Steven Knight on Making the Leap From ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’ to ‘Dirty Pretty Things’ to, Eventually, James Bond — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" launched Knight's career as one of its creators in the late 1990s, his first major industry breakthrough
- At the RTS London Convention on Tuesday, Knight revealed his "secret" was running "two computers" — he was simultaneously writing radio commercials, comedy for British stand-ups Frankie Howard, Ken Dodd and Jasper Carrot, and novels while Millionaire aired
- "Dirty Pretty Things" began as Knight's fourth novel, which he wrote in present tense like a script; converting it into one, he got it to director Stephen Frears, yielding the 2002 film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Audrey Tautou
- In Hollywood afterward, Knight was still introduced in meetings as "the man who helped make 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?'" — nearly a quarter-century later
- Amazon MGM hired Knight to pen the long-awaited 26th James Bond film and franchise reboot, while Noel and Liam Gallagher tapped him to shape the Oasis tour documentary "Don't Look Back in Anger"
- Bond, referenced at the RTS talk as "the unmentionable thing," now has a finished first draft per Knight's recent reveal — a disclosure that may have earned him a wrist-slap from Amazon
Why it matters: Knight's trajectory from co-creating a 1990s quiz show phenomenon to scripting Amazon MGM's Bond reboot — via "Dirty Pretty Things," "Peaky Blinders" and the Oasis documentary — illustrates how cross-format versatility compounds over decades. For Amazon MGM, a finished first draft means the 007 reboot, which has been in development limbo since 2021, is now actively in script rather than stuck in pre-production purgatory.
Ask SkimNews
