Cottrell Boyce demurely denies being paid mega-bucks for the script, but unsurprisingly it is more financially rewarding than writing Coronation Street.
In between Millions and The Odyssey, he wrote the screenplay for Laurence Sterne's reputedly "unfilmable" 1759 experimental comic novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy Gentleman, starring Steve Coogan (as Shandy father and son), Gillian Anderson (star of the X Files), Stephen Fry, Rob Brydon and Liverpool's own Ian Hart. The son of teachers, Cottrell Boyce comes from Rainhill, attended school in St Helens and now lives in Crosby, with his wife Denny and their seven children.
He says: "I love having children around me. On set a collection of small children allow you to start any conversation you'd like and end any you don't." The film Millions concerns two boys, who live in Ditton, near Widnes, recovering from the shock of their mother's death by cancer. The younger boy, Damian, played by Alexander Nathan Etel, obsessed about the meaning of doing good, starts seeing and communicating with saints. Is this because of post-traumatic stress caused by his mother's loss? Or perhaps because saints really exist?
Damian's elder brother, Anthony, played by Lewis Owen McGibbon, takes a consistently more pragmatic, hardened outlook on life throughout the film.
Into the boys' lives is thrown a large sack of redundant sterling bank-notes from a passing train, inadvertently dumped on them by robbers. Damian naturally assumes it is a gift from friendly saints enabling him to help people. Because (in the story) Britain is about to join the euro, the money must be spent immediately.
This automatically poses the moral question of accepting a gift seemingly sent from above and children's perception of such rules. In his novel, derived from his screenplay and written mid-production, Cottrell Boyce devises some subtly entertaining set-pieces, such as the excess availability of big bank notes causing hyper-inflation in the school playground economy.
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