102 Quotes by Steven Knight

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

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.

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.

With any period piece I think the thing to do is forget that it's not contemporary when you're writing and to have the characters feel as much as possible like characters that you would know.

The things that are considered to be respectable have their roots in unrespectable things.

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.

I'm a massive Bowie fan, always have been.

I just don't like cinemas very much. And when I do see a film it depresses me.

I never set out to write a script that is 'topical.'