Quote

I don't trust a lot of popular films because they seem to indicate that people would like to be super-heroes or vampires, and that's the last thing I mean by the useful mirror of art.

William Monahan

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Monahan
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: November 3
Critic
Film Director
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Claude La Badarian
Like
Lasts
Mirror
People
Last
Useful
Art
Popular
Film
Mirrors
Indicate
Seems
Hero
Vampires
Mean
Films
Vampire
Thing
Seem
Heroes
Would
Trust
Super

More quotes by William Monahan

Image
Getting the correct writer is simply like casting. You wouldn't hire an actor in order to tell him how to work. He knows how to work, which is why you hired him.
William Monahan
Image
I think that scripts should be published, but they are published, really, because when you're a screenwriter, your stuff ends up in samizdat form on thousands and thousands of desks and shelves across the industry.
William Monahan
Image
You just have to know what you want and what you're doing and it leads to a kind of general well-being, which I think you sensed when you were there.
William Monahan
Image
T.S. Eliot, who learned to swim at the same beach as I did, just threw in the towel and moved to Cheyne Walk. I'm not going to do that but I'm not scared of the open channel between me and Britain.
William Monahan
Image
In reviewing films, people get quite liberal about saying the script this and the script that, when they've never read the script any more than they've read the latest report on Norwegian herring landings.
William Monahan
Image
When I was very young, you would get the TV listings from The Globe and The Herald, and you would basically go through them, circle things, and map out your viewing week.
William Monahan
Image
Casting is all about availability, as much as anything else.
William Monahan
Image
In Boston terms I was everyone and no one, with no social investment, no social insecurity, sort of Imitation of Christ in one hand and The Education of Henry Adams in the other, and because I was part of nothing I could observe everything without having anything personal invested in the findings.
William Monahan
Image
I don't think the latest Star Wars pictures have any artistic intentions, but the original picture opened up epic science fiction.
William Monahan
Image
By the time someone gave me some samples of standard screenplays I was already beyond that stuff, because I was not only a tinkerer in ways to do things, I'd started from Dylan Thomas. As a screen dramatist he was a very intense visualist, with great timing and fluency.
William Monahan
Image
I don't think you need $35 million bucks to make a movie. I think what people should do is make a lot more movies for a lot less money. You can really do it.
William Monahan
Image
When I'm shooting, as much as writing, I see edited footage in my mind, so I work that way, and it's economical.
William Monahan
Image
Because you're running an enterprise with two hundred-odd people, and it's really your responsibility to keep it moving quickly. So you have to know what you're doing, do it, and move on.
William Monahan
Image
A writer is a performer as well. A writer isn't the literary department. That gets tried on but nothing's a script unless a good writer goes away and does his thing alone.
William Monahan
Image
There were days when you would get the TV listings from The Globe and The Herald. Video was out, but nobody could afford it...expect for my uncle George, who was a second father to me, and had every film in the world, and every book.
William Monahan
Image
It wasn't just British gangster films that really did for me as a kid, personally, it was British films in general.
William Monahan
Image
There's always a great hue and cry when you sign onto a remake, and that's always been sort of annoying me and freaking me out. This profession that we're in is drama. What drama has been since the beginning is, you restage plays with new casts, or a writer will take a new run at an old story.
William Monahan
Image
You're not turning the picture over to a system or a process, you are the process, and the most important thing is to have things exactly as you want them.
William Monahan
Image
I'm interested in stories about human beings. I don't care where or when they are set.
William Monahan
Image
You can believe in originals only if you just don't know their context within literature. Certainly I believe in originality, but it lies with the teller, not the tale.
William Monahan