Peaky Blinders | Steven Knight confirms he won’t be directing the movie himself

Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders
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Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight is writing the script for the movie, but letting someone else take on directing duties. More here.


Later this year, filming is set to begin on the long-mooted Peaky Blinders movie, that’s going to wrap up the long-running TV series with a cinema adventure. The film is going to be housed at the relatively new Digbeth Loc Studios site in Birmingham, the international production facility that’s been a passion project of writer, director and producer Steven Knight.

Steven Knight has been keen to bring such a facility to his home town, and the first major production that was homed at Digbeth Loc was the recent BBC TV series This Town. Now, Knight confirms in the new issue of Film Stories magazine that the Peaky Blinders film is on schedule to fully move in Digbeth Loc in September. Furthermore, he’s also confirmed that he doesn’t plan to direct the film himself.

Knight has directed three features to date: Hummingbird (starring Jason Statham and an amazing hairpiece), Locke (with Tom Hardy and a long motorway drive) and Serenity (the one with Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaughey that, on the whole, people didn’t like). He’s said in the past that he wants to direct the stuff that others veer away from, and he’s sticking to his rules. “It needs to be a script so weird that nobody else would touch it”, he grins, as we ask him what’d get him back to the director’s chair himself.

“It’s hard on the body, directing”, he adds, although I point out that Ridley Scott and Martin Scorsese are in their 80s and still working away. Laughing, he concedes that “I will [direct] when the story’s right”, but he also wants to do things that don’t have to be shot in a traditional way. This is the man, after all, who had Tom Hardy driving up and down the aforementioned motorway, time after time after time. Part of it is down to wanting to do things a bit differently, part of it is because he founds the pace of big film production like “walking through treacle”.

“There’s got to be another way”, he argues, but affirms that he personally won’t be finding it on the Peaky Blinders movie. He’s written the script, he’s overseeing the project…. but he definitely won’t be directing it.

The full interview with Steven Knight is in issue 50 of Film Stories magazine, that’s available to order now.

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