Dialogue is what I like doing. It's what I am good at doing.
— Steven Knight
Peaky' is the luckiest project I've ever been involved with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
The things that are considered to be respectable have their roots in unrespectable things.
The problem with prequels is you're limiting yourself as to where it can go.
The great thing about America is that people take its history and mythologise it.
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.
I want to be influenced by the world not TV or film.
I will never unravel the mystery of how a script gets into the hands of certain people.
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.
If I choose to direct something, it's because I don't think it would get accepted.
My mum was a bookies' runner at nine years old and my dad's uncles were Peaky Blinders and gangsters.
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.
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.
There's been a big black hole in the middle of the country as far as TV production goes.
From the age of about 8 to the age of about 15, I was obsessed with Native Americans.
Expect the unexpected, is what I'd say about 'Taboo.'
Closed Circuit' came out of a general anxiety about surveillance. Government surveillance and private surveillance.
I'm a massive Bowie fan, always have been.
In Britain, when the working class are summoned for fiction, it's 'isn't it a shame, isn't it a pity, isn't it awful, the terribly poor things... ' whereas from within, it's nothing like that. It's fantastic, it's glamorous, it's terrible and good the same as it is for everybody.
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.
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.
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.
There has been a tendency only to deal with a certain social class when it comes to stories more than 100 years ago.
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.
Yeah, I think people are drawn to characters that break the rules.
When you think 'Peaky Blinders,' when it first began it got mixed reviews and people didn't know what to do with it, and it was like: 'Why is there modern music on this?' So I think whenever you do something different you're going to get that response.
There's a grown-upness about television now that wasn't there before. You do know you're doing stuff for adults who can tell the difference between right and wrong, well hopefully, and make judgements about violence. And with 'Peaky,' always if there is an act of violence, there is a consequence.
To get a game show into production is as challenging and as intellectually demanding as it is to write a novel or screenplay.
I want to make people see that evil is seductive and that we need to be careful.
Locke' is a different way of making a film as well as being a different sort of film.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In terms of the symbolism, I think that if you do it right, writing is a bit like dreaming.
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.
What Westerns did was to take a world and mythologise it.
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.
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.
Writing, when it works, one needs to access whatever it is that creates dreams.
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.
There have been times when I've shaved twice in the same morning because I've forgotten I've shaved already.
I never map things out in advance. It would be better if I did and more economical in terms of time, but I've found that if you work out a plot line from beginning to end, at the beginning it becomes very rational.
