Kermode & Mayo’s Take - Now and Ben: Steven Knight on ‘Maria’, his screenwriting secrets, the Peaky Blinders movie & more

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

In this latest bonus nugget of ‘Now and Ben’ goodness, our sometime super sub Ben Bailey Smith chats to legendary film & TV writer Stephen Knight. He’s penned some of the most exciting scripts to hit our screens over the last three decades, from ‘Dirty Pretty Things’ and ‘Locke’ to ‘SAS Rogue Heroes’ and, of course, ‘Peaky Blinders’. Most recently he’s written ‘Maria’—a biopic of opera singer Maria Callas in her last days as she tries to rediscover her voice in time for her swan song. Following 2021’s ‘Spencer’, it’s Knight’s second collaboration with director Pablo Larraín. Ben sits down with Steven for an in-depth chat about the exceptional career that’s seen him become one of Britain’s most prolific and best-known TV & film writers. They talk humble beginnings in British TV comedy with Jasper Carrott, and his journey from the backstreets of Birmingham and the small screen to the bright lights of Hollywood. Ben even gets a cheeky bit of gossip about the upcoming Peaky Blinders movie… Listen out for more of Ben’s conversations with cinema’s most exciting creative talents dropping into the feed every ‘Now and Ben’… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Well, this show is sponsored by NordVPN. Hey Mark, you know what people say about this time of year? That it's perfect for huddling together with a warm blanket, a mug of cocoa, and the best movies and of course movie podcasts around? Well, ideal for taking an early ski trip to L'Alp de Huy. What's wrong with the Alps? Yeah, well, I was going to say that it's dank, dark and miserable, but you convinced me really. And if you're here or there, whatever you're watching, Pleasures, Nord can help. It connects you to servers in 111 countries.

You can use it on up to 11 devices and unlock content from around the world. Whether you're under a woollen blanket or gliding across a blanket of snow, Nord keeps you safe from trackers and hackers by hiding your details when you're connected to public Wi-Fi, built-in threat protection and even dark web alerts. This January with our link you get an additional four months free on the two-year plan and with Nord's 30-day money back guarantee there's zero risk. Check out the link in the episode description. I am joined excitingly by someone who's kind of become a bit of a behemoth in writing terms in this country and internationally, and a bit of a hero of mine is Mr. Stephen Knight. Stephen, how are you doing?

I'm very good, thank you. It's genuinely great to meet you. We were just talking off air there about humble beginnings. And I was remembering being a kid watching, um, commercial breakdown and, uh, Oh, can carrot. Yeah. Um, and was it the David Briggs and Jasper? Oh, I love the detectives.

I wish they'd bring you back. And I don't know if anybody really, like I'm sure some people do, like the Stephen Knight completists like me. No. But, you know, those were some of your earliest gigs, right? Working with Jasper Carrot. Yeah. I mean, started out in comedy and learned that comedy is the most difficult discipline of all. It really is tough. You've got to make your audience make a noise every 30 seconds. Otherwise you fail. It's weird. And also the faith you must have to have in the writing. You know, I was listening on

the take to an interview with Nick Park about the new Wallace and Gromit movie. And he was saying he had to have faith in jokes that he wrote five years ago, but they would still be funny. It's such a delicate comedy, isn't it? From a writing point of view. I mean, anybody who tells a joke knows that if you just fluff one word, or you get the pace wrong or the emphasis wrong, it's gone. It's like sheep are just all gone, the sheep have scattered, you've got no chance.

