CraveOnline: Do you prefer the title Hummingbird or Redemption?
Steven Knight: Hummingbird.
Is that the official title in the U.K.?
In the U.K. it’s called Hummingbird, “hummingbird” being the name of a drug. It was felt by the U.S. distributors that people wouldn’t get the fact that hummingbird was a drug. I just thought they would. [Laughs] That’s they’re job and I’m sure they know what they’re talking about. They have the contractual right to change the name, so they changed it to Redemption. A rose by any other name is still a rose. It is about redemption, so it could have been worse.
This is the first feature film that you’ve directed, am I correct?
Yes, you’re right.
Were you adequately prepared?
Physically, no. Mentally I hope yes. Physically, certainly not. It’s like being in a boxing match every day. Not in terms of conflict, in terms of the physical, brutal, hard work that is directing a film. Especially, we did four hard weeks of nights in Soho, and Soho at night is a hard place to be. So it’s physically, really, really, really [difficult], so in the end you feel that you’ve really been through the mill, but it’s sort of addictive. Within two months I was directing my second film. [Laughs]
For the fight scenes, did you rely on second unit?
I relied on Jason for that, because obviously we had stunt coordinators, and obviously I had an idea of how the fights would look, but when Jason arrives on the set he brings with him such a wealth of experience. And also he’s just good at it. Stuntmen say, and fight coordinators say, that he would be the best stuntman and fight coordinator around if that’s what he wanted to do, because he’s so good at it. He would make the fights real, and bring to it such a sort of aggression that it was quite frightening to watch. But yeah, he was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.
Tell me about the origin of the spoon scene.
[Laughs] Again, I wanted to always try… I always want that the thing that happens next is not what the audience is expecting. You expect someone to pull a knife. You don’t expect someone to pull a spoon. I thought it was part of Joey Jones’s humor to do that. The point being, he can win a fight with a spoon. That’s how good he is. That was the idea behind that bit.
Was the spoon the first trinket you came up with, or did you start with a fork, and say, “That’s too hardcore. Let’s do a spoon?”
[Laughs] No, I think maybe there was a fork involved at some point in the very, very early stages of the script, but no, it was spoon. It’s the most harmless of all the cutlery items, I think.
