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In all honesty a gangster picture was the easiest kind of film for me to get made.

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
Gangsters
Easiest
Honesty
Picture
Film
Made
Kind
Gangster

More quotes by William Monahan

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I'm a homebody, as many writers are, and need to be by myself, and I like to be by the Atlantic Ocean.
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I never write with particular actors in mind.
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Actors are players and if they're hot, or onto something, you let them go, or you and the actor can both get on to something. I always run out with lines as I think of them.
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I cut London Boulevard pretty aggressively, but I liked the transitions and the elliptical feel that I got. It's not an exceptionally easy film to follow. You have to know that the paparazzo looks like Mark David Chapman. He hasn't got an expositional sign on him.
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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.
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As far as executing work is concerned, you do it all in order. You do it in contractual order. There's no overlap, it's just continuation of your ordinary work. You move from one project into another.
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There's always a great hue and cry when you sign onto a remake, and that's always been sort of annoying me and freaking me out. This profession that we're in is drama. What drama has been since the beginning is, you restage plays with new casts, or a writer will take a new run at an old story.
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T.S. Eliot, who learned to swim at the same beach as I did, just threw in the towel and moved to Cheyne Walk. I'm not going to do that but I'm not scared of the open channel between me and Britain.
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I'm not a precious text protector, or anything like that, you know, because it's a much more vital form than that. You have to rock.
William Monahan
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Yeah, well I can't see a situation where I wouldn't at least re-write as a director something I was going to direct. At the moment, I wouldn't direct anything that I hadn't written. I can now say, as everybody else says, that it all depends on the script.
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I don't think the latest Star Wars pictures have any artistic intentions, but the original picture opened up epic science fiction.
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.
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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
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Most films go out like skydivers who have had their chutes packed by a committee of blind schizophrenics.
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.
William Monahan
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I'm more from a double world where I wasn't part of anything or invested in anything, because I was Irish, and very Irish, but also the other part of my family, not that it had airs, or money, was descended from the first minister on Cape Ann in the 1620s.
William Monahan
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On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing.
William Monahan
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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
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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.
William Monahan
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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