So I guess you would have had a little bit of extra confidence working with someone like Jasper, because you know that he can elevate already good writing, or even, you know, maybe take a bit of a half-arsed joke and make it even better. Well, it's really weird because he was, when I was writing for him, he was at the top of his game and it helps when the audience come in that they want him, you know what I mean? There's already a warmth and they sort of forgive the first few minutes sometimes. And then when they're in and when the comedian has got them, it's a really interesting science and art, this thing. And comedians are really interesting to talk to about it because they say, the audience meet beforehand and decide if they're

going to be a good audience or a bad audience. And there's no telling how it's going to go. But he once, we were having a meeting doing stuff and he said, I can get to a point with an audience where I could say literally anything and they would fall about laughing. He once, we were having a meeting doing stuff and he said, I can get to a point with an audience where I could say literally anything and they would fall about laughing. He said, give me a line. So I said, okay, my brother drives a Sierra. That's the line. And so that night we were in somewhere, Bristol or somewhere and he's doing his stuff and everybody's up there and they're all getting hysterical. And then he said, my brother drives a Sierra and they just, they really laughed, you know, it was like, and it was sort of, there is a psychology to it and a magic to it that is interesting but really difficult and it's great to get out of it. Absolutely. And, and you know, you've got,

you've got someone like that with a funny face, a funny voice, an incredible, incredible delivery, incredible rhythm, incredible rhythm and incredible timing makes your job a little bit easier, I suspect. But what really interests me in that starting point for you is that faith that you have to have once you put the final full stop in, that this piece that you've written is going to be taken, utilised well. It made me think about the shift that you took into drama. And this is kind of a double question. Firstly, were you always thinking about getting into drama? And secondly, how did you feel that first time handing over a script

into that dramatic world, you know, and having that same faith that you would have had with someone like Jasper you worked so closely with. Yeah, I mean, I've said this before, Leonard Cohen has a great quote, said, all you need to be a writer is arrogance and inexperience. And at the beginning, a huge amount of inexperience. In other words, you don't know what you're not supposed to be doing. And all the time that I was doing comedy, I was also writing novels, which weren't comedy. And they were doing okay. And they were published by Penguin. And so I suppose the first

test of non-comedy was the first novel, which did well and got well received. And the foot, I'd wrote two more, then the fourth one was going to be a novel. And I thought, I would write this as a screenplay. And that was Dirty Pretty Things. And, you know, if ever arrogance and inexperience applied, it was then because I just did it. I didn't even have final draft. I did it in just normal typing. And I got a false view of how these things were because suddenly it was in the hands of Stephen Frears and he said, you know, like to have a meeting. So I met him in Notting Hill and his notes were, it's really good. Could you make the ending better? And that was it. End of meeting. And I thought, oh, this is how it is in, you know, in Hollywood. This is what you do. They give you one note

and learn, of course, through the years that that's not normally how it goes. But that was the first one and it got well received. And so that gave me a lot of confidence to go off. And, you know, over two decades between Dirty Pretty Things and Maria, which we'll get onto in a bit, how much has the process changed as your confidence has grown? Because, you know, I'm around a lot of writers and there's lots of different approaches, I find, to this sort of screenplay element. Once you've finished, are you saying, you know what, take it, I don't want to know, do your thing?

Or are you involved in pre-production? Are you on set saying, hey, that line is being delivered the wrong way? Where does your involvement begin, middle and end? I mean, in terms of the process of actually writing and how that develops, for me, I think it's always been the same. It's different for everyone. But for me, the only way that it works is if I just sit there and let it happen. I've said it before, for me, it's a bit like dreaming where everything else is off and

your mind feels as if your mind is doing something itself. It's just making this up as it goes. Then you read it back and go, oh, well, okay, that's what that's about. And it's a very odd process for me. But to begin with, I used to pretend that I was making a plan. I used to pretend that I had an outline and that I had a plan for each scene, because it felt that that's what people want and often to begin with still now, but not so much, you know, for a movie in particular that Dallas for a treatment where you say this is what's going

to happen in the film, quite understandably, they're going to lay out a lot of money, you know, they want to know what they're going to get. I find it impossible. My treatments are never anything like what I actually write. But I've got used to that, not got used to it, I now make it plain that that's what's happening. And so when I get to the end, I mean, then there's the process of going through it and every time you go through it, some mornings, what you've written looks great, some mornings what you've written is awful. And it's the same thing.

