Quote

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.

Steven Knight

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Steven Knight
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: August 5
Executive Producer
Film Director
Screenwriter
Birmingham
West Midlands
Character
Care
Liberating
Anything
Prepared
Live
Deep
Believe
Create
Really
Stop
Like
Impossible
Dies

More quotes by Steven Knight

Image
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
Image
I didn't direct [the Taboo episodes]. I wrote all of them.
Steven Knight
Image
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
Image
[2015] it's a time that there's a clash of ideologies, similar to the Cold War. I think that a story like this has been waiting to be told, and I think it's a fresh look at the whole earth-shattering business of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Steven Knight
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Steven Knight
Image
I wanted to take a damaged individual in a damaged society with damaged relationships between nations and take a look at how this individual survives amongst them, and that for me as a writer is the connection that you needed to get inside the skin of the main character and wonder how he's going to cope with all this.
Steven Knight
Image
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
Image
There [in Allied] was depicting London in the war, as well, and doing that in a way where you see something that you don't normally see, which is how hedonistic it was. In reality, that's what was going on. But, all of it worked.
Steven Knight
Image
There's something about the evolution of television where it evolved from to the things that we're now watching and loving. It evolved from film writers, film actors, and I think gradually people are easing themselves into the amount of time they have.
Steven Knight
Image
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.
Steven Knight
Image
I think that helps because there has been no formality of friendship, the politeness of friendship, so we can just work directly on the work that's ahead of us [with Tom Hardey].
Steven Knight
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think the East India Company represents what we would think of as a very modern approach to the world where everything was counted, every penny was counted.
Steven Knight
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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