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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

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William Monahan
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: November 3
Critic
Film Director
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Claude La Badarian
Kind
Called
Machine
Time
Happy
Director
Actors
Machines
Moving
Directors
Keep
Actor
Firsts
Especially
First
Writer
Important
Move
Precious

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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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Henry Adams was scared shitless, politically, by the discovery that England isn't alien to a boy from Boston, but it was true, and it is true. It's a Boston and coastal Massachusetts thing. Henry Adams blocked it out.
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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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I sound like Warhol but only because I'm tired.
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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.
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Casting is always subject to availabilities.
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Most films go out like skydivers who have had their chutes packed by a committee of blind schizophrenics.
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You know a shooter when you see it. At least the creative people do. If a picture isn't obvious in the first draft you're kind of screwed.
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I came into screenwriting from an odd direction, because the first screenplay that I read was and is better as writing than the top one percent of literary novels.
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The empirical is very important, but merit is inherent and not acquired. A university is massively important because you can see where you stand naturally in the ranks, and try yourself out, but education is just reading and understanding what you read.
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For some reason, I seem to work well with actors. I love working with them.
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I'm interested in stories about human beings. I don't care where or when they are set.
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In all honesty a gangster picture was the easiest kind of film for me to get made.
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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.
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It wasn't just British gangster films that really did for me as a kid, personally, it was British films in general.
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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.
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The thing about The Departed, the x-factor that people can't quite put their finger on, is that it deals clearly with class and accent all these things that are fundamental to Boston, but previously anomalous or even prohibited in demotic American films.
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I'm not very precious at all, which I think people find surprising.
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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.
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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.
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