© Kinvara Balfour

Peter Morgan is the latest person to be featured in "The Visionaries", a series of short films about forward thinking people, filmed on an iPhone and directed by Kinvara Balfour. In the film, embedded below from YouTube, Morgan reveals much about how he creates the hit Netflix programme The Crown, saying, "I had the idea when I wrote the scene for The Audience [his 2013 play about Queen Elizabeth II's weekly meetings, called audiences, between her and her prime ministers]."

"I suddenly thought how interesting to have this man in his mid-70s, and certainly near the end of his political life, and also near the end of his natural life, and here was this young girl who had been thrown into this predicament, way younger than she ever expected to be. And I thought, 'is it a kind of Educating Rita story?' And then I realised how much he was actually dependent on her and how much he used her, and that actually in the course of that relationship, it was a bit of a chess match – that what started as a willing apprenticeship evolved into much more of a real battle of wills.”

Morgan initially considered The Crown as a feature film, and he had some clear casting choices in mind. “I thought, 'Oh, this makes perfect sense as a film', and you can almost picture Michael Gambon doing it, and [for the role of the Queen] Carey Mulligan.” He looked into the story "only half-interested", but soon got drawn in by the story of Her Majesty and the royal family.

The Crown, and its rumoured £9.3 million budget per episode, is wholly produced in Britain. Peter Morgan works with a team of eight researchers to come up with storylines. He says, "I will ask to read everything I can about what happened in [a particular time period] to all the main characters, and then pick certain events. Once I’ve identified what really interests me, I’ll ask the researchers to drill down much more. They provide documents, and I start coming up with stories.”

In the film, Morgan also provides insights into the process of making Frost/Nixon. (Balfour's short film is dedicated to Sir David Frost and his late son Miles – her uncle and first cousin, respectively.) Originally a stage play, later made into a film, things didn't go smoothly on his initial meeting with Frost. Over a morning breakfast meeting at Claridge's, also attended by Robin Cooke and diplomat Madeleine Albright - “What a morning, it was like Murder on the Orient Express” - he pitched him the idea. He said that later, “It got a bit testy with Frostie. He didn’t like what I wrote about him. I begged David to hold his nerve. But he didn’t really. He wanted to shut the play down."

"I kept saying to him, 'If you, Frostie, were to write the play about Frostie that you would like to see, the world probably wouldn’t like to see it. And even though you may hate what I write about you, when I wrote The Queen, if you read the screenplay, you would, I think, be completely satisfied that it was quite a critical portrayal and it left you in no doubt that she was quite a cold, unhelpful, uncooperative, distant person who was not willing to budge an inch that week. But somehow her human failings made it feel like quite a sympathetic portrait. There’s something in that extraordinary process of once something gets made and shot, you get a bit of acting as wonderful as Helen’s, something shifts and it becomes something different.'" Eventually, Frost changed his mind. Morgan says, "I am happy to say we got the play on, even though he tried his best to injunct it. He then grew very fond of it."

Peter Morgan appears in The Visionaries, a series of mini-films for the Instagram generation. Shot solely on iPhone, featuring the true visionaries of the world: human beings who see and do things differently. Watch the full series for free, inclusively, on YouTube.

Read more about The Crown

• How The Crown revived our love for the Queen

• The Crown’s Vanessa Kirby on why she wants to get drunk with Princess Margaret

• Extraordinary facts about the Queen's life