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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
Real
Talk
Way
Space
Plot
Make
Sound
Leads
Things
Another
Weird
Would
Two
Sounds
Character
Direction
Best
Characters
Find
Takes

More quotes by 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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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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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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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.
Steven Knight
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I must have been about 11 when I read the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which I read, over and over again.
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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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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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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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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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.
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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It has to be an actress like Marion Cotillard [in Allied] because there are so many levels to it. It's set in the Second World War, when lots of people were doing things that, outside of a war, you wouldn't do, like killing and dropping bombs. She's doing things that one wouldn't approve of, but it's war.
Steven Knight
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What I wanted to do [in Allied] was get two characters who fall in love for real, across the barricade, and then it transcends the war.
Steven Knight
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I don't think that jealousy and love and hate and anger and all those things have changed in the past 200 years - people just express themselves differently.
Steven Knight
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When I was probably about 10 or 11, and I found it was simply something I could do. When you're at school and you do something and you get praised for it, you think, Oh, right, well I'll do that. From then on, I always thought I'd be a writer. I thought novels at first, and then I sort of naturally drifted into TV.
Steven Knight
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[Taboo] has been exactly the same as working with the BBC in that creatively they do that precious thing which is to only make a comment when a comment needs to be made.
Steven Knight
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Obviously, television is a writer's medium, so you get a lot more power and authority. With a film, the discipline is having a beginning, middle and end, and having it work in a specific space of time.
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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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
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[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.
Steven Knight