Steven Knight Quotes

A typical TV show is always about protecting the franchise - it's all about stretching it out as long as you can take it. And it's about taking the characters in any given hour as far as you can take them, but then resetting them more or less back to zero so at the beginning of the next week, so they're still the character you know and love.

What audiences love with series is that they can invest in characters for such a long period of time, and it's the same for actors. You can truly tell your story; then it's done.

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

Every film you're commissioned to write is all about an arc; usually, the arc is that the world creates a change in the character, usually for the better. To not have an arc, the messages and ideas in the film became more prominent.

My character on 'The Good Wife' is a smaller character, and his story arcs are typically season-long, unless it's a big episode for him. His transitions take place over many, many hours.

There's this thing in TV that I find hysterical where the writers and creators will ask us if you want to know what happens to your character or if you want to experience it episode by episode. In the theatre, we always know the ending; we always know where the character is going.

I love the trilogy form. I like the idea that you can establish a character in book one. And then in the second part, you can take the characters down to their darkest point. And then in the third part, you have total freedom either to give them redemption - or just to kill them.

I think it is important that you care about the characters, and you are not just waiting for the next action sequence but have a vested interested in what happens to them.

Being able to stay with a character over the course of years is a gift.

It's fun to grow with a character over the course of a TV series. Video games are usually a much more condensed process.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

You have 22 episodes to start from zero to hero; you can really take a nice, big, long arc. In a film, it's tough to do that - you only have 90 minutes.

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character.

I look for roles where there is some kind of an arc to the story.

Whenever you're blessed and given a second season, you can really let the characters evolve. That first season, you're setting everything up. It's background, where they're coming from, what they want to do. And then you get to marinate in it that second season.

Lucifer likes to have fun, but we need to make sure that he's also rooted in a proper journey. For the first few episodes after a pilot, you're just trying to establish your world and the starting points for your characters. But I feel like, as the stakes went up, the 'Lucifer' veneer got less and less.

In the English books, the American kids' books, typically, there is a problem, the characters grapple with that problem, and the problem is resolved.

The biggest risk with a series that goes on this long is that you'll get bored with the character.

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.

When you have a movie, you know who they start out as and where they go. But this is constantly changing, and you're growing with the character.

There's something really satisfying if you've created a bunch of characters that have withstood 25 episodes.

It is quite different, but I love doing a series because you get to live with a character for a much longer amount of time. And the other aspect of it is that you have a steady job.

In the initial season of a show, you're figuring out your character and their life and their background and you're putting together all the chapters of the book.

If we get to shoot the third one, which I'm really hoping we do, the third one's great. There's a big uprising and rebellion, and my character Gale's a big part of that. If we get to shoot that, I'll be very, very pleased.

I've often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for 'Sleepyhead,' I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who - crucially - would be unpredictable.