Steven Knight Quotes

I don't generally derive my stories from novels. I try to turn into film things I have felt or experienced.

I loved The Weird (one of the stories in it inspired Blackalley in Discourse).

Everything can be grist for the muse. Sometimes, writers draw on personal experiences. 'Ghoul' was just that.

Most of my stories, if not all of them, have some basis in real life. That's the kind of fiction I'm most interested in. I suppose that's one reason I don't have much respect for fiction that seems to be game playing.

There are so many moments and works that influence us in what we do. Movies, music, TV and, most importantly, the profound everydayness of our lives.

I did no research on 'The Best Man.' That was something that came out from my own head.

There's some movies I watch, they're kind of like my anti-anxiety pill, my anti-depressant pill. I watch them at least once or twice a month probably. And I never stop learning from them as a filmmaker.

It is no accident that I made Cartoon Town a simple little village - in many ways it mirrored my home town. And, yes, many of my puppet characters took on some of the more eccentric characteristics of people I knew there.

I never consciously do any work directly influenced from any movie, unless I'm doing a parody.

I went through a pretty big David Bowie period when I was younger, and that has affected me profoundly in my life and my work.

I grew up loving film and television. Film, in particular. I would never feel as inspired - it's sort of the same for music with me as well, but I never got the same kind of feeling with music as I did with watching film.

'Machine' was one of the biggest decisions I have taken in my life - it was the best narration till date. It is a typical Abbas-Mustan thriller.

Actually, after three years, I realised that the opening scenes of 'Polladhavan' were inspired by 'Lolita,' in which the lead character says, 'Why did I meet her? My life would have been different had I not met her.'

My favorite film is 'The Shining,' mostly because it was the film that inspired me to become a filmmaker myself.

All the stories I write come from someone I've met or some anecdote I've heard.

As artists, we can't help but infuse our art with our own experience, so your experience becomes informative.

In my films, a lot of the situations come from real life.

I decided with 'Savage Season' to use a lot of things in my life as the basis.

Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.

I don't do films because they tell a particular kind of story, I do films with stories that touch me.

All of my stories, they don't come from my high school experience, but they're definitely based on things that happened to me in high school, or things that happened to friends of mine, or things that I wish had happened to me.

What I do with everything is take things out of real life. You encounter all sorts of stories. It's a lot of your friends and family, sometimes there's quite sad episodes in their life and everything. So just little things I've picked up along the years always find a way into all of my stories.

I think it was the sense that Turn is a spy thriller, and that's a genre that really fascinates me, in general.

A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.

Always, with any movie that I do, I have a book of ideas that I've heard, or seen, or whatever, and I always try to incorporate it in the film.