Quotes from Steven Knight

So many American and international producers want to shoot in the U.K. because of our crew base and tax incentives.

Locke' is a different way of making a film as well as being a different sort of film.

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.

The whole process of filmmaking can be chaotic, but if you can have an enthusiastic cast, you're pretty much there.

The film business seems to attract rules more than any other business. I don't know why it does. I think it's because there's so much money at stake.

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.

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.

There have been times when I've shaved twice in the same morning because I've forgotten I've shaved already.

The problem with prequels is you're limiting yourself as to where it can go.

I think it is best that if you are the writer you just leave the director to it. With the caveat that you state, 'Be gentle with the script. And if there are changes, consult me.'

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.

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.

I've had more reaction to 'Peaky' than anything. People react really intensely.

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 used to be grandparents who would say that if you were misbehaving the Peaky Blinders would get you, they were the bogeymen.

The great thing about America is that people take its history and mythologise it.

Manchester's history is cotton and wool. Birmingham's is iron and steel.

With TV, your structure is determined by the series not the episode. You can have incident without consequence to the character, but keep your eye on the ticking clock of the series.

There's always a concern over budget with film too but people are more extravagant when they're making a feature. In television everything's tight, everything's paired down and it's just a question of making it look expensive.

Any attempt to recreate a world of 1814, or 100 years before that - I think it's important to understand that the people of the time had a different concept of what reality was. Their reality was much more haunted.

I often find in the film world, that it's very self-referring. If you talk to someone about films, they talk about them in terms of other films - rather than as something that happened to them in their life. And I'm really keen to get back to film as a reference to real things, not necessarily to other films.

Some accents people - internationally - can't understand, also they come with baggage. London means a certain thing, Liverpool means a certain thing. Whereas with Welsh, he can be a middle-class man with working-class roots and still have an accent and it not be an issue.

Writing, when it works, one needs to access whatever it is that creates dreams.

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.