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There's only one way to prep, so far as I know. You have your script, you hire the people you want, you find your locations and your setups, everybody shows up and you shoot the film.

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
Film
Locations
Find
Hire
Way
Location
People
Script
Shoot
Scripts
Preps
Everybody
Setups
Shows
Prep

More quotes by William Monahan

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In Boston terms I was everyone and no one, with no social investment, no social insecurity, sort of Imitation of Christ in one hand and The Education of Henry Adams in the other, and because I was part of nothing I could observe everything without having anything personal invested in the findings.
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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.
William Monahan
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Look at what people are trying to conceal, and you’ll see that they’re revealing everything.
William Monahan
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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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The novel ceases to be looked at as a novel. Such is the overwhelming power of motion pictures. Gore Vidal pointed out that the movies are the only thing anybody's really interested in. The association with movies and movie money can, and certainly did in my case, occlude a novel as a novel.
William Monahan
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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.
William Monahan
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I never write with particular actors in mind.
William Monahan
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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.
William Monahan
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I can work in London. A British journalist asked me if I had any trouble working with an English crew, as an American, and I said I might have if I was from Scotland, but I'm from Massachusetts, which is sort of Oxfordshire, but more intellectual. That's kind of unforgivable but you've got to let them have it.
William Monahan
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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.
William Monahan
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When I was young I was only thinking of writing, and whatever was going on was unreal and comparatively unimportant.
William Monahan
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If you're playing around with a film, you're just playing around with it. But if it has to go into theaters, you get yourself into gear and finish it.
William Monahan
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Yeah, well I can't see a situation where I wouldn't at least re-write as a director something I was going to direct. At the moment, I wouldn't direct anything that I hadn't written. I can now say, as everybody else says, that it all depends on the script.
William Monahan
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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.
William Monahan
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Redrafts can be very lucrative for me, but you must understand that if films go through many drafts or writers it's because someone doesn't want to do the picture and never will.
William Monahan
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There's always a great hue and cry when you sign onto a remake, and that's always been sort of annoying me and freaking me out. This profession that we're in is drama. What drama has been since the beginning is, you restage plays with new casts, or a writer will take a new run at an old story.
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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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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I'm not very precious at all, which I think people find surprising.
William Monahan
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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.
William Monahan