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
Since
Refreshing
Five
Liar
Getting
Liars
Like
Honesty
Positive
Effects
Trouble
Probably

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I love editorial and sound and music, and I was working with the best people, so you learn a lot.
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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.
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On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing.
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As first time director, though, you're like a new officer coming up to be in charge of very serious veterans, and you're always going to have guys looking at each other for the first day until they realize you're not screwing around.
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I had a long writing history behind me before I got into anything in film. It comprehended science fiction, it comprehended historical, it comprehended, you know, just about everything that you can think of.
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Wisdom is not having illusions, especially anything in your own mind that elevates you above others.
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I sound like Warhol but only because I'm tired.
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Get Carter is a classic, but it did nothing in the United States. It came out on a double bill with a Frank Sinatra western.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I have a lot of stuff that I never published because I always had a sense that novels were not finally going to be the way I made my living, because the form was dying commercially.
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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.
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London matters to me because it's the center of what I do for a living and has been since Tudor times.
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Even though a screenplay is performed only once, unlike other forms of drama, it's still a performance in itself, and unless it's a great performance, odds are that actors will not come, and a movie will never be made.
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If you see, as I do, in edited film, you're going to end up as a director.
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I'm a homebody, as many writers are, and need to be by myself, and I like to be by the Atlantic Ocean.
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I don't watch anything. I work so much. If I see a film, it's usually that I'll go in after working 15 hours and slam in The Bridge on the River Kwai or something.
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