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I wanted to do London Boulevard because I saw the potential of a story about two people who need each other desperately, who love at first sight, as one does, and above all a story in which no one is what they appear to be.
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
Firsts
London
Need
Sight
First
Saws
Needs
Story
Love
Two
Boulevard
People
Stories
Desperately
Doe
Appear
Wanted
Potential
More quotes by William Monahan
I'm not very precious at all, which I think people find surprising.
William Monahan
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
Most films go out like skydivers who have had their chutes packed by a committee of blind schizophrenics.
William Monahan
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.
William Monahan
You're not turning the picture over to a system or a process, you are the process, and the most important thing is to have things exactly as you want them.
William Monahan
I learned my job from English dramatists. Tennessee Williams was no good for me, New York stuff was no good to me.
William Monahan
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
If I can give a young author any advice, whatsoever, never let anyone announce the film sale of your first novel. Film rights are sold to almost every novel, but it shouldn't be the lead story in your first engagement with the press. Then you end up getting reviews like a novel made for the screen and things like that.
William Monahan
I've always been a bit repelled by Sunset Boulevard, which is wrong about almost everything it touches, whether it's fame, Hollywood, screenwriters, or old ladies. Sunset Boulevard would only make sense to me if it was about John Gilbert and the pool boy.
William Monahan
T.S. Eliot, who learned to swim at the same beach as I did, just threw in the towel and moved to Cheyne Walk. I'm not going to do that but I'm not scared of the open channel between me and Britain.
William Monahan
It's interesting to think that my children know more about the process than many mature critics.
William Monahan
You never know what people are going to go and see.
William Monahan
I never viewed screen drama as a vulgar form, or a lesser one, and I've never written it left-handed.
William Monahan
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.
William Monahan
On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing.
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
Look at what people are trying to conceal, and you’ll see that they’re revealing everything.
William Monahan
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.
William Monahan
For me, film has been good because I'm able to work at top crack, working at something I love to do, in the only literary form in which you can still make money. There are no famous novelists, not as novelists used to be famous.
William Monahan
As a director, you're given a tremendous apparatus to work with, and very great talents are available to you.
William Monahan
