is that film and TV actors look better than the rest of us - it could be argued that this is the whole point of them - and in any case, physical verisimilitude was never a prerequisite. We were more interested in acting and stuff, and nobody can deny that Firth is one of the best actors of his generation.

At Christmas 1995, when we were casting, Pride and Prejudice was being watched by 13 million people, and it was hard (for us, anyway) to see Colin swapping the Austen breeches for the Arsenal boxer shorts. But he was sent a script anyway, and, to his great credit, he bothered to read it. Once he had expressed an interest, that was it as far as we were concerned."

The First Kiss

"I knew that writers are not usually welcome on sets; I understood why, too./.../ I didn't whine. And one of the reasons for that - apart from the obvious reason that I didn't know the first thing about film-making - was that the film was shaping up to be far better than I had imagined it to be./.../ A simple example is the scene where Paul an Sarah kiss for the first time. /.../The finished version had a wonderfully funny business with coffee cups and awkwardness and silences, all of which came from David and the actors; I really cannot claim any credit for the things that one remembers about the scene". [Picture show Ruth and Colin cracking up while filming the first kiss scene.]

Colin and Arsenal

"Colin and I went to Highbury to see Arsenal against Leeds at Easter, 1996. He had been to a couple of games before - he was brought up in Winchester, and had been to the Dell to see Southampton - and he knew a reasonable amount of football. When he told me that on reading the book he was reminded of a lot of names he'd forgotten, I was fearing those names might be George Best and Pele, but they were more along the lines of Bob McNab and Jimmy Husband, which is understandable and forgivable - possibly even sensible.

He went several more times that season; he read a history of Arsenal; he watched videos and, for reasons best known to himself, memorised the names of the 1971 and 1989 squads. (In one of the classroom scenes you can see the fruits of this useless labour - he wrote down the names on the blackboard before they shot the scene.)

One extra overheard Colin Firth giving Annette Ekblom, an actress playing opposite him, a potted history of the club in between takes. Stuff like this was pretty much all I had to show for my four decades on the planet; it was a bit depressing to see someone master it in a couple of weeks." [Source: The Screenplay, Introduction]