Top 178 Quotes & Sayings by Steven Knight - Page 2

Any genre as it's called, I think can be quite reductive in terms of what a film is, because I think there is an eagerness to put in any film, in anybody's work, to give it a genre title and I think as a consequence of that, the film starts to obey the rules of the genre.

You meet people and you hear the way they talk and the way they behave, and that subconsciously gets fed into the characters you create 'cause you have to make them flesh and blood somehow.

Once upon a time there was a physicality to the business of investigating a serious crime. There were objects, pieces of paper, even good old-fashioned fingerprints. Today it's different. Because all of us are routinely and voluntarily giving the intimate details of our lives to all kinds of people whether we realize it or not.

I never set out to write a script that is 'topical.'

There's lots of different ways of writing stuff and lots of different mindsets to have, but I think when it's your own creation, it's more pleasurable because you have total control.

A commission and an original are two different things, and both have their virtues and vices. A commission is a bit more collaborative, in that you outline the story that you think should be told, and then you write it. And then, there are notes and you change it, in the conventional studio system.

Dialogue is what I like doing. It's what I am good at doing.

Locke' is a different way of making a film as well as being a different sort of film.

The great thing about America is that people take its history and mythologise it.

What Westerns did was to take a world and mythologise it.

There have been times when I've shaved twice in the same morning because I've forgotten I've shaved already.

Making a film is hard because you're not dealing with the intangible. When you're writing, it's perfect because it's only in your head and then you have to take it into the physical world and that's where things drop off and things fall apart and you have to fix them.

Yeah, I think people are drawn to characters that break the rules.

Part of the reason for doing 'Peaky Blinders,' apart from the fact that it was a personal story and I've always wanted to do it, was what was great I felt is that Birmingham is probably the least fashionable city in Britain.

Peaky' is the luckiest project I've ever been involved with.

I think the best research is people you meet and things that they say, rather than second hand accounts of something. I think when you meet someone and talk to them, then you get the real thing and that's what you can use. That's the material you can actually put on the page.

Getting 'Millionaire' right was as hard as writing 'Dirty Pretty Things.' Harder. In the pilots, contestants kept wanting to take the money; we had to find ways - the lifelines - of keeping them in the seat, answering the questions. But there is so much snobbery about popular culture. A game show just isn't valued as much as a novel.

What I like about 'Taboo' just in general, even in writing it, you are not certain what the motives are sometimes because these characters are so odd that you let them speak for themselves and you're never quite sure where it's headed.

Now because the film industry is what it is, if people are expecting a certain film genre and they're not getting it, there are howls of outrage.

One of the horribly frustrating things about writing feature films is the rules everyone applies and says, 'You have to do this by the end of the first act and by the end of the second act you must introduce this.' As if there were rules to life or telling a story or the ways things happen, which of course there aren't.

Writing, when it works, one needs to access whatever it is that creates dreams.

I want to be influenced by the world not TV or film.

It's really important to me that 'Peaky Blinders' went down so well in Birmingham. Apparently the audience share in the West Midlands was double that of any other region.

The problem with prequels is you're limiting yourself as to where it can go.

To get a game show into production is as challenging and as intellectually demanding as it is to write a novel or screenplay.

I'm a massive Bowie fan, always have been.

I want to make people see that evil is seductive and that we need to be careful.

Closed Circuit' came out of a general anxiety about surveillance. Government surveillance and private surveillance.

I remember going to Birmingham City matches as a kid and there were these other kids in Small Heath who had their own odd, partly Scouse accent.

I am definitely going to continue directing, but I am always going to try to explore new ways of making films. It really is possible to make films in different ways.

It's such a gift when you know who you're writing for and you know that that actor is capable of so much that you can relax a bit.

There's been a big black hole in the middle of the country as far as TV production goes.

I think there's a tendency in England, when you look at the past, to either have upper middle class period drama with its own rules, or if you're going to look at working class people, you have to do that in a particular 'Isn't it a shame, aren't they oppressed' way, or it's treated comically.

I will never unravel the mystery of how a script gets into the hands of certain people.

I write about what worries me and, hopefully, things worry me a little bit earlier than they do some other people, purely because I am a writer and it is my job to go out there and be worried by things.

I've been banging on about doing stuff in Birmingham for years and years, and everyone says 'We can't, it's the accent thing.' For some reason it's a very difficult accent to get right, harder even than Geordie.

The things that are considered to be respectable have their roots in unrespectable things.

I do lots of projects in film and TV. You have some that are lucky, and some that are unlucky.

There are so many rules about how you make a film and so many conventions that you can and can't do. I think people have forgotten that they are just rules that were invented for convenience - sometimes it is more convenient not to obey the rules.

From the age of about 8 to the age of about 15, I was obsessed with Native Americans.

I always thought it would never happen. And then, it became possible. In between commissions, I wrote it as an original screenplay [Allied].

I was 21, when I heard the story that inspired this [thriller Allied], and I wasn't even a screenwriter then.

True stories are always good because they're so odd, and so unlikely.

Sometimes if you're a director, you want to believe that you're great and capable at all aspects - the technical side, the lights, everything - but I'm not.

I think people are drawn to characters that break the rules. I think there is something about a good person doing bad things for what they consider to be a good reason. Then the battle is on to almost prove to the audience that it's justified. How far can you go with that? How far can that character go before people won't accept it? Trying to walk to edge of that line is a challenge.

The story [of Allied] stayed with me, like a stray dog outside the office, waiting.

I spoke to Tom's [Hardy] manager and said, "While we're talking about Taboo, do you mind if I also mention this film project that I've got, which is called Locke, and I need Tom to play the lead." And we spoke about both in that meeting and in the end the deal was that I would do Taboo if he did Locke and vice versa.

I've realized that the only thing I'm interested in is the performance. If the performance is right, then I'm happy. You offer up the dialogue and then the performance comes around.

No screenplay is possible, unless you get some attachment from somebody who's going to get it made.

Sometimes you take something because it's an offer and it's big and it's good money and you have to absolutely respect that process, because it's not easier.

When you're watching, I find two things happen. You either watch a film and it's really good and then you think, "Why can't I do that?" Or you watch a film and it's not good, and you think, "Why am I doing this?" So either way, it feels like being at work.

I think that it's not a bad thing to not be too versed in the vocabulary of cinema, because you start to think that certain things are allowed and not allowed.

Whenever I see a cut of a film and something is gone, I don't notice it unless it obviously should have been kept.

If you've read something brilliant, it's good. It's good to look out the window and see what's going on in the world.

It's always good to have a world that people don't know about - a world that hasn't yet been done. It's like treading on fresh snow. You're the first one there.

You work, especially in the movie business more than in TV, but you have an environment where people feel obliged to have an input because that's what they do, and I think sometimes it can clutter things up and make things more problematic.

There's more to come. Series 4 [of Peaky Blinders] is coming soon. But I'm proud of making my hometown, which is considered to be completely unfashionable, slightly fashionable. People actually know where it is now.

[Allied] meant to be a film that's a bit different. It's roots are in the '40s and '50s, and that sort of filmmaking style.

I like to create a character where you believe, deep down, that they don't really care if they live or die. That's very liberating for the character because, if the character is prepared to die, then they can do anything. It's impossible to stop them.

The plan is that there would be three seasons [in Taboo], and, as with Peaky Blinders, I have had a destination in mind from the beginning, because I think it helps as a writer. The destination in mind is that James Keziah Delaney sets foot on Nootka Sound. But that's a long way off.