Quote

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

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
Think
Fiction
Thinking
History
Science
Film
Anything
Comprehended
Everything
Historical
Writing
Behinds
Long
Behind

More quotes by 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
I love editorial and sound and music, and I was working with the best people, so you learn a lot.
William Monahan
Image
I was always entirely about work, about getting where I am now. If I'm not working I'm thinking about it, though at some point I learned not to talk about it very much.
William Monahan
Image
It wasn't just British gangster films that really did for me as a kid, personally, it was British films in general.
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 learned my job from English dramatists. Tennessee Williams was no good for me, New York stuff was no good to me.
William Monahan
Image
If TV seems improved, I think it's been enhanced by violence and sex permissible on cable, as well as better cinematography, but in the end it's really only soap operas like your grandmother's afternoon stories and that's all it wants to be or has to be.
William Monahan
Image
There were days when you would get the TV listings from The Globe and The Herald. Video was out, but nobody could afford it...expect for my uncle George, who was a second father to me, and had every film in the world, and every book.
William Monahan
Image
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.
William Monahan
Image
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
Image
I learned from Ridley [Scott] how to come out of the trailer at a fast walk and make your decisions and keep it going. We were very much on time and under budget, as they say. That was a very important thing for me and very satisfactory.
William Monahan
Image
I wanted to do London Boulevard because I saw the potential of a story about two people who need each other desperately, who love at first sight, as one does, and above all a story in which no one is what they appear to be.
William Monahan
Image
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
Image
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.
William Monahan
Image
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
Image
By the time someone gave me some samples of standard screenplays I was already beyