“Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger”, interview with creator and screenwriter Steven Knight

Presented out of competition at the Venice Film Festival 2026, Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger follows the emotional impact of Liam and Noel Gallagher‘s Oasis reunion tour Live ’25, drawing on the brothers’ first joint interviews in over 25 years and never-before-filmed rehearsals to capture what their music means to audiences across generations. Creator and screenwriter Steven Knight talks about forgiveness, family and the reconciliation he witnessed on tour with the band.

A film about forgiveness, and about family

Knight describes wanting the film to work on three levels at once. “I wanted it to be sort of on three levels,” he says. “It’s about the two brothers who, to begin with, they haven’t spoken for 16 years and it’s still fresh. As the tour goes on, they find forgiveness and reconciliation.” The other two levels, he explains, belong to the audience. Turning the cameras on the crowds revealed “so many fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, mothers and sons where the music has been there for 16 years and people have found it. A next generation have found it. They weren’t sold it, they just found it.”

For Knight, two generations seemed to share the songs “as if it was a possession of theirs, as if it was about them, and as soon as they hear it on stage, tears, and these are British people sometimes who don’t do this sort of thing. So it was quite remarkable.”

Filming a reunion without disturbing it

Knight was determined not to let the cameras shape what they were capturing. “We wanted to film this without affecting what we’re filming,” he says. “We didn’t want to make a film about making a film about a reunion. We wanted it to just be. So we put 10 static cameras in the rehearsal room so no one can be followed, and just record what happened.” From that footage, he chose the moment Liam walked into the room for the first time, after Noel and the band had already been rehearsing for a week. He describes the restraint of that reunion: “British working-class men are not going to high-five or hug or shed tears straight away.”

Instead, the moment passed through a joke about the drum kit and straight into the music: “Are you ready? Let’s go. 1, 2, 3, 4. Bang. And it was just straight in.” That reserve, Knight says, only made the underlying feeling more powerful: “The emotion involved in not showing that emotion is enormous.” As the tour continued, he adds, the reconciliation extended beyond the brothers themselves: “Then their kids meet and their kids become friends. It’s great.”

An emotional effect on the audience, and maybe a phone call

The reaction Knight describes goes beyond the two brothers, who he says were themselves moved watching the finished film for the first time, “a very emotional reaction.” He hopes the same holds for anyone watching it. “What people tend to be doing is, once the film’s over, they think, ‘There’s someone in my life who I haven’t spoken to for 10 years or 16 years or whatever, maybe I should give them a call.’ And if that’s the effect it has, that would be fantastic.”

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