Steven Knight Interview: Creating “Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man” – Behind the Scenes of the Iconic Crime Drama

Steven Knight created the BBC 2 series Peaky Blinders in 2022 which ran for six seasons until 2023. Based on the Carl Chinn novels, it is set in Birmingham, UK post World War I and tracks the ruthless mobsters led by Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy). The series ended with Tommy in self-imposed exile. Now, the story continues as a feature film Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man – Tommy returns with a host of new characters, including his abandoned son Duke (Barry Keoghan) and Tim Roth as Peter Beckett who seeks to destroy the British financial system by flooding it with counterfeit bills. It also stars Rebecca Ferguson and Sophie Rundle.

Steven spoke with Creative Screenwriting Magazine about bringing Tommy Shelby back to the screen.

Describe the spirit of Peaky Blinders and its transition from television to film.

Steven Knight

Having written the series, if you start a story, you’re already starting to write a film. The backstory is still only in your head. You have to know where the characters are from and what they’ve done.

In this case, the Peaky backstory is in six hour-long episode series. Immortal Man is throwing the Peaky Blinders into World War II, they’re in Birmingham during the Blitz, so no one knows if they’re going to be alive tomorrow, because the bombs are dropping. The spirit of Peaky Blinders has taken a grip on the city of Birmingham itself, because that’s how everyone’s living.

There’s a lot of hedonism going on. There’s a lot of ‘live for today’ spirit going on. The unifying principle for the Peaky Blinders, particularly for Tommy Shelby, always has been that he has, since the First World War, walked a tightrope between life and death.

He’s always been, in the words of John Keats, “Half in love with easeful Death” himself. And that has been his superpower; the fact that he’s prepared to do things where he’s risking his life. This is amplified by the fact that the bombs are dropping and the war is on.

Elaborate on Tommy Shelby’s current headspace.

I wanted to examine the central character, Tommy Shelby, starting off in self-imposed exile, and feeling guilt for something that he’s done, He’s always been a good man doing bad things for a good reason – or for a reason that he believes is good. But he’s done something that he knows was wrong.

And that’s a new thing for Tommy Shelby. Immortal Man is his attempt to find forgiveness for himself, to do a good thing that is actually good – to save his son, but also it saves his country and possibly alters the outcome of the Second World War. There are huge stakes involved, but I wanted to see them all through the prism of Tommy Shelby and his relationship with his family, especially Duke.

What is the significance of the title Immortal Man?

The title came to me quite early because the creation myth of the Peaky Blinders is that Tommy, his brothers, and their comrades were stuck in no man’s land during the First World War. They were absolutely certain they were going to die; that the Germans were going to come and wipe them out. And by a miracle, they were saved. And they all agreed in that moment, that from now on, everything they do is a bonus. Everything from now on is extra because really we should have died in that moment. Tommy has always felt that immortality because he has cheated death.

The title of the film is also the title of the book that he’s writing. In the book, he’s not being a good father to his kids. He hasn’t been around. What he wants to do is leave something of himself to his children, which is a kind of immortality. Through writing the book, he’s going to live on. His profile will be known after he’s gone. People will know who he is and what he did.

Discuss the relationship between the TV series and the Peaky Blinders feature film.

The film is set six years after the series ends. I felt that the film would be the final chapter of this part of the story. It felt that putting it into the form of a film rather than a TV series, almost concentrates the mind.

It sharpens it, because you’ve got less time and you’ve got to know exactly what your story is, beginning, middle and end. I knew that the focus of this film would be Tommy Shelby. With a film, you don’t have the luxury of cutting away to someone else’s story so much.

It’s the Tommy Shelby and the Duke Shelby story as they collide. One of the main motivations for doing this as a film was that our fans have been the energy behind the series all along. It wasn’t well publicized, it wasn’t promoted heavily.

Fans discovered it, talked to each other and it was word of mouth that made it work. They’ve always communicated virtually. We wanted was to put it in cinemas so that fans could actually go and be together in one place and experience the film together. A lot of cinemas in the UK have sold out for the whole run already. People want to see the film with other fans. A lot of people are turning up dressed for the occasion in the States as well.

Describe the “like father like son” dynamic between Tommy and Duke.

This is almost a biblical view of father and son. They’re both trying to rescue and destroy each other.

I’m very interested in the wider implications of the story and what it signifies. The father-son thing, the legacy handing over power, handing the crown over to the heir, and handing over the experience and knowledge that Tommy has got.

