Steven Knight

“Brief Encounter, which is just a classic. David Lean. The performances are beyond belief, and it’s very emotional and… it’s sort of gone in a big circle, where there was a time when it was considered to be really old-fashioned, but it’s sort of not that.”

“Le cercle Rouge. I did a version of this set in Hong Kong, which is going to come out at some point. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Alain Delon, possibly the best actor maybe, certainly out of Europe, and wonderful film.”

“The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, for me, it’s about Richard Burton, who was the most remarkable actor, born in Wales, son of a coal miner, fluent in Welsh. Drinker, fighter, all of those things. Brilliant actor. His story with Elizabeth Taylor was a movie in itself. And he’s the actor I would most have liked to have written for that would have reflected that sort of fire that he had in his soul.”

“Paris, Texas. One of my daughters, when she was three years old, became obsessed with… Three years old, became obsessed with Paris, Texas. And if we needed to get her to sleep, or if we needed to calm her down or anything, we’d just put Paris, Texas on and she’d just sit there. Not just listen to the music, but she’d watch it and sort of know what was coming next. There’s something hypnotic about it.”

“3:10 to Yuma is indicative, for me, of westerns… my dad used to take us boys to westerns, with usually John Wayne. But any western that was on… My dad was a farrier, a blacksmith, he’d shoe horses, he used to take us all out shoeing horses, so we knew about horses and my dad used to love to watch the way they rode, because the people who ride horses in westerns are amongst the best riders in the world. As well as the stories, the horses were quite important to us.”

“One-Eyed Jacks, I mean, Marlon Brando, so… And Karl Malden in this film, it’s one of the strongest performances. For me, this film introduced a sort of modernity to– Marlon Brando himself, a modernity to performance. You didn’t quite know if he was in it or not, if he was really in the character or not. But that was because the character who he always played was not really in the world, in my opinion.”

“Betty Blue. I love– Again, when I was a kid, me and my brothers, Saturday night on BBC Two… That’s not relevant to this film, but on Saturday night on BBC Two they used to play French films and they did have an effect on me. Anything when you’re little has an effect, and watching those films had a real effect on me, not because we were arty, but… All this stuff would be going on, everything would be happening, and then it’d suddenly go, “Fin,” and nothing had been resolved and the plot hadn’t really come together. They’d just done a series of scenes and then went, “Fin,” as if to say, “I’ve had enough of this, I’m bored.” And the French sensibility, I really miss it in films, because they didn’t care. Betty Blue was a great film.”

“Dont Look Back. I mean, God. Bob Dylan. When I see this, and see his interviews on telly, he looks like a time traveler who is from now who has been taken back in time, and he’s sort of bewildered by how weird everybody is. He’s actually more like us than them– Is that my phone? I’m sorry about that.”

“Citizen Kane hardly needs… explanation. It’s just so good.”