Interview [Written]: Steven Knight (“Locke”)

A Rope of Silicon interview with Locke writer-director Steven Knight:

So what is Locke? Why was I so excited to see it? What’s so great about talking with Steven Knight? Well, Locke (read my review here) is an 85-minute movie featuring Tom Hardy as Ivan Locke, a construction site foreman driving in his car and fielding numerous phone calls for the entire film. It’s a single location drama that, unlike films such as Buried, where the threat of survival is on the line, it takes what could be considered a very normal situation in a man’s life and explores the consequences of either owning up to your mistakes and doing something about it or ignoring them.

An excerpt:

I have to admit, there was a little trepidation walking in… one guy, in a car, talking on the phone for 85 minutes.

It’s a hard sell, but once people have seen it, they get it.

To that point, how would you respond to someone that sees it and says, “Nothing happens”?

In a sense they’d be right, but the intention at the outset was to point the camera at an ordinary man, a man who is like anyone else. He’s not Jason Bourne, he’s not James Bond, and he’s made a mistake anyone could make and the movie is about his response to that and his attempt to make it better. Nothing happens that would get into the papers, nothing happens that would get on to the local news, but I think the reason people are responding is because they see their own lives within it.

The number of people that have come up to me and said, “That’s the journey my dad didn’t make… That’s the journey my dad did make… That’s the journey I didn’t make…” and they really do relate to it in their own way. I think that’s a different experience compared to the “normal” cinematic experience.

You say in the notes you told the cast to treat it “like a play” and solve issues on the fly. Is that something you are going to now take to the rest of your films seeing how much it ramps up the realism?

I’m going to try. I’ve got an idea that I’m going to do next. The day job is the same, which is writing conventional scripts with conventional budgets, but I’m really interested in putting together stories that can be told in a different way and my interest is in capturing performance above anything else.

Here is the trailer for the movie Locke:

For the rest of the interview, go here.

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