Steven Knight

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.

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.

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.

I think the best actors do both. I think they fulfill what you want them to do, in terms of the vision for the whole piece. And then they always bring something that does surprise you and shock you.

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

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 certain periods of history don't get dealt with because I think historians, and it's their job, but they look back and look for patterns. They look for sequences and they look for reasons, and certain periods of history don't fit with the general pattern of 1500 to the 20th century, during which there's the creation of the United States.

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.

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.

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.

There's a grown-upness about television now that wasn't there before. You do know you're doing stuff for adults who can tell the difference between right and wrong, well hopefully, and make judgements about violence. And with 'Peaky,' always if there is an act of violence, there is a consequence.

There are always people who are doing things that don't fit the official accounts.