It’s a father trying to explain to his son physically that the things he’s doing are wrong and that there is another way of doing stuff.

In the way that they clash and fight, we sense that they’re going to betray each other. Father and son sort of swap places, where the father is the power and the son is dependent, and then that turns around.

Tommy Shelby’s never going to be that dependent person. This is the moment when they cross over and Tommy is the one that says to his son, “I am a horse and you do it for a horse.”

Peter Beckett (Tim Roth) Photo by Robert Viglasky/ Netflix

How does Peter Becket represent fascism?

The interesting thing about the Second World War, is it’s possibly the last conflict where I would hope that we would all agree it was only good versus bad. We were right and they were wrong.

What’s great about the way Tim Roth portrays Beckett, and this was his choice as well, was to make him almost beguiling, friendly and reasonable in order to seduce Duke. We’re showing that this ideology, which is fundamentally wrong, can appear to be very straightforward and reasonable. Tim speaks in a very open way and he’s a man of the people.

He says to Tommy Shelby, “Look, come on, why don’t you just join us? Why don’t you understand that this is the way to go?” And that’s what is so dangerous about that ideology. People can be easily be fooled into thinking that it’s a simple solution.

Immortal Man is based on actual events during World War II. Explain how you wove those into the narrative.

There was actually a situation where the Nazis wanted to flood the UK banking system with counterfeit money. It was called Operation Bernhardt. When I’m picking a period of time, I look for pieces of history that have probably been forgotten or kept secret.

The Nazis used Sachsenhausen concentration camp and the inmates there to forge 350 million pounds worth of currency. The idea was to inject that into the British economy, flood the system and destroy the country. That was kept secret by the British government for almost fifty years.

They didn’t want to affect people’s faith in the currency. I think they withdrew the £10 note during the war. After the war, they redesigned the currency.

The British banks said, “These are the best forgeries that we’ve ever seen. And it is almost impossible to spot.” It was a plan that was hatched. It didn’t work, but could have worked.

Ada (Sophie Rundle) Photo courtesy of Netflix

How did you plot Immortal Man with a blend of old and new characters?

Plotting for me comes, not from planning. It comes from writing.

It’s the thing that I do where I sit at the keyboard and just let it happen, then see what’s occurring when I read it back. It’s almost like dreaming. Sometimes when the plot works, it’s almost like you’ve got lucky. Something that you did randomly. You’ve just realized that you can then do that with that. And this ties that to that. It’s all very nice and neat when you didn’t plan it that way to begin with.

I wanted Tommy to be in the emotional condition he was in. I wanted his son to be doing what his son is doing. And then it was a question of just finding a way that they’re going to come together.

They’re going to clash. It involves writing quite a lot of stuff that you don’t use. But you know where you’re heading. You just don’t know how you’re going to get there. I didn’t write a treatment which may possibly be a much smarter way of doing this. I tend to let it happen.

How did you navigate story “drift” while adapting the Peaky Blinders novels into a film and TV series?

It wasn’t a slavish adaptation, nor a complete reinvention. It was a matter of being aware the movie screen was bigger, being aware the budget was a bit bigger. And being aware that you only have 90 minutes, two hours, does change the way the story is told.

For me, a television series is like a novel, and a film is more like a short story. It’s got to just have that beginning, middle and end to it.

In terms of how it looks, this is down to Tom Harper, the director. There’s something, whether deliberate or not, that feel it’s a bit like watching a second World War movie in the traditional sense. I wanted the characters to feel very modern compared to the novels. I don’t think human beings change particularly. They just wear different clothes and use different words.

I’ve always wanted to relate to the characters so they have emotions that we recognize. They respond in ways that we absolutely recognize. And that’s where the contemporary music comes in, because that is almost like a direct line to the audience – this is the emotion that this person is feeling and it’s being expressed through a contemporary soundtrack.

Do you have any final ideas about your writing process?

I’m aware, as a consequence of people pointing out, that the stuff I write has a particular feel or a style to it.

It’s not done consciously. I think that’s as a result of just letting it happen. I try where possible, to reflect the randomness and chaos of reality. When we’re writing fiction, we feel obliged to obey the laws of fiction. There are no coincidences. People are one thing, and they have an arc maybe, but they don’t have ten arcs in one hour, like people really have in real life.

When I’m writing dialogue, I try to reflect the way that people talk, which doesn’t make sense sometimes. People are saying things, but meaning the opposite. I’m trying to unlock that intricacy of dialogue in real time.

Watch at https://www.netflix.com/title/81319485

by Staff Writer

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