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I write drama in the English language. If I wasn't working in London I'd be doing something wrong.
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
Write
Writing
London
Something
English
Drama
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More quotes by William Monahan
I think the only real referent for anybody writing drama is probably Hamlet. You have the most extreme tragic drama, this sort of blood-boltered thing, but it's also very funny, which is simply a matter of the playwright being alive and observant and entertaining, and understanding not only the world but what will play.
William Monahan
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
Most films go out like skydivers who have had their chutes packed by a committee of blind schizophrenics.
William Monahan
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.
William Monahan
If TV seems improved, I think it's been enhanced by violence and sex permissible on cable, as well as better cinematography, but in the end it's really only soap operas like your grandmother's afternoon stories and that's all it wants to be or has to be.
William Monahan
London exists normally in a state of bleach bypass. There's the artistic context of Blow Up and Performance and all the Sixties and Seventies British films that I grew up on, because I did very much grow up on British films.
William Monahan
In all honesty a gangster picture was the easiest kind of film for me to get made.
William Monahan
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
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
I sound like Warhol but only because I'm tired.
William Monahan
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
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
Casting is always subject to availabilities.
William Monahan
Saying directors don't write because they don't type is very wrong, it's like saying Dylan doesn't write music because he doesn't write notation.
William Monahan
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
When they see you get what you want and move on, quickly, you've done a contract with the crew from that point. In Britain if the sparks call you Guv on day two, you never need an award of any other kind.
William Monahan
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
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.
William Monahan
I was particularly anxious that I shoot the tires out of the class system. All it is these days is a hobby of certain masochists, and certain sadists.
William Monahan
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