Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight is doing research for his script for the next James Bond film with “the SAS and even more secret outfits”, the UK writer told Screen this week.
“I am talking to them about what they do every day. It’s all real,” he said of the exploits depicted in the Ian Fleming books on which the on-screen character is based. “The author… was living that life. In the war, he was doing those things. He knew people doing that stuff, going out there and killing people.
“Ian Fleming was such a great writer. To be a writer, you have got to know about people.”
Knight said he believed he had a licence to reinvent James Bond, the first one to be made by Amazon MGM. “Bond has been bulletproof. People have been able to make mistakes and variations, quite elaborate variations, and the character has survived because the core of it is like a diamond. You can’t touch it. The person you are talking about is folklore.”
Watching the Bond films was a big part of his childhood. Sean Connery was his favourite. “It was always Connery. You’d be watching as a kid with your dad. The certainty, the confidence and the escape from something, everybody buys into that. That’s the thing with Bond, everybody wants it.”
Knight has just completed a documentary about Oasis that will be released by Disney in the autumn.
“There were two brothers who just didn’t give a fuck. They just did it…that’s what we need more of,” he said of Noel and Liam Gallagher.
Birmingham facility
Knight is on the Croisette to talk to international producers about Digbeth Loc, the Birmingham studios he has founded in partnership with studio and post-production service provider BBC Studioworks.
Birmingham band UB40 recently recorded an album there, and the latest series of Knight’s Peaky Blinders, set in the 1950s, is now in production for the next six weeks.
Knight said he would eventually make a film or series about Charlie Chaplin that will reveal the comedian’s Birmingham gypsy roots. He added he’d like to build a “big statue” of Chaplin at Digbeth Loc.
As Digbeth is based in an economically challenged area of Birmingham, Knight is determined that the film studio is open to and welcoming towards the local community.
“We’ve got loads of sheds and warehouses,” he said. “I want people to come in. Just do what you’re going to do and we’ll see what comes of it. It is going to be writers and artists who are going to rescue [us].”
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