It's the same stuff. And it just keeps getting, I always go, I always in the morning start at the beginning and read through what's written so far and then hit the new stuff. But in terms of what happens afterwards, I remember with Dirty Pretty Things, the first one, I didn't realize that what you write and what's in your head when you write it, the images that you have in your head and the way the lines are delivered is never going to be what ends up on the screen. It's going to be an approximation of that, but it is going to be different. To begin with, I thought different meant bad. So when I first watched the first assembly,

it was quite a rough cut though of Dirty Pretty Things, I was halfway through and thought I'm going to have to find something else to do for a living. Because this is so awful. You know, and the lights went up and everybody said it was great. And I realized that the thing was it was just different. And you very quickly get used to the fact that different doesn't mean worse, it often means better. So if you're in the hands of Stephen Frears or David Cronenberg, it isn't what you had in your head, but it's something better.

And so you get used to that. And in terms of involvement, I do have involvement in the process of getting the script to the stage where it's a shooting script. Absolutely. In terms of the words, I cannot let that go. I hate to be in a position where they turn up on set and start improvising. I really don't like that. I think my character would say this. Yeah. No, he wouldn't. Stephen's already said what your character would say. It sounds like the arrogance part of the inexperience, but it's just, when you've written something, it's very delicate and precious. Do you know what I mean? It's like

a very delicate organism and you can't pull things out of it or put things into it, in my opinion. But I'm not there on set saying you can't do that, you can't do this. I just trust the people that are doing it. And Stephen Freer said, you know, get the best people and let them get on with it. And that's the best motto, I think. Yeah. I'm really interested by something you said about losing the sort of self-consciousness around writing and the dreamlike state. really interested by something you said about losing the sort of self-consciousness around

writing and the dreamlike state. How do you get into that zone? Because I'm sure just like all writers, you have days where you're just painstakingly writing one line and it just doesn't seem to go anywhere. And then other days where it just flows. Are you able to identify a difference between the two sort of mental states? Yeah, I think you're right about days being different. Some days is like repair, and you're going through what's done and you're putting things right. Some days it just goes and you realize you've written 20 pages of a script in a in a few hours, because it's just come to you quite easily.

If something's slow, I've discovered if something's coming slowly, it's wrong. Usually, if something's coming quickly, it's right. Because it seems that the stuff that comes quickly seems to be coming directly from wherever the hell it comes from. And what I also do is tend to give authority to the most recent idea. Even if it means you've got to do a lot of work of reverse engineering. So for an example, in Eastern Promises, it's a spoiler, but it doesn't really matter. The central character, I think, is a gangster. It's been long enough here. The central character we think is a gangster turns out to be a policeman, an undercover cop. That happened while I was writing a scene between that character and the policeman who

was interrogating him. I don't know why, but I swapped the lines over and he was the policeman. Then I thought, well, what about if he is a policeman? Now, I'd written two thirds of the script not knowing myself that this character was an undercover cop. Then I thought, I better have to change a load of stuff. Then I thought, I better not change that stuff because if I didn't know, they won't know. The audience won't know. But it's like giving authority to that, to that most recent thing and letting the thing happen as it happens.

And how to get there, I don't know, no mute, no, if I can hear people talking or if I can hear music with words, it doesn't happen. Yeah. So you also mentioned like almost the dreamlike state of writing without sort of boundaries, writing without constantly self assessing or writing with freedom. And there's elements in some of your work where I sometimes feel like I can feel

that as I'm watching it and listening to the words. Because you think about Peaky Blinders, the amount of dreamlike or even nightmarish elements to it within the story. And as I was watching Maria last night, I was also reminded not just of Peaky, but of Spencer, you know, and the almost ghost story feel that it really connected me with Tommy Shelby, Diana Spencer and Maria Callas all of a sudden as I was watching Angelina doing this amazing performance. Yeah, yeah. I got this kind of spooky thing of like, oh, this feels like device sounds

