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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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William Monahan
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: November 3
Critic
Film Director
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Claude La Badarian
General
Wasn
Film
Kids
Gangster
Really
Gangsters
Personally
British
Films

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I write drama in the English language. If I wasn't working in London I'd be doing something wrong.
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A writer is a performer as well. A writer isn't the literary department. That gets tried on but nothing's a script unless a good writer goes away and does his thing alone.
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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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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.
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I love editorial and sound and music, and I was working with the best people, so you learn a lot.
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The old days of screenwriting, and myths about screenwriting, are maybe over. It's a literary form, if you can wake up to it.
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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.
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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.
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I'm not very precious at all, which I think people find surprising.
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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.
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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.
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I sound like Warhol but only because I'm tired.
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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.
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Get Carter is a classic, but it did nothing in the United States. It came out on a double bill with a Frank Sinatra western.
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I learned my job from English dramatists. Tennessee Williams was no good for me, New York stuff was no good to me.
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Even though a screenplay is performed only once, unlike other forms of drama, it's still a performance in itself, and unless it's a great performance, odds are that actors will not come, and a movie will never be made.
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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.
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I don't think you need $35 million bucks to make a movie. I think what people should do is make a lot more movies for a lot less money. You can really do it.
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I have no reason as a director to have films go up in versions that I don't like. My only experience of film after ten years is honestly that if a picture doesn't get second-guessed you're looking at four Oscars, and if a picture does get second-guessed, you're not. I've got an advanced degree in that lesson.
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The novel ceases to be looked at as a novel. Such is the overwhelming power of motion pictures. Gore Vidal pointed out that the movies are the only thing anybody's really interested in. The association with movies and movie money can, and certainly did in my case, occlude a novel as a novel.
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