Quote

I never viewed screen drama as a vulgar form, or a lesser one, and I've never written it left-handed.

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
Drama
Written
Left
Lesser
Form
Viewed
Never
Handed
Vulgar
Screen
Screens

More quotes by William Monahan

Image
The thing about The Departed, the x-factor that people can't quite put their finger on, is that it deals clearly with class and accent all these things that are fundamental to Boston, but previously anomalous or even prohibited in demotic American films.
William Monahan
Image
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.
William Monahan
Image
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
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 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
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.
William Monahan
Image
I don't trust a lot of popular films because they seem to indicate that people would like to be super-heroes or vampires, and that's the last thing I mean by the useful mirror of art.
William Monahan
Image
I went into directing having observed and learned from the best. There was a certain standard of procedure. I found that I was equal to it. I thoroughly enjoyed directing, I liked it a lot. It's very satisfactory to see that you can do it. The art takes care of itself.
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
I'm usually the first guy to propose a change because I'm continuing my process. We're in a context, in this business, a context in which most screenplays work on a very modest level of achievement, in that a lot of them aren't really written by what you would call writers.
William Monahan
Image
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
Image
Without English art, I never would have understood myself, my own family, or the New England world I lived in.
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
Wisdom is not having illusions, especially anything in your own mind that elevates you above others.
William Monahan
Image
Dialogue is used to reveal not what we want to say, but what we are trying to hide.
William Monahan
Image
When I was a kid in London there was just something about the light and there's something about the way London went onto film in those days, whether it was Technicolor or Technicolor plus the flatness of the light, or whatever.
William Monahan
Image
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.
William Monahan
Image
Casting is always subject to availabilities.
William Monahan
Image
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.
William Monahan
Image
Most films go out like skydivers who have had their chutes packed by a committee of blind schizophrenics.
William Monahan