Steven Knight thinks Tom Hardy is a very good reader.
The pair worked together on 2013 movie Locke, where Steven directed the actor in the title role.
For one scene, which saw a car driving down a motorway, the crew filmed it nearly 20 times and then used footage from all the takes pulled together for the finished article.
Tom had to read cue cards for the scene in question, something Steve reveals came easily to the British star.
"He's a very, very good reader Tom Hardy. He can read something he's not read before, and do it well. But we'd been through the script for five days with all the actors around a table. And then the script was on autocues in front of him. My main direction was to always go for less emotion. For Ivan Locke [Tom's character] not to follow the emotions of the people he's speaking to on the phone," Steven revealed to denofgeek.com.
"The best take was usually at three o'clock in the morning, when everyone was exhausted. That's when we really captured Ivan Locke."
While Locke was one of the first films he directed, Steven's writing credits include Dirty Pretty Things and The Hundred-Foot Journey, starring Dame Helen Mirren.
For the many night scenes involved in Locke, police escorts were on hand to help. They even managed to get themselves into certain scenes.
"They did. They'd get bored, put on their lights, and shoot past! It was great, because it worked. We used it a few times," Steven laughed. "But normally when you're shooting you do get people hooting their horns and interrupting. But we got very little of that. At the time of night we were shooting, the traffic was quite thin anyway.
"I said to all of the actors, no matter what happened, carry on. We did hit traffic jams. But because of the way we were shooting, we knew that we always had options. We had three cameras rolling at all times, so we had lots of coverage."
