Images
Peaky' has attracted a lot of attention from different disciplines in the arts. It was originally going to be a ballet, which is Ballet Rambert, and there is also a lot of music artists who offer their music to the show to be used on the soundtrack.
Steven Knight
I think there is something about a good person doing bad things for what they consider to be a good reason. Then the battle is on to almost prove to the audience that it's justified. How far can you go with that? How far can that character go before people won't accept it? Trying to walk to edge of that line is a challenge.
No money has ever been spent on 'Peaky Blinders' in terms of publicity, there's no massive campaign - because it's the BBC you just get the trailers. But what's happened is people have found it for themselves and I think the loyalty is greater when people find than when they're told to watch something.
I will never unravel the mystery of how a script gets into the hands of certain people.
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.
Getting 'Millionaire' right was as hard as writing 'Dirty Pretty Things.' Harder. In the pilots, contestants kept wanting to take the money; we had to find ways - the lifelines - of keeping them in the seat, answering the questions. But there is so much snobbery about popular culture. A game show just isn't valued as much as a novel.
I never set out to write a script that is 'topical.'
In terms of the symbolism, I think that if you do it right, writing is a bit like dreaming.
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.
I think it's always good not to listen to what the rules are supposed to be about the arc of the character and the third acts and all this stuff.
I love the BBC. I love working with the BBC. They leave you alone; they give you zero notes. It's like being on vacation.
There's no writers room, or any other writer involved. I write everything from beginning to end. Maybe it's just me not being able to let go of something, especially with 'Peaky.'
The great thing about America is that people take its history and mythologise it.
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.
Making a film is hard because you're not dealing with the intangible. When you're writing, it's perfect because it's only in your head and then you have to take it into the physical world and that's where things drop off and things fall apart and you have to fix them.
Any genre as it's called, I think can be quite reductive in terms of what a film is, because I think there is an eagerness to put in any film, in anybody's work, to give it a genre title and I think as a consequence of that, the film starts to obey the rules of the genre.
Part of the reason for doing 'Peaky Blinders', apart from the fact that it was a personal story and I've always wanted to do it, was what was great I felt is that Birmingham is probably the least fashionable city in Britain.
Spaghetti Junction is the most beautiful thing you've ever seen at night.
From the age of about 8 to the age of about 15, I was obsessed with Native Americans.
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.
There are always people who are doing things that don't fit the official accounts.
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.
Manchester's history is cotton and wool. Birmingham's is iron and steel.
I've been banging on about doing stuff in Birmingham for years and years, and everyone says 'We can't, it's the accent thing.' For some reason it's a very difficult accent to get right, harder even than Geordie.
No, I don't actually look at Twitter.
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.
The whole process of filmmaking can be chaotic, but if you can have an enthusiastic cast, you're pretty much there.
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 has been a tendency only to deal with a certain social class when it comes to stories more than 100 years ago.
I just don't like cinemas very much. And when I do see a film it depresses me.
I want to make people see that evil is seductive and that we need to be careful.
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.
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 was doing two things at once for quite a long time. I was working in television and writing novels.
A funny thing about film is that it's the only medium where people say there are really rules that you have to stick to. Nobody says to the writer - in a film you've got to have three acts - there's a character arc you have to do - there's no reason that's true.
I do lots of projects in film and TV. You have some that are lucky, and some that are unlucky.
My mum was a bookies' runner at nine years old and my dad's uncles were Peaky Blinders and gangsters.
The things that are considered to be respectable have their roots in unrespectable things.
To get a game show into production is as challenging and as intellectually demanding as it is to write a novel or screenplay.
I want to be influenced by the world not TV or film.
The problem with prequels is you're limiting yourself as to where it can go.
There's been a big black hole in the middle of the country as far as TV production goes.
Closed Circuit' came out of a general anxiety about surveillance. Government surveillance and private surveillance.
It's really important to me that 'Peaky Blinders' went down so well in Birmingham. Apparently the audience share in the West Midlands was double that of any other region.
True stories are always good because they're so odd, and so unlikely. 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. It always feels good to be dealing with a period of history or a world that no one else has dealt with.
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.
In the States a lot of Hispanic and black audiences are gravitating towards 'Peaky Blinders.' A mate of went into a bar in Santa Monica and sent me a photo of four blokes dressed as Peakies - they meet every week for a 'Peaky Blinders' evening.
Locke' is a different way of making a film as well as being a different sort of film.
There's lots of different ways of writing stuff and lots of different mindsets to have, but I think when it's your own creation, it's more pleasurable because you have total control.
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