Danny Stack, Scriptwriter

I became interested in screenplays from a young age. I sat down one day with William Goldman's novel, Magic, waiting to watch an adaptation on TV. I expected to see 'chapter one' appear on the screen. I got very excited thinking that I was going to see a word-for-word rendition of what was in the book. That didn't happen, and I was just completely bowled over by the idea.

The first screenplay I ever read was Into the West. When I read the script first I was saying to myself "That's not the film!" I just couldn't get my head around it at all. It made me even more fascinated about the whole process.

The first script I ever wrote was an Irish comic crime thriller called The Good Guys in 1990. I managed to option that with a producer by convincing him how terrible it was, and persuading him by how I would make it better.

I started off doing film reviews for Jo-Maxi, and at the same time I was a special-effects runner in Ardmore Studios. I was doing the runner job by day, and I'd go to RTE every Tuesday evening and do five-minute film reviews.

I was doing two jobs, but I wasn't getting paid much for either, and I was living in a grimy bedsit in Dublin, so I made the decision to move to London.

Pretty quickly I got a job at Channel 4 and I worked my way into the comedy department where I worked on shows like Ali G and Spaced. But I knew I really wanted to write so I took the decision to leave production and pursue freelance writing.

The selection process for writing for EastEnders is really tough, and I'd been turned down by them previously and was devastated, so this time [on getting selected] I bawled. Forget about crying for Doctors – I bawled for EastEnders.