Quote

Redrafts can be very lucrative for me, but you must understand that if films go through many drafts or writers it's because someone doesn't want to do the picture and never will.

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
Films
Understand
Doesn
Film
Someone
Lucrative
Many
Drafts
Must
Picture
Never
Writers

More quotes by William Monahan

Image
I never work until I have a deadline. You have to fit so much in a given day that you just don't get serious until you know when the deadline is.
William Monahan
Image
Certainly some guy eating cardboard in Cincinnati has lost any ordinary impetus to review your novel decently if he's just read you just got six figures out of Warner Bros - which incidentally was not true.
William Monahan
Image
I'm a homebody, as many writers are, and need to be by myself, and I like to be by the Atlantic Ocean.
William Monahan
Image
I think that gambling is a synthetic experience and that if you have any balls you gamble with your life. I have. So can everybody else.
William Monahan
Image
I'd been working so hard making the film that I hadn't even emotionally processed the fact that I was a director.
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 sound like Warhol but only because I'm tired.
William Monahan
Image
Doing crime films...maybe it's to some extent a matter of taste. Certainly my first novel had a criminal element and was about the similarity of criminals and artists. Pretextually, it was sort of a money bag thriller. But it was aggressively not what it seemed to be. It was kind of Duchamps.
William Monahan
Image
The thing about movies is if somebody has an idea that works, it's in, and I say that as a screenwriter as well as a director.
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
In truth, the cinema as a delivery system obviously has its days numbered. And that's not a bad thing. When you can buy any book in the world on your iPad, or off Amazon, you don't go the public library. The public library becomes about homeless gentlemen sleeping in chairs.
William Monahan
Image
If you write a screenplay that gets circulated, you have a bigger readership than any literary novelist. And it's an educated audience as well.
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
Star Wars was great at the beginning and crap at the end while Star Trek has always been interesting, and the difference is in the writing, and the thematic intentions.
William Monahan
Image
You never know what people are going to go and see.
William Monahan
Image
I went into directing having observed and learned from the best. There was a certain standard of procedure. I found that I was equal to it. I thoroughly enjoyed directing, I liked it a lot. It's very satisfactory to see that you can do it. The art takes care of itself.
William Monahan
Image
I'm more from a double world where I wasn't part of anything or invested in anything, because I was Irish, and very Irish, but also the other part of my family, not that it had airs, or money, was descended from the first minister on Cape Ann in the 1620s.
William Monahan
Image
I don't move until an actor is happy, but it was very important to me as a so-called first time director to keep the machine moving. It was especially important to me to keep it moving and not be some kind of precious writer-director.
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
You evolve in the ways in which you are precious. When you are the director, you are also continuing to write on the floor as you go along.
William Monahan