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

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
Ending
Beginning
Works
Probably
Everybody
Think
Thinking

More quotes by William Monahan

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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.
William Monahan
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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
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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
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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
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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 never viewed screen drama as a vulgar form, or a lesser one, and I've never written it left-handed.
William Monahan
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Doing crime films...maybe it's to some extent a matter of taste. Certainly my first novel had a criminal element and was about the similarity of criminals and artists. Pretextually, it was sort of a money bag thriller. But it was aggressively not what it seemed to be. It was kind of Duchamps.
William Monahan
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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.
William Monahan
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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
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Out of all of the Star Trek movies, I happen to like the most recent one the best. I think it was the best one ever done.
William Monahan
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Wisdom is not having illusions, especially anything in your own mind that elevates you above others.
William Monahan
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Without English art, I never would have understood myself, my own family, or the New England world I lived in.
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.
William Monahan
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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
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I learned my job from English dramatists. Tennessee Williams was no good for me, New York stuff was no good to me.
William Monahan
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Getting the correct writer is simply like casting. You wouldn't hire an actor in order to tell him how to work. He knows how to work, which is why you hired him.
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 shoot very little film. If you just do coverage you're shooting any number of potential films instead of just one, and I was shooting just one specific film. Film is cheap but time is expensive.
William Monahan
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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
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As a director, you're given a tremendous apparatus to work with, and very great talents are available to you.
William Monahan