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In reviewing films, people get quite liberal about saying the script this and the script that, when they've never read the script any more than they've read the latest report on Norwegian herring landings.
William Monahan
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William Monahan
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: November 3
Critic
Film Director
Journalist
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Screenwriter
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Claude La Badarian
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More quotes by William Monahan
You never know what people are going to go and see.
William Monahan
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
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.
William Monahan
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
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
I'm a homebody, as many writers are, and need to be by myself, and I like to be by the Atlantic Ocean.
William Monahan
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.
William Monahan
I came into screenwriting from an odd direction, because the first screenplay that I read was and is better as writing than the top one percent of literary novels.
William Monahan
I learned my job from English dramatists. Tennessee Williams was no good for me, New York stuff was no good to me.
William Monahan
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
As a director, you're given a tremendous apparatus to work with, and very great talents are available to you.
William Monahan
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
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.
William Monahan
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
My gratitude to Ridley [Scott] isn't anything new. I named one of my kids after him. But he's a very important person to me.
William Monahan
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
Wisdom is not having illusions, especially anything in your own mind that elevates you above others.
William Monahan
On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing.
William Monahan
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
When they see you get what you want and move on, quickly, you've done a contract with the crew from that point. In Britain if the sparks call you Guv on day two, you never need an award of any other kind.
William Monahan
