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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

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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
Around
Guys
Screwing
Firsts
Realize
Officer
First
Coming
Veterans
Going
Serious
Veteran
Always
Realizing
Officers
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Director
Though
Directors

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I'm not a precious text protector, or anything like that, you know, because it's a much more vital form than that. You have to rock.
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Most films go out like skydivers who have had their chutes packed by a committee of blind schizophrenics.
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In truth, the cinema as a delivery system obviously has its days numbered. And that's not a bad thing. When you can buy any book in the world on your iPad, or off Amazon, you don't go the public library. The public library becomes about homeless gentlemen sleeping in chairs.
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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.
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All of a sudden I pulled up short and harked back to Ridley [Scott] holding up the script in Manhattan, at the St. Regis breakfast room, and saying, It's very visual, isn't it, and realized it was the key to my whole life since then.
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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.
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If you decide to do Hamlet in a funny hat staged in a ruined factory, it doesn't make you Shakespeare.
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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.
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The only answer to Are you Beatles or Stones? is, I'm both.
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When I was very young, you would get the TV listings from The Globe and The Herald, and you would basically go through them, circle things, and map out your viewing week.
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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.
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I need as much of the business of making a film to be in my own workspace. It really ought to be a bit more like doing a novel, alone, at first. I'm feeling my way.
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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.
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I think that gambling is a synthetic experience and that if you have any balls you gamble with your life. I have. So can everybody else.
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In all honesty a gangster picture was the easiest kind of film for me to get made.
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I don't move until an actor is happy, but it was very important to me as a so-called first time director to keep the machine moving. It was especially important to me to keep it moving and not be some kind of precious writer-director.
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When I'm shooting, as much as writing, I see edited footage in my mind, so I work that way, and it's economical.
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Look at what people are trying to conceal, and you’ll see that they’re revealing everything.
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London matters to me because it's the center of what I do for a living and has been since Tudor times.
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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.
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