While Emma Thompson eventually won the Academy Award for her screenplay for 1995's Sense & Sensibility, at the time as a first time screenwriter she faced a lot of difficulty learning the process and she got a lot of surprising help. For on, she credits the film's producer Lindsay Doran who "help[ing] me, nourish[ing] me and mentor[ing] me through that process ... I learned about screenwriting at her feet."
Another interesting fact was, as she later mentioned on the BBC program QI in 2009, at one point in the writing process a laptop failure almost lost the entirety of her work! So, in panic Thompson called fellow actor and close friend Stephen Fry. Fry, who was the host of QI and a self-professed "geek", spent seven hours before he was able to recover the documents from the device. During this time, Thompson had tea with Hugh Laurie who was at Fry's house at the time and that was also how Laurie got introduced to the role of Edward Ferrars that he would play in the film. Stay tuned!