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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.

William Monahan

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William Monahan
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: November 3
Critic
Film Director
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Claude La Badarian
Time
Already
Timing
Tinkerer
Started
Screen
Dramatist
Ways
Standard
Fluency
Stuff
Screens
Samples
Someone
Intense
Sample
Great
Standards
Screenplays
Way
Gave
Thomas
Things
Beyond
Dylan

More quotes by 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 hate doing anything in offices. I either want to be out in the world or in my own environment - and it should be your own environment that you work in.
William Monahan
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If you write a screenplay that gets circulated, you have a bigger readership than any literary novelist. And it's an educated audience as well.
William Monahan
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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.
William Monahan
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Saying directors don't write because they don't type is very wrong, it's like saying Dylan doesn't write music because he doesn't write notation.
William Monahan
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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.
William Monahan
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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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You evolve in the ways in which you are precious. When you are the director, you are also continuing to write on the floor as you go along.
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I think probably everybody works most on the beginning and the ending.
William Monahan
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For some reason, I seem to work well with actors. I love working with them.
William Monahan
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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.
William Monahan
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Henry Adams was scared shitless, politically, by the discovery that England isn't alien to a boy from Boston, but it was true, and it is true. It's a Boston and coastal Massachusetts thing. Henry Adams blocked it out.
William Monahan
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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.
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I don't watch anything. I work so much. If I see a film, it's usually that I'll go in after working 15 hours and slam in The Bridge on the River Kwai or something.
William Monahan
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If TV seems improved, I think it's been enhanced by violence and sex permissible on cable, as well as better cinematography, but in the end it's really only soap operas like your grandmother's afternoon stories and that's all it wants to be or has to be.
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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There's only one way to prep, so far as I know. You have your script, you hire the people you want, you find your locations and your setups, everybody shows up and you shoot the film.
William Monahan
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There were days when you would get the TV listings from The Globe and The Herald. Video was out, but nobody could afford it...expect for my uncle George, who was a second father to me, and had every film in the world, and every book.
William Monahan
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It wasn't just British gangster films that really did for me as a kid, personally, it was British films in general.
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