Quote

Refreshing honesty has been getting me in trouble since I was five, but it's probably had some positive effects - like not being a liar.

William Monahan

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William Monahan
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: November 3
Critic
Film Director
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Claude La Badarian
Getting
Liars
Like
Honesty
Positive
Effects
Trouble
Probably
Since
Refreshing
Five
Liar

More quotes by William Monahan

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All of a sudden I pulled up short and harked back to Ridley [Scott] holding up the script in Manhattan, at the St. Regis breakfast room, and saying, It's very visual, isn't it, and realized it was the key to my whole life since then.
William Monahan
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I'm interested in stories about human beings. I don't care where or when they are set.
William Monahan
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I hate doing anything in offices. I either want to be out in the world or in my own environment - and it should be your own environment that you work in.
William Monahan
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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
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If you're playing around with a film, you're just playing around with it. But if it has to go into theaters, you get yourself into gear and finish it.
William Monahan
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I cut London Boulevard pretty aggressively, but I liked the transitions and the elliptical feel that I got. It's not an exceptionally easy film to follow. You have to know that the paparazzo looks like Mark David Chapman. He hasn't got an expositional sign on him.
William Monahan
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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
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I learned my job from English dramatists. Tennessee Williams was no good for me, New York stuff was no good to me.
William Monahan
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In all honesty a gangster picture was the easiest kind of film for me to get made.
William Monahan
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I have no reason as a director to have films go up in versions that I don't like. My only experience of film after ten years is honestly that if a picture doesn't get second-guessed you're looking at four Oscars, and if a picture does get second-guessed, you're not. I've got an advanced degree in that lesson.
William Monahan
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Actors are players and if they're hot, or onto something, you let them go, or you and the actor can both get on to something. I always run out with lines as I think of them.
William Monahan
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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
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When I started writing screenplays, as early as I started writing anything, I hadn't seen any ordinary screenplays. I saw movies and figured out how I thought they should be written.
William Monahan
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I love audiences, but they're not there to drive the bus. Whenever you ask opinions or anticipate opinions you can get pretty terrible art, or non-art. You need a single guiding intelligence, even in a collaborative form.
William Monahan
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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
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I always write as I like to write, and I've been thinking about it because I honestly didn't realize how different my stuff is, until I started looking at other people's scripts as a producer.
William Monahan
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I'm not very precious at all, which I think people find surprising.
William Monahan
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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
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If you see, as I do, in edited film, you're going to end up as a director.
William Monahan
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I'm not a precious text protector, or anything like that, you know, because it's a much more vital form than that. You have to rock.
William Monahan