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I find the best way to make things real is to just put two characters into a space and let them talk to each other in the way that they would talk to each other, and then see what they would say. I know it sounds weird, but that leads the plot and takes you in another direction.

Steven Knight

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Steven Knight
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 5
Executive Producer
Film Director
Screenwriter
Birmingham
West Midlands
Way
Space
Plot
Make
Sound
Leads
Things
Another
Weird
Would
Two
Sounds
Character
Direction
Best
Characters
Find
Takes
Real
Talk

More quotes by Steven Knight

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With FX in particular, they've been fantastic and were really hands off. I mean, it helps that you've got Ridley Scott on your side.
Steven Knight
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With any period piece I think the thing to do is forget that it's not contemporary when you're writing and to have the characters feel as much as possible like characters that you would know.
Steven Knight
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Just the idea that someone is married and they've got a kid, and he reports for work one morning and his boss says, You're wife is a spy. Shoot her. In the real story, he just went back and did it, which would have been a short film. Therefore, I had to spend some time exploring what you would do.
Steven Knight
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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.
Steven Knight
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I'm not suggesting that ours [series] is unique in that, but they can begin to have that depth, that gravity, they can spend some time, so it's a bit more like reading a good novel, if you like.
Steven Knight
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I'm very bad at watching anything. I'm bad at going to theaters I can't watch my own stuff I watch a lot of sports.
Steven Knight
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In other words, when you have someone [like Ridley Scott] with that authority, then you tend to be left alone. But they were good and they're really good people, and I'm a big champion of the BBC and I think that like minds find each other and I think that FX and BBC is a perfect match.
Steven Knight
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I've spent three hours with Snoop Dogg, talking about how he loved [Peaky Blinders series]. And David Bowie loved it. The late Leonard Cohen was a fan. It struck a chord with various people that I didn't think it would.
Steven Knight
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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.
Steven Knight
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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.
Steven Knight
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I wouldn't put myself in that bracket, but it's one of those things. I think what helps is that we [with Tom Hardey] don't socialize, we don't really know each other, we purely work together.
Steven Knight
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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.
Steven Knight
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Suddenly, after years of television being the poor relation and film being everything, it now feels like film is a conjuring trick. It's like, Oh, my god, how are you going to do that in 90 minutes, as opposed to eight hours?! I've got so little time to do this! It becomes an art form, in itself. Doing both helps you do each one.
Steven Knight
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Whenever I see a cut of a film and something is gone, I don't notice it unless it obviously should have been kept.
Steven Knight
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[Woman Walks Ahead] is from me being a very bizarre child. From the age of about 8 to the age of about 15, I was obsessed with Native Americans.
Steven Knight
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Snoop [Dog] said [Peaky Blinders] reminded him of how he got involved with gang culture. It's always fantastically flattering when I see people dress like that and take on the look.
Steven Knight
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You know that when you suggest something on the page, it's going to be there, plus more. It's a great luxury to know that you don't have to push it. You just lay it out, and it will be there.
Steven Knight
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I visited the set [of Allied] a few times, and it was a great set to visit. A lot of it was in West London, in an old Gillette factory. You'd go into the factory through the security, and then there were a lot of camels and goats. Most sets are really dull, but this was fantastic.
Steven Knight
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East India Company weren't an evil organization that went around deliberately oppressing people, but they were driven by profit, and how familiar is that now?
Steven Knight
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I love cooking and kitchens.It's just a great world, and I wanted to explore it. You see the façade, the outside, the public part, and then you just walk through one door marked Staff Only and you're in a different universe.
Steven Knight