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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.

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
Decide
Funny
Staged
Doesn
Hamlet
Make
Factory
Factories
Ruined
Shakespeare
Hats

More quotes by William Monahan

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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.
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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.
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You know a shooter when you see it. At least the creative people do. If a picture isn't obvious in the first draft you're kind of screwed.
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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'm not very precious at all, which I think people find surprising.
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I don't have an aversion to quote unquote remakes, because I understand what dramatic writing is, what the dramatic profession has always been about, which is talent, not the pretext for its exhibition.
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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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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 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.
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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.
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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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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 don't like scripts leaking. On the other hand, the more real attention a script gets, the better.
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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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I sound like Warhol but only because I'm tired.
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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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You can believe in originals only if you just don't know their context within literature. Certainly I believe in originality, but it lies with the teller, not the tale.
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You never know what people are going to go and see.
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It's interesting to think that my children know more about the process than many mature critics.
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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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