The following comes from an online transcript of scriptwriter Simon Beaufoy's BAFTA lecture in 2010. He is actually in interview-mode-conversation with Matthew Sweet.

[Quote] In "The Full Monty" we wrote what became a scene that everyone remembers and takes away from the film, and says, "Oh, I love that bit, where they do this."
I wrote it and crossed it out, wrote it and crossed it out. We tried not to film it. In the edit, everyone stood around and went, "I don't know, it's too much, it's a slight change in tone." But it became the scene that everyone remembers, and goes to show that filmmakers really don't know anything. Audiences will decide....

[Clip from "The Full Monty" in which the characters start dancing to "Hot Stuff" whilst in the job centre queue]

[Quote] "The Full Monty" was an example, and a really telling example for me very early in my career, that a film will tell you what it wants to be, whether you like it or not. I was setting out to write a political film with some jokes in. We were all trying to do that. Uberto [Pasolini] the producer, and Peter [Cattaneo] the director: that was our intention.

During the editing process it became a comedy with some politics. It jumped genres, which was a really extraordinary thing for me, watching that happen.
So rather than cut it as a film where you stay back in that slightly naturalistic way, and watch the scene develop, and if there's a joke happening over this side and you catch it, great, but if you don't it doesn't matter, because there'll be another one along shortly -- we cut in on the joke, we cut to a close up and then left a little gap for laughter.
And then in the next scene, which was pretty downbeat, we put some jaunty music under it to keep things rolling along. And suddenly it became a comedy, an out-and-out comedy, and none of us were really happy with that, in this very British, grumpy way. We were all going, "It's not as good as it was," because we wanted the film that nobody wanted to see that was all very serious and political, and the film just said, "That's not me, that doesn't work that way. What you've got is this, this is what works."

And this has happened on every film that I've worked on. You have to let the film tell you what it's going to be. You can fight it all the way....going, "you have to have this at the end." And it never works. [Endquote]