too contrite, but like this feels like a Stephen Knight sort of flourish kind of thing. Do you know what I mean? It felt very dreamy, otherworldly. And I wonder if that's something that you know, the haunting quality of it, is that something that you're drawn to? Is that something that interests you, excites you? Absolutely. I mean, I think if you do allow yourself to write in this way, you will inevitably get that sort of internal logic to think things have their own internal logic, but they're not necessarily the logic of outside of whatever you do. You know, I always think everybody, everybody

dreams in your dream, your dream about your friend or your relation or whatever. And I'll enter this bizarre plot that has no beginning, middle and end, but the character will speak exactly as that character really speaks. You know, in a dream, no character comes in and gives a line of clunky exposition. They don't do it. So some part of your brain is doing that anyway. So trying to get those characters into your head and let them speak in a way is a way of doing it.

But the similarities are only visible, I think, to people outside of it. You know what I mean? People say, you tend to write about this or you tend to write about that, but I don't intend to do that. It's just obviously what comes in. Yeah. So, you know, I touched on Maria there. We might as well get into it. This is, I guess, your latest work, if we're not including Rogue Heroes, which everybody is watching on the beep at the minute. But Maria, this movie directed by Pablo Laran,

from a writing point of view, what fascinated me about this movie is, I was constantly trying to work out what is a Pablo flourish, what is a Steven flourish? Because obviously we've got fantasy, we've got reality. There are certain elements to this film that I wondered, was this a blank piece of paper and Steven came up with this

concept. So I'm thinking in particular, you know, Mandrax, the, you know, the idea of this film crew that aren't real following around the idea of ghosts sort of following her around so much of this stuff is visual. I just wondered from the very start, were you thinking I'm going to tell it like this or did Pablo come in and say, you know, this is what I'd like to see on the screen. It's great. Pablo's and my relationship is, is, um, very non-verbal. It's sort of quite, I remember we went, we met for breakfast before Spencer

and we, I thought it was just I thought we were just going to meet to meet and he said, I want to do this thing about Diana. I thought, I've never thought about that before. Quite quickly thought this is a good idea and then just started to write it and he does let you just do it. You just start. So with Maria, similarly while we were doing Spencer, he mentioned Maria. And I said, yeah, that would be interesting. So I did some research and found out it was the most remarkable and amazing story.

People sort of know the name. A lot of people don't even know the name, but they don't know where she came from and what her life was. So that's what I wanted to do. And I wanted to tell it through a short period of time, the same with Spencer, because I think doing a biopic is, I think it's pretty much impossible to take someone from birth to death in two hours. So I wanted to pick it up. And then, you know, I do like to explore otherness and surreality. And the gift for this was that the truth is that when in the last days of her life, Maria was taking a lot of drugs, she's taken a lot of narcotics, that some of them were hallucinatory, which pushes the door open, gives you permission a bit. And then, you know, everybody was telling her she should stop. And I just liked the idea

that actually she was using the drug as a way of reviewing her life. She was using it to get to the places in the past so that she could relive those moments and decide if she did the right thing or not. Because the real idea about Maria is she was reviewed to death by lots of people. She was reviewed on her voice. She was reviewed on her weight. She was reviewed on her looks, constantly judged by other people. And I wanted the last four days of her life, she decides to review herself. She decides to pass judgment on herself. And in order to do that, she needs a bit of help. And so she goes to Mandrakes. And I thought, well, if Mandrakes is a character

that holds a hand when they're walking through Paris, then that's, it's sort of not justifying what she's doing, but it's giving a logical explanation to something that has completely illogical results. So I just love the idea that this film crew, that he's called Mandrax and that he's asking a question. So the drug is asking her mind questions about her past. Yeah. What's up, Mark? All's well. How about you? Well, I've been thinking about that cushion that we gave away at our live show. Yeah. That and the pencil case. Imagine if we had a load more that we needed to shift. Imagine the riches. Every bottom or pencil case in the country would be graced in some way by our presence. Mason- Well, when you put it like that, we should have used Shopify. Shopify is the commerce

