Even before film plaudits, writer hit a jackpot

In 1998, Steven Knight was eking out a respectable living as a jack-of-all-trades in the British entertainment industry -- writing sitcom episodes and stand-up comedy for the TV company Celador, trying his hand at a film script and working on a team devising TV game shows. He could not have known that two modest projects would change his fortunes spectacularly.

For one, his script, a thriller set among London’s immigrant underclass, became a film, “Dirty Pretty Things,” directed by Stephen Frears. It opened here in December to critical acclaim and solid business, and he and the film were nominated for Britain’s version of the Academy Awards. Now Knight is a hot property in Los Angeles, courted with lucrative offers. “I’m basically saying ‘yes’ to everything, and we’ll see how long I’m in fashion,” he said last week at Celador’s Covent Garden offices.

More remarkably, the game show on which he was working became, to his astonishment, a global phenomenon. Easily the most successful game show of recent times, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” has earned huge sums of money for Celador and made Knight and his collaborators seriously wealthy. “It hasn’t done badly,” he said, with exquisite understatement. “At the time, we thought it was just another show.”

The remark typifies Knight, 43, a tall, rangy man with reddish-brown hair and a low-key, self-deprecating manner. It’s hard to imagine him standing up to Hollywood power brokers, yet he speaks his mind quietly but firmly.

He also has a dry sense of humor. Asked how many countries now broadcast “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” he deadpanned: “All of them.” A beat. “Well, obviously not all. I don’t think Iraq has it. But for example, China does. It’s all over the place.” (A Celador spokeswoman later confirmed the show’s concept has been sold to 106 countries.) When asked if he held a title within Celador, Knight said: “Emperor.” Another beat. “OK, in reality, I don’t have one. If people want me, they usually say; ‘Oi, you!’ ”

Knight’s script for “Dirty Pretty Things” was his first attempt at a feature-length screenplay. “It started out as a novel,” he recalled. “I’d already written three, and I owed Penguin a fourth. But after two chapters, it felt more like a film, so I began writing it as a screenplay, and that seemed to work.”

The immigrants in “Dirty Pretty Things” are mainly illegal. Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) trained as a doctor in his native Nigeria but now has two jobs: taxi driver by day, and night porter at an expensive London hotel. His closest friends include Senay (played by French actress Audrey Tautou), a Turkish chambermaid at the same hotel; Juliette, an Anglo-African prostitute (Sophie Okonedo); and a Chinese-born morgue attendant, Guo Yi (Benedict Wong). The thriller aspect begins when Okwe stumbles onto a shocking discovery about what’s going on at the hotel.

While the film is set in London, the only recognizably English characters are marginal. This, Knight insisted, was deliberate.

“In the [script’s] early stages there was an English character who stumbled into this world,” he recalled. “But in getting it down to length certain things had to go. It moved more elegantly when he wasn’t around. It felt better to take this world that existed in London and deal with that world.

“My intention was always to write a thriller, with the idea: ‘Hotel porter finds a human heart in one of the rooms.’ And this thriller happens to take place in a world populated by people with precarious status. I never thought: ‘I’m going to write a film about these poor people.’

“If you stick to the reality of the racial makeup of that world, people think you’re making a racial point. But the truth is, that night porter almost certainly wouldn’t be white. And the chambermaid would be Turkish, Korean or Filipino. If it had been recast with white English actors -- now, that would have been making a racial point.”

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Discovering another London

To research the story, Knight accompanied a Turkish friend to two north London sweatshops. He was amazed by what he saw: “You turn off an ordinary street, climb a few concrete stairs, open a door and you enter the Third World. Rows and rows of women, dressed in ethnic costumes -- Kurds, Filipinos, Koreans, making clothes for London’s most expensive designer shops. In one, they were listening to ‘The Archers’ [a long-running BBC radio soap opera] and using the radio to learn English. And I thought, ‘If this isn’t a film, I don’t know what is.’ ” Though “Dirty Pretty Things” is clearly a thriller, it also effectively portrays illegal immigrant life in Britain. Stephen Frears says: “It’s about the people you see out of the corner of your eye but don’t dwell upon.”

Knight economically conveys this idea in a startling piece of dialogue that has achieved cult status in Britain. When Okwe, Senay and Juliette outwit the racketeers, a shady middle man asks: “How come I’ve never seen you people before?” Okwe replies: “Because we are the people you don’t see. We are the ones who drive your cabs. We clean your rooms. We” perform another, shall we say, more intimate service.”

“I wanted that line to sum up one of the main themes of the film,” Knight said, “and I had to fight to keep it intact.”

In the same vein, Knight wrote three endings. One was scrapped early on, and a second (described by Frears as “idiotically upbeat”) was shot to keep the film’s financiers (Miramax and BBC Films) happy. A third, with a bittersweet resolution, was used.

Knight has completed another script called “Woman Walks Ahead,” set in 1889 and dealing with a relationship between Native American chief Sitting Bull and a bohemian New York woman artist who visited him to paint him and stayed to become his secretary and legal advisor. Knight has also adapted Denis Lehane’s psychological thriller “Shutter Island” for film and is at work on “Emma’s War,” about a British aid worker in Sudan in the late 1980s.

His one regret is “Gypsy Woman,” a small British film, shot but unreleased. It is close to his heart, because he comes from gypsy stock. The youngest of seven children, he was raised in Birmingham. His father was a gypsy blacksmith; as a teenager Knight used to accompany him to shoe horses. “The film involves a gypsy character, but it’s a romantic comedy,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be about the plight of the gypsies.”

Knight plans to write film scripts for 10 years, then revert to novels; he appreciates the extraordinary latitude extended to him by book editors. Of course, given the wealth that has come his way as a co-creator of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” he can do whatever he chooses. Yet he insists the success of the game show was partly luck.

“My colleague David Briggs is the originator of the idea, giving increasing amounts of money for successive questions,” he recalled. “But when we did dry runs of the show, the questions weren’t multiple choice, and contestants kept taking the money early on. If they’d won 32,000 pounds, they wouldn’t risk it.

“So we had to think up ways to keep them going. One was showing them multiple-choice answers. We let them keep the money they’d won after certain points. We came up with asking the audience, phoning a friend, and giving them a 50-50 chance. These were only ways of reassuring the contestants to keep going....

“But just by accident ‘phone a friend’ became a human drama. On the third show, a young girl phoned her father and said: ‘Dad, help me.’ And he said, rather desperately: ‘I can’t.’ It was great television, and we knew we were on to something.”

Knight is too shrewd not to see the irony in being a rich man who has achieved his first film success with a script about a poverty-stricken immigrant underclass. “Well, I think being a writer is like being a radio,” he mused. “Whatever signal you pick up, you have to broadcast it. It’s not always what you want to write, it’s just there. You just start writing and you never know what’s going to happen.

“And until they pass a law that says, ‘if you have an income above this amount you’re not allowed to write about people with an income below that amount,’ I’ll continue to do it.”