Stuart: A Life Backwards Page #2

Synopsis: When Stuart Shorter - a homeless alcoholic with a violent past - meets writer and charity worker Alexander Masters, they strike up an unlikely friendship. As Alexander learns more about Stuart's complicated life and traumatic childhood, he asks if he can write his story and Stuart advises him to tell the story backwards, so that it's "More exciting - like a Tom Clancy murder mystery". As their remarkable alliance develops, Stuart gradually recounts his life story in reverse, his resilient personality and dry sense of humour giving the story an almost tragi-comic edge. Through post office heists, attempts at suicide and spells inside numerous institutions, Alexander is given a glimpse into a totally alien world and begins to understand how Stuart's life spiralled so badly out of control.

Genre: Drama

Director(s): David Attwood

Actors: Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hardy, Nicola Duffett, Claire-Louise Cordwell

6 wins & 1 nomination.


IMDB:: 7.9

Stuart: A Life Backwards Movie Quotes »

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: TV-MA
Year:: 2007
: 92 min
: 933 Views

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You got make it more exciting.
Do it backwards. Like a murder mystery.
Like a best-seller.
You know, like what Tom Clancy writes.
Yeah! How'd I get to be like this?
What murdered the little boy I was?
Make them nine-to-five sit up.
I mean, you put ten socks in the washing
machine and only seven come out.
Where do they go?
- Stuart?
- I'll tell you another thing and all
- Stuart?
You take the machine apart and it ain't in it neither.
- Stuart?
- What?
- What's this?
- What?
- This.
That, Alexander, is a lice.
The main place you get those
is around your bollocks.
That lice, that'll grow.
Scabies are smaller and they go under the
skin and live there, literally nibbling.
It took five and a half hours for our convoy
to do the 50 miles from Cambridge to London.
Stuart would never drive
above 30 miles an hour.
Hey, Buckingham Palace.
What a load of bollocks! Huh!
Who needs a queen?
- Oh, no, no, no, no. No, not like that.
- What?
Use this, right? Underneath, yeah?
Here you are.
You lose more heat that way
than you do that way.
Ruth and John need these:
eyes on the back of their heads!
End [indiscernible] police state now!
People are being wrongfully imprisoned
for working in a charity
and doing nothing but trying
to help the homeless.
Charity workers in prison because
of a miscarriage of oh, f*** off.
Charity workers in prison because
of a miscarriage of justice.
Okay, listen up, everyone!
Okay, everyone! Listen up!
Everyone, please. Quiet, please!
Everyone, we need you to move this way,
thank you.
Wait a minute, hold on, hold on. Why?
This is a peaceful protest.
Yeah! F***ing why?
You can't cross these brass flags if
the Home Office doesn't want you to.
That's social f***ing fascism, that is!
And then we must put a fence in behind
you to ensure you're not trespassing
and ones on either side to protect you.
- What?
From the public, sir. They might step on
you. And a fence in front just in case
during the night you roll onto
the road and get run over.
Oh, I see. So you mean
to cage us in completely.
I didn't say cage, sir, no.
That was your word.
Do prisoners really get wages?
Yeah.
You mean a lot like normal people?
Yeah, make a f***ing fortune.
Millionaires coming out of the nick
every week.
You've been in a lot of prisons then?
Have I? F***ing hell.
How many?
Well, um...
Well, start off, when I was a nipper
there was Send Detention Centre,
Baintnow House, back to Send again,
Eriestoke, Norwich,
then I grew up and went to big boy prison.
Whitemoor. Aw, now that's
what I call a real prison.
You got everything there, mate:
terrorists, psychopaths, security threats,
murderers, manslaughters, crazies...

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Alexander Masters

Alexander Masters is an author, screenwriter, and worker with the homeless. He lives in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Masters is the son of authors Dexter Masters and Joan Brady. He was educated at Bedales School, and took a first in physics from King's College London. He then went to St Edmund's College, Cambridge for a further degree in maths, and then the beginnings of a PhD in the philosophy of quantum mechanics. He was studying for an MSc degree in mathematics with the Open University, and working as an assistant at a hostel for the homeless in Cambridge, when he wrote his first book. He is the writer and illustrator of Stuart: A Life Backwards (ISBN 0-00-720037-4), the biography of Stuart Shorter. It explores how a young boy, somewhat disabled from birth, became mentally unstable, criminal and violent, living homeless on the streets of Cambridge. As the title suggests, the book starts from Shorter's adult life, tracing it back in time through his troubled childhood, examining the effects his family, schooling and disability had on his eventual state. Masters wrote the book with Shorter's active and enthusiastic help.Alexander Masters won an Arts Council Writers' Award for Stuart and went on to win the Guardian First Book Award and the Hawthornden Prize. The book was also shortlisted (in the biography category) for the Whitbread Book-of-the-Year Award, the Samuel Johnson Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States. He also wrote a screenplay adaptation, filmed in 2006 for the BBC and HBO, and broadcast in September 2007. It won the Royal Television Society Award in the Single Drama category and the Reims International Television award for the Best TV Screenplay. In 2007, he collaborated with photographer Adrian Clarke on the book Gary's Friends, chronicling the lives of drug and alcohol abusers in North East England. Masters is also the author of The Genius In My Basement (ISBN 9780007243389), a biography of mathematician Simon P. Norton. In 2016, Masters published A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in the Trash (ISBN 9780374178185)Alexander Masters has been portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in Stuart: A Life Backwards, the 2007 BBC dramatization of his biography of Stuart Shorter. more…

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Stuart: A Life Backwards Page #2

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