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the movies, particularly with Mandrakes actually, where you've suddenly got the bystanders or tourists at the Eiffel Tower becoming this huge operatic chorus. Are you putting this all in a big long stage direction, or is it like a little MB for Pablo? Or what's that look like? It's not that different to anything. You know, basically it's... Because what I wanted was that, as I say,

she has been performing for other people all of her life. The idea that she goes out and everybody starts performing for other people all of her life. The idea that she goes out and everybody starts performing for her. So suddenly there's a show going on and it's for her to look at and then it's gone. I mean, in terms of how to direct, I just say she's walking with mandrakes and then people are walking by and then suddenly,

not suddenly, over a period of let's say, seven or eight seconds, it starts to have a sort of form to it and then they start to move together and then they start to sing together, which is both exciting and frightening, I think, especially with opera when there's people. So yeah, I mean, the direction is she's walking and then the people who are walking the passersby suddenly form up and become an orchestra or she's walking in the orchestra. There is an orchestra outside her apartment in the rain. It was very difficult to get violinists

to agree to sit in the rain with their violins. I did wonder about that because the last thing you want to do with wood instruments is get them wet. But I mean, when you're with Pablo, he's going to make it happen. There's this beautiful kind of three-way relationship going on with Maria and her house staff, she's got the housekeeper and her sort of butler. And it's very tender with the dogs as well. The dogs I've seen in documentary footage, the dogs in real life as well, very similar.

But the house staff, was that a sort of flight of fancy from you? Did you read something about her staff or were there no staff? Were these pure Stephen Knight creations and why? No, no, these are real people. They were the crucial element to get to the research for this, particularly for Ruchio. Wow. Because we had a researcher who interviewed him and the transcript of the interview is

amazing and the recording of the interview is amazing and the recording of the interview is amazing where he was her butler for I think 30 years, 25 years and Bruna was her housekeeper for the same amount of time. So to begin with, they are the staff of this towering diva who, as you can imagine, was quite demanding. The years go by and Maria becomes more and more frail. The relationship by the time we join it is of a family, but it's like adults taking care of a parent who is losing her mind. Many people have experienced that. So suddenly they are carers. They're taking care of, and what they have to do then is

when she gives an order where before they would have snapped to attention, now they're having to go along with it to make it seem real. Do you know what I mean? And the things that Ferruccio said, like for example, he said that she was constantly asking him to move the piano. She constantly said the piano is not in the right place. Yes. So that's real.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. And he really did his back in doing this. You know, details like that about a domestic situation where three people have been together too long and about the things that happen are just fantastic because that's the reality of the character. And that's true. And you know, he had a bad back because she kept telling him to move the piano and I've put that in because it because

he does it he moves the piano he knows there's no reason for moving the piano from the window to the other bit of the house but he does it not because he's scared of her but because he loves her and wants her to feel okay yeah and and you know it also provides the there was something so sweetly domestic about that, those moments as well, but they also provided, I mean, I, I, I chuckled more than once when the piano was on the move again. Yeah. It was a nice bit of light relief in, in, in what could be quite not a heavy film. I didn't find it heavy, but I found it haunting and sort of upsetting in that way. I guess the best, you know, a good movie has this empathy building skill. And when I watched it, I've, I thought about the end

of my life, you know, I thought about the end of older people in my lives, in my life's lives, you know, and how we all start to look back. And that is that's something that can be, you know, really heavy to take on. So I think the piano for me really just added a little light relief that I love. The other thing that really struck me was that there's a scene with Maria Callis and John F. Kennedy in a restaurant. I have no idea if that really happened. I suppose it's very much possible considering the way their lives intertwined. How do you go about putting a scene together, a back and forth, head to head, with

two massively iconic characters like that who existed in real life, you know, finding their voice, all of that stuff? I approached it as two prisoners whispering to each other, where they're both imprisoned by their identity. And you see JFK in this with all of his bodyguards. When you look at bodyguards, they could be there to keep you in place. They could be there to stop you escaping, or they could be there to keep you alive. And the two things are sort of true at the same time. And I think the same with Maria, where she was a prisoner of who she was. So, you know, I have a scene in Paris where somebody comes up and says, I think you're great, but you, you know, I bought a ticket for your show and you didn't show up because you pretended to be sick. And so being public property and

people knowing that stuff about you gave them something in common. And the issue of infidelity they had in common as well, not from Maria's point of view, but they both were in a world where I think like for the Kennedys in particular, the morality of everyday life did not apply and they didn't feel that it applied to them. And I think Maria being who she was from the background that she was, she'd thrown into this world where there was a different set of moralities, but she still was the same person who still wanted love and fidelity.

