Steven Knight exclusively talks to Film Stories about his dream film studio in Birmingham – and the upcoming Peaky Blinders film…
Back in 2018, as this magazine was lumbering to life, writer, producer and director Steven Knight was still hard at work trying to make a dream project come true. He was in the midst of making the really rather divisive movie Serenity, juggling the demands of his TV hit Peaky Blinders, and – get this – attempting to set up a major film studio in the Birmingham area.
Birmingham – where this magazine started life – hasn’t exactly been a hotbed of film production. Sure, the 1990s brought the comedy horror I Bought A Vampire Motorcycle. Things picked up in the mid-2010s when second unit work was being done on the second Kingsman movie, and Steven Spielberg had chosen the city for the, er, grim future dystopia scenes in 2016’s Ready Player One.
A full film and TV production studio, though? Who’d be mad enough to try and set one of those up? Step forward Mr Knight, who finally announced the opening of the site in early 2023. Since then?
“It’s been amazing,” Knight says of the year and change since Digbeth Loc was officially announced and opened. One of the first shows to come out of it, the hit BBC drama This Town – penned by Knight – has certainly helped in terms of profile, yet it’s far from alone.
“We’re going to be doing the Peaky Blinders movie in September. But then subsequent to that, we’ve got a pipeline coming through. Post- production and pre-production companies moving in. The office space is filling up rapidly.”
Getting a crack on…
Too rapidly, almost. The Digbeth Loc team is taking things slowly, given that organically, the site is working well with people already in there. It doesn’t sound like they’re having to advertise their services far and wide, with the untapped demand for such a complex in the area already pretty much proven.
That’s before its biggest project to date moves in, that Peaky Blinders film for which the script is pretty much done and pre- production is getting underway. The film will be managed and shot primarily on site: given that the Birmingham-set international drama has rarely filmed in its home city before, this is a very welcome step forward. Beyond that?
“There’s lot of plans in the pipeline for expansion of the facility, in terms of what shows are coming.”
Knight says that, despite what you may think, “it’s not difficult to fill up a studio, to be honest.” He adds, “what I’m trying to do is take all of my stuff there.”
It’s worth noting that Oscar- nominee Knight has several projects on the go himself, as well as recently undertaking Hollywood screenwriting work on films as varied as a new Star Wars movie and a remake of Vertigo.
Ways in
Back to Digbeth, though. With new tenants come new opportunities, and that helps drive one of the other ambitions behind the complex: to help people in the area break into the industry. The BBC is one of the organisations on board with this. As well as adding productions to the Digbeth Loc roster, it’s also bringing its mentorship scheme.
“The Birmingham Film Academy are moving in,” Knight adds. “We’ve got carpenters and sparkies too.”
Refreshingly, this isn’t just opportunities for those seeking a first job either.
“We’ve got a fantastic drive to get people who are not necessarily young, but they are already doing stuff, and can divert to become people who work on film sets,” Knight says proudly. “We’re working with Birmingham City University (BCU) and the University of Birmingham, who are also going to present on site. And in the meantime, we’re making stuff. We try not to be academic or theoretical about it. Everything that we do is getting stuff made.”
For examples, outside of This Town and Peaky Blinders, “in spring of next year, MasterChef – the biggest food franchise for the BBC – is going to be broadcast from Banana Warehouse.”
There’s a sentence. Banana Warehouse is an existing building that’s part of the Digbeth complex. The BBC announced the relocation of Master Chef from London to Birmingham in 2022, and it’s taken time to make the journey. After all, Digbeth is an area of the city ripe for regeneration, and the warehouse in question was a Grade II listed building lying unused. It’s taken extensive, careful repair and improvement work to turn it into a modern sound stage – with the original warehouse remaining at its heart – but it’s nearly ready to go.
“It’s actually moving forward quicker than we thought,” Knight admits. “It’s quicker than we’d prepared. We made This Town there before we were ready, but it turned out great.”
I’m really taken by the drive to get people to break into the industry from all sorts of paths, though. It’s a topic he warms to.
“People are people,” he reasons. “People in their 30s, 40s and 50s, they bring with them a lack of heat and volatility sometimes, which is great. We are really keen to take advantage of that, the fact that the film industry might use people with existing skills that can be adjusted, rather than [needing] radical change.
“We’ve got to get the best people in the room,” he insists. “It’s great that we’re getting young people in too, but there’s lots of people out there who can contribute to what we’re doing.”
Age need not be a barrier.
Down the motorway
As we wind down our conversation, I mention that when we chatted about the project back in the infant days of Film Stories, it wasn’t set to be where it ended up. Digbeth is in Birmingham city centre after all, but originally, the plan was for a site near the National Exhibition Centre. That’s some way out of the city centre, yet right next to Birmingham Airport. But also, a bit in the middle of nowhere.
“There’s nothing wrong with the NEC, but Digbeth is so different,” Knight admits, happy the studio ended up where it did. “You’re near to the city centre, you’re not in the middle of a muddy field, you’re not in the middle of nowhere, you can walk to restaurants, you can get a coffee, go to an ATM.”
There’s more, too. “We’re putting a hotel on the location, so you can stay there and walk to walk. We’re using the canals. All the things that that area offers.”
He’s proud of the area, and has talked in the past about the West Midlands, and Birmingham in particular, having the occasional habit of talking itself down. In fairness to him, this very article noted why Steven Spielberg ended up in the West Midlands back at the start, and that’s hardly the positive light that perhaps a Hollywood production in town deserved.
“There’s a race to be cynical, and a race to be bored,” he says. “The first person to be cynical or the first person to be bored has proved themselves to be the cleverest. Whereas I think it’s the opposite. Enthusiasm and spirit is what we need. There’s plenty of it in Birmingham.”
He cites the spirit of the famous Lunar Men of Birmingham, a group who came together at the heart of the British industrial revolution, and helped spark the city’s reputation as a city of 1,000 trades. It’s still a city of 1,000 trades: it’s just the trades are changing fast.
“People just believed they could do stuff, and that’s what we’ve got to do. There’s no shortage of it within the individuals. But I think there’s a cleverness to being a detractor, where you don’t ever want to be caught in possession of an enthusiastic belief, because you may look silly.”
Had Knight himself not fought for Digbeth Loc – and while he had a lot of support, he was very much a man pushing a boulder uphill – then it’s hard to see how Birmingham could boast quite the facility it now has. But: he did fight for it.
Thanks to Knight, the future could therefore see some major productions setting up home in the middle of Birmingham. And not just because they want to put a grim futuristic dystopia on screen.
