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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
Like
Looking
Director
Though
Directors
Around
Guys
Screwing
Firsts
Realize
Officer
First
Coming
Veterans
Going
Serious
Veteran
Always
Realizing
Officers
Time
Guy
Charge

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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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Casting is all about availability, as much as anything else.
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For some reason, I seem to work well with actors. I love working with them.
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When I was young I was only thinking of writing, and whatever was going on was unreal and comparatively unimportant.
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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.
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I was always entirely about work, about getting where I am now. If I'm not working I'm thinking about it, though at some point I learned not to talk about it very much.
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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.
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I'm more from a double world where I wasn't part of anything or invested in anything, because I was Irish, and very Irish, but also the other part of my family, not that it had airs, or money, was descended from the first minister on Cape Ann in the 1620s.
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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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In all honesty a gangster picture was the easiest kind of film for me to get made.
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I don't think you need $35 million bucks to make a movie. I think what people should do is make a lot more movies for a lot less money. You can really do it.
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Certainly some guy eating cardboard in Cincinnati has lost any ordinary impetus to review your novel decently if he's just read you just got six figures out of Warner Bros - which incidentally was not true.
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The old days of screenwriting, and myths about screenwriting, are maybe over. It's a literary form, if you can wake up to it.
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I never write with particular actors in mind.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I never work until I have a deadline. You have to fit so much in a given day that you just don't get serious until you know when the deadline is.
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As far as executing work is concerned, you do it all in order. You do it in contractual order. There's no overlap, it's just continuation of your ordinary work. You move from one project into another.
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Refreshing honesty has been getting me in trouble since I was five, but it's probably had some positive effects - like not being a liar.
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