Quote

I think probably everybody works most on the beginning and the ending.

William Monahan

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Monahan
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: November 3
Critic
Film Director
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Claude La Badarian
Probably
Everybody
Think
Thinking
Ending
Beginning
Works

More quotes by William Monahan

Image
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
Image
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.
William Monahan
Image
I have no reason as a director to have films go up in versions that I don't like. My only experience of film after ten years is honestly that if a picture doesn't get second-guessed you're looking at four Oscars, and if a picture does get second-guessed, you're not. I've got an advanced degree in that lesson.
William Monahan
Image
It's interesting to think that my children know more about the process than many mature critics.
William Monahan
Image
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
Image
Casting is always subject to availabilities.
William Monahan
Image
I don't trust a lot of popular films because they seem to indicate that people would like to be super-heroes or vampires, and that's the last thing I mean by the useful mirror of art.
William Monahan
Image
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
Image
It wasn't just British gangster films that really did for me as a kid, personally, it was British films in general.
William Monahan
Image
As a director, you're given a tremendous apparatus to work with, and very great talents are available to you.
William Monahan
Image
I write drama in the English language. If I wasn't working in London I'd be doing something wrong.
William Monahan
Image
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
Image
I'm interested in stories about human beings. I don't care where or when they are set.
William Monahan
Image
In all honesty a gangster picture was the easiest kind of film for me to get made.
William Monahan
Image
Look at what people are trying to conceal, and you’ll see that they’re revealing everything.
William Monahan
Image
By the time someone gave me some samples of standard screenplays I was already beyond that stuff, because I was not only a tinkerer in ways to do things, I'd started from Dylan Thomas. As a screen dramatist he was a very intense visualist, with great timing and fluency.
William Monahan
Image
I've got things I have to do in fiction to sort of register my existence, before I kick the bucket, but it will never be my living and I know it. Plus it never moved fast enough for me and lacked cut and thrust. I need to be in the real show.
William Monahan
Image
You don't write for actors. Actors come for characters you've made up.
William Monahan
Image
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
Image
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