Things Are Looking Up: Fasten your seat belts. Frank Cottrell Boyce's 'Cosmic' is out of this world.

Photograph by Rebecca Lupton

One of my son’s friends had one of those bizarre growing spurts and was really uncomfortable with it. I’m always looking for “wouldn’t it be great if...” ideas for stories. It struck me that children are much more restricted now than they were when I was young—they’re chaperoned and watched and timetabled. So I thought that if you were a kid who looked like a grown-up, you could cut loose and go wherever you liked.

It’s one of the funniest books I’ve read in ages, but I heard that your own children hated the original version.

I had a much less outgoing, geeky character. They just couldn’t abide him. They were like, “Oh, I just don’t want to know any more about this guy.” So I guess it’s the character that makes all the difference in the end.

You have seven kids between the ages of 4 and 23, and you work at home, in Liverpool, England. Does your study resemble Superman’s Fortress of Solitude?

No, it really, really doesn’t. This is a good lesson in greed. When we bought this house, there’s a very, very cute little room in the back that looks down into the garden, and I just thought, “I’m having that.” And, of course, because it’s an incredibly appealing room, everybody wants to be in it. It’s very small. They come in and sit on this couch and they read and they feed the squirrels we have out on the balcony. It’s just too nice. I should have chosen the cellar.

How do you manage to accomplish anything?

I get up quite early—but not punishingly early—and I try not to do anything ’til I’ve done my 1,000 words for the day. If I know what I’m doing, I can write those words quite quickly. But if I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m just stuck in my pajamas vegetating in that room ’til the words are done.

You’re a successful film writer whose credits include 24 Hour Party People, Hilary and Jackie, and Millions, which is about two boys who find a suitcase full of money. Film critic Roger Ebert described you as “arguably the most original and versatile screenwriter” in England. That’s quite a compliment.

Yeah. Except I don’t know if original and versatile are what you necessarily want in a screenwriter. [He laughs.] I think kind of reliable and exciting, maybe. Do you know what I mean? An original and versatile screenwriter is like having a gymnastic waiter. It’s OK up to a point, but now just go and get the food.

Thanks to a suggestion from Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle, you began writing kids’ books. How did that happen?

I originally wrote Millions as a screenplay. After Danny definitely agreed to do the film, we went out to celebrate, and we were talking about what books we were reading. Danny is a voracious reader, and he’s always reading about politics in the Middle East or new insights in psychology or the oil industry. And I was sitting there going, “Well, 'Millie-Molly-Mandy,’ they’re really good books.” I love to read children’s books, and I read a lot of them. So he said, “Why don’t you write one?” And I said, “I’ve never had an idea.” He said, “Millions is a good idea.” I have to say, once I started writing [the book] Millions, I felt as if I’d come home. Going into schools and reading, it’s such a fantastic feeling. It’s like, oh, this is what it’s supposed to be like.