And so I just wanted those two things to happen while they spoke to each other. And I don't know how they found the actor, but he looked just like JFK. Yeah, spooky, spooky. Yeah, he was really, I found him really spooky. Similarly with the actor that played Onassis actually. Great look about him. Fantastic hair. And he had the funniest line in the movie for me where she was talking

about the moralities of, as you were saying, the moralities of cheating and stuff like that. And moralities of cheating and stuff like that. And his answer was that it was 1959. I love that. Yeah, I think this was a period, the early 60s was a period where people were tearing up a lot of sorts of regulations, but I think particularly in that strife of society. So you've got, like I mentioned briefly, the new series of Rogue Heroes is out and people are raving about it. I haven't got on it yet, but I've watched pretty much everything else

that you've done even without realizing, like I say, from Jasper Carrot to Dirty Pretty Things, which I watched when I graduated from university. I don't think I was reading credits in those days. I had no idea that I'd enjoyed two disparate things from the same person and have continued. I'm wondering what comes next for you. I've heard lots of rumours in the past couple of years about a Peaky Blinders film. Is that a reality?

Yeah, it's shot. We shot it. It's done. It's shot? Yeah, yeah, yeah. it's in the can. And it's everybody says this about rushes and assemblies, but it is remarkably good, I think. And we've got Barry Keahan. We've got Tim Roth, we got Rebecca Ferguson, Steven Graham, and of course, we've got Killian Murphy. That is quite a thing to hear on a Friday morning. It makes me incredibly happy.

Speaking of happiness, are you happy when you're writing? It's one of those things that for me is sometimes it feels amazing, especially when you're talking about that 20 pages in a few hours moment where it's just flowing. And other times it feels like I'm thrust back into A levels. I've got to deliver this essay. I hate opening my computer. I hate putting my fingers on the keyboard. I hate sitting there still for age. I just want to get the hell out of there.

But are you happiest when you're sat there type? What's, what's your relationship with it? Yeah, I love it. I mean, I think I would know I would do it even if I wasn't being paid to do it. It's something that I've compelled to do. And that that thing, if, if I get to a point where I'm not looking forward to going to the keyboard, well, it doesn't. I think the only way to proceed from the very beginning is make sure that you're doing something that interests you that. Yeah. So if it even if it's commission, first of all, choose the commission wisely. But also, if

it's a commission, make clear from the beginning, you're going to do it in a way that is particular that you you're gonna do it in a way that is particular, that you're gonna do it in a way that you're gonna enjoy because there isn't, you're right, there's nothing worse than sitting down and going through it because you have to go through it. And I think that comes from the worst element of that is it's when you know there's a third party

and you know what they expect. You know what they're going to want. And so you're afraid to stray because you think that you've got their voice in your head saying, no, no, no, that's not what we asked for. Once you do that, I think you're in trouble. But if you feel as if you've got absolute liberty to reach the destination of those wonderful words, the end, you've got your liberty to get there destination of those wonderful words of the end. You've got your liberty to get there however you want. It can only be fun. And it's got to be. I think you've got to

enjoy it. Otherwise it will feel awful. How do you deal with blocks? I'm touching wood here. I'm touching wood. I don't get it. I'm touching what it doesn't have. Yeah, here's a piece of wood. I'm touching wood, I don't get, I'm touching what it doesn't have. Yeah, it's a piece of wood. It doesn't have, I can't believe I'm saying that, but I just, if there's something that's not going, then I tend to just go as far from the topic as possible. So the next scene, start it with something that is absolutely nothing to do with what you're writing. And then what you've got to do is find your way back to the subject. Years and years and years ago, I saw a philosopher called Edward de Bono doing a talk, and he said,

