Quote

If you see, as I do, in edited film, you're going to end up as a director.

William Monahan

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Monahan
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: November 3
Critic
Film Director
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Claude La Badarian
Edited
Director
Directors
Film
Ends
Going

More quotes by William Monahan

Image
I write drama in the English language. If I wasn't working in London I'd be doing something wrong.
William Monahan
Image
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.
William Monahan
Image
But the web is to some degree a broth of psychopaths seeing what they can get away with in circumstances of anonymity. Look, we live in a world where one is unsafe in various ways because of the Internet. Anything can be said. Someone can look at your house from space.
William Monahan
Image
I always write as I like to write, and I've been thinking about it because I honestly didn't realize how different my stuff is, until I started looking at other people's scripts as a producer.
William Monahan
Image
If I can give a young author any advice, whatsoever, never let anyone announce the film sale of your first novel. Film rights are sold to almost every novel, but it shouldn't be the lead story in your first engagement with the press. Then you end up getting reviews like a novel made for the screen and things like that.
William Monahan
Image
Star Wars was great at the beginning and crap at the end while Star Trek has always been interesting, and the difference is in the writing, and the thematic intentions.
William Monahan
Image
London exists normally in a state of bleach bypass. There's the artistic context of Blow Up and Performance and all the Sixties and Seventies British films that I grew up on, because I did very much grow up on British films.
William Monahan
Image
If you're playing around with a film, you're just playing around with it. But if it has to go into theaters, you get yourself into gear and finish it.
William Monahan
Image
When I was young I was only thinking of writing, and whatever was going on was unreal and comparatively unimportant.
William Monahan
Image
Casting is always subject to availabilities.
William Monahan
Image
I love editorial and sound and music, and I was working with the best people, so you learn a lot.
William Monahan
Image
Redrafts can be very lucrative for me, but you must understand that if films go through many drafts or writers it's because someone doesn't want to do the picture and never will.
William Monahan
Image
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
Image
In all honesty a gangster picture was the easiest kind of film for me to get made.
William Monahan
Image
Because you're running an enterprise with two hundred-odd people, and it's really your responsibility to keep it moving quickly. So you have to know what you're doing, do it, and move on.
William Monahan
Image
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
Image
The old days of screenwriting, and myths about screenwriting, are maybe over. It's a literary form, if you can wake up to it.
William Monahan
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I had a long writing history behind me before I got into anything in film. It comprehended science fiction, it comprehended historical, it comprehended, you know, just about everything that you can think of.
William Monahan