A biography for Steven Knighthasn’t been written yet.
“Well directing TV is very time-consuming, so if you are going to direct TV, a season will take a year out of your life.”
“You can make somebody bad for a long time, and people love it when they then do one good thing and it's almost like a triumph. Actors seem to enjoy it more.”
“No, I don't actually look at Twitter.”
“There used to be grandparents who would say that if you were misbehaving the Peaky Blinders would get you, they were the bogeymen.”
“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.”
“Writing, when it works, one needs to access whatever it is that creates dreams.”
“I think an under-recognized fact is that TV has changed because the screens have, we now have these massive screen in our homes... so it's worth making your show look good.”
“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 think it's a bit like saying a painter does a painting everyone loves and it's 40% blue paint, so from now on you have to paint paintings that are 40% blue. That's the film industry at its most blunt, which is why it's constantly bats and spiders and superheroes.”
“Peaky' is the luckiest project I've ever been involved with.”
“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.”
“Any question about narrative storytelling is answered by Dickens.”
“Dialogue is what I like doing. It's what I am good at doing.”
“There are always people who are doing things that don't fit the official accounts.”
“What Westerns did was to take a world and mythologise it.”
“TV is a writer's medium, the writer is in charge effectively. So what you write is what gets shot, so in that sense I prefer it. But in terms of the scale of it, features are fantastic.”
“I do lots of projects in film and TV. You have some that are lucky, and some that are unlucky.”
“Peaky' is a very personal thing for me because it's based on stories that I was told as a kid by my parents. At the very beginning, I tried to have other writers involved but it just didn't work.”
“In history there's what's written down and there's what actually happened.”
“Locke' was sort of myself trying to find out if you could give yourself the maximum number of obstacles to make enough drama and seeing if you could do it.”