Steven Knight Quotes

I'm not going to stop painting just to take orders.

I don't like directing that much to want a career as a director for hire. I like to have as much creative control as possible.

My goal was, and still is, to write first, direct my own stuff whenever possible and control my own creative destiny.

I don't suffer the decisions the studio world makes.

I have worried about getting pigeon-holed, but now I think I've done enough weird, offbeat stuff not to be. And I also know that I do things for the right reasons: I've made my money, so I don't have to say yes to anything.

I have a freedom that's incredibly valuable. Obviously my freedom is far smaller in scale than people like Zemeckis and Spielberg have here. But it's comparable. I can dream up a project, develop it, make it, control it, release it.

When it came to my art, I went my own way and did not follow the trends.

One thing I know is that I don't want to be a director for hire, making genre films.

I just make the movies I want to see. I've always been that way.

I've always felt like I've had the ability to choose which roles I was going to play. I don't think that the industry agreed with me, but I've always had a bit of a headstrong attitude of only doing the things that I really believe in and want to explore.

You can take your life into your own hands in terms of directing. There are ways for you to finance yourself and to write and make a film.

I've had a lot of voices tell me what I should be making. Personally, I would much rather live and die by my own hand. If my stuff sucks, then at least I made it suck. I didn't allow some person, some old dude in a suit, to make it suck for me.

If you look at somebody like Sam Bee, she got to create her own thing without any expectations that there was a show there. That was probably liberating for them.

I don't want to make films that are constantly pleasing the audience, it is not my tradition.

When I get to make a movie, I really try to make it on my own terms.

It is easier to make a film but difficult to make it on your own terms. In that sense 'Madras Cafe' was a very satisfying experience.

I remember once doing a benefit for a Jewish charity and wearing an enormous cross. I kind of don't let the audience dictate anything to me. I sort of dictate to them, and they better be on board.

I have people telling me what I can and can't do, what music I can and can't make.

You have to remember the police used to raid and arrest the audience for seeing Scorpio Rising (1964), or Jack Smith movies. Wouldn't that be exciting today, if you see went to the movie and everyone at the IFC was arrested in a paddy wagon and taken away?

I didn't come to Hollywood to be subservient to anyone else's vision.

I remember when I was in art classes, I hated following the assignments. And I would get in trouble for doing something totally different or taking it in a weird direction.

You really think that on my films people tell me what to do? I don't think so. On my films I decide.

I love to work. It's the idea of having someone else tell you how to make your film or how to sell it - that's the part I can't really deal with. I would rather do 1,000 things that are work than deal with one thing that's a political problem.

I can't tell you how freeing it is to have my own label. For the first time in my career, I have total control.

What I discovered in Berlin was this immense freedom because it felt like you could start any kind of project and nobody would care... and that's what I sort of adopted to my own.