he's talking about creativity, and he said, best way to be creative is if you're writing a book about, I don't know, or you're writing a story about a fire, a big fire, and I'm making this up, a big fire in the building, start off with the idea of a cabbage, let's say. So you think, I've got to start with something to do with the cabbage. It's nothing to do. So what you're going to do, you're going to think, okay, I've got to write about somebody cooking a cabbage. So you start the scene, you watch somebody chopping up a cabbage, putting it into the pot and putting it on some heat. Now I've got to get back to the fire in this city that's happening. And the reasoning being that if you go on a journey from your house to some way you've never been, it gets more and more difficult.

If you start some way you've never been and start a journey home, it gets more and more easy as you go because things get more and more familiar. If things are getting a bit tricky, I just think, okay, well, the next thing, there's no law that says I can't now start this thing with whatever I want. But then I'm going to have to get back to what I'm supposed to be doing. And if it works, people think you're really clever. But all you've done is just introduce randomness. All you've done is introduce randomness into this situation. And once randomness is introduced, you feel a lot freer to do anything you want. And you've directed in the past as well. Will you direct again or do you think you'll always

stick behind the pen and the typewriter? I don't like directing really. It's really hard work, physically, physically hard work, and lots of people involved, lots of decisions, lots of compromises. I direct when no one else will direct. If I've written something no one else will direct because they don't like it, then that's when I do it. So, you know, hummingbird or serenity and all of those things that people were really a bit horrified by.

Because I'm not saying they were, I'm right and people are wrong. That's what I wanted to do, so I did it. And when I did Locke, because what I found was in directing, unlike writing, you've had this thought in your head of what the scene is going to be and you turn up on the day and there's loads of trucks and loads of people and the actors and the weather and the sun's going up or going down and the light is changing and you've got all of these practical things that are going to get between you and what you wanted to have on the screen. And what I wanted to do was write and direct something where the variables were virtually non-existent. So it's a man in a car, driving in a car, in a jumper, driving from Birmingham to London, doesn't get out of the car, nothing can change.

The script is in the rear view mirror and in the sat nav for the actor. The other actors are phoning in their, their, um, their stuff from a hotel in Enfield somewhere. And so everything's under control. The only things that are not under control of the performance. And obviously you've got Tom Hardy and suddenly that's the thing, you know what I mean? It's the, the way that, that he performs that part. And that's the sort of directing that I would do again.

And it's not because I disdain the other forms of directing, it's because I'm not that good at it. If I'm dealing with everything else, dealing with the people and the conditions and the weather and all that, it's just like, I just want to get to the thing that was originally the idea and it's very difficult. But that's why I have a massive amount of admiration

and awe for directors who do it because no one knows how bloody hard that is to do. And they just come down for more and they keep doing it. Yeah. What's next for you? What's the very next thing? Or are you working on something at the moment? I am, I've just, oh man,

I've talking of sometimes writing is hard. I've just finished a script which I'm delivering today for, I don't think it's even out there yet. I don't know if it's been announced, but for who I think is one of the best actors in the world. And I'm really pleased with it. Guinness, it's in the can now, I've written a thing about the Guinness family television extended drum, but the Guinness family saying the 18 seventies. Um, and other things coming up that I can't talk about. Um, that's fine.

But yeah, lots, lots, lots coming up. Oh, and the peaky ballad, I just mentioned, I wrote a ballet. You wrote a ballet. the Peaky Ballet. You wrote a ballet? Yeah, it's yeah, for the Peaky Blinds Ballet for Ballet Rombe. And it too, Britain did really well. It's now out in the world. It just appeared in Istanbul. It's going to be in Paris in March. And then it goes to the States. So there's plenty much more Stephen Knight to look forward to, which makes me very happy,

considering I now realize I've been following your career for over 30 years. Incredible to meet you. Thank you so much for your time and look forward to the next Knight project. It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you.