Last night we attended a fantastic screenwriters lecture at BAFTA with writer/director Steven Knight. Knight who started out working on television show Who Wants to be a Millionaire is credited with writing scripts for both DIRTY PRETTY THINGS and EASTERN PROMISES. He followed these scripts with HUMMINGBIRD and LOCKE, films that he directed as well as wrote. He hasn’t forgotten his televisual roots though and has scripted both series of Peaky Blinders, which stars Tom Hardy and Cillian Murphy.
The full event write-up will be up on the site later this week but we had to bring you the news that Knight knows exactly how he wants to end the show which has just started it’s second series. Spoiler avoiders be warned, Knight wasn’t shy about sharing his views on where the show is going:
I’ve got the ending in mind where he is, and I’m not joking, he is Sir Thomas Shelby, and it’s the start of the Second World War and the first siren goes off and that’s it. But I mean, you know what I want to, what I’m trying to do with the whole thing is look at someone from his background, can he get out, can he escape ever? Because he’s English and, you know, the class thing is even worse then, but can he, even if he becomes rich, which he does, even if he gets knighted which maybe he does because his political chicanery with various people. I don’t know how it will work yet, but he will do deals with various politicians and he will end up getting knighted. Even then he’s still nobody. You know maybe, or maybe the answer is then he’s accepted and he’s fine, but I think the former is more likely.
Some people have drawn comparisons between the show and Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, though Knight admits that he has never read the book. The story for the show comes from his own family background:
I’ve never read Brighton Rock I must admit, no I haven’t. I’m massively badly read. But no I mean interestingly that was pointed out to me as possibly the only bit of research that was in print. In other words, basically nothing was written about Billy Kimber, all of those people. The only bits that I knew about was from my parents telling me stories about their experiences when they were kids in Birmingham, because my mum was a bookies’ runner and my dad’s uncles were peaky blinders, they were racketeers, so it was, this was family lore. But I wouldn’t aspire to be anywhere close to Graham Greene.
He also expressed a great desire to see his home town of Birmingham get a lot more screen time:
I want to use Birmingham as much as possible because it’s, yeah, it’s not, I don’t know why it’s been completely, I think it’s the accent or something. But it’s been, it’s not been a venue for drama and it should be because it’s a great big industrial city with lots of stories and a fantastic history. And the worst thing though you can then do is say; you know our poor old region, what’s wrong with our region, why don’t you do something with our region? The only thing you can do is make something, try and make something that doesn’t feel like it’s from a region at all. It’s from everywhere, it could be anywhere you know, but it just happens to be in Birmingham. I mean the reason I did it is because as I say the stories were family stories and my family grew up in Birmingham so that’s what I wanted to do. But I’ve got plans to do stuff in Brum as much as possible, and I’m even, I’m gonna try to put together a group of people to get a sound stage in the south of Birmingham where features and television can be shot, just because I think if there’s a stage there then that will generate the, you know, ancillary industries and get things going. But you know the BBC are doing stuff, they’ve moved the Academy up there for writers and people and, you know, I think that it’s not just Birmingham, anywhere, anybody who lives in any city anywhere should look first at their environment and see what the stories are that are from there.
Knight had a lot of interesting thoughts to share regarding his past projects, and also took time to offer advice to would be writers. Come back later in the week for more.
Source: THN
