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I don't have an aversion to quote unquote remakes, because I understand what dramatic writing is, what the dramatic profession has always been about, which is talent, not the pretext for its exhibition.

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
Aversion
Quote
Dramatic
Profession
Unquote
Talent
Exhibition
Understand
Exhibitions
Writing
Remakes
Always
Pretext

More quotes by 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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London matters to me because it's the center of what I do for a living and has been since Tudor times.
William Monahan
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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
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The only answer to Are you Beatles or Stones? is, I'm both.
William Monahan
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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
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As far as executing work is concerned, you do it all in order. You do it in contractual order. There's no overlap, it's just continuation of your ordinary work. You move from one project into another.
William Monahan
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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.
William Monahan
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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.
William Monahan
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I learned from Ridley [Scott] how to come out of the trailer at a fast walk and make your decisions and keep it going. We were very much on time and under budget, as they say. That was a very important thing for me and very satisfactory.
William Monahan
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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
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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 love editorial and sound and music, and I was working with the best people, so you learn a lot.
William Monahan
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You never know what people are going to go and see.
William Monahan
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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
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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 sound like Warhol but only because I'm tired.
William Monahan
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Some reviewer might be out there saying, obviously Edge of Darkness didn't come off because of the script, blah blah blah, but everybody has read the script, except the journalist attacking it.
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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The old days of screenwriting, and myths about screenwriting, are maybe over. It's a literary form, if you can wake up to it.
William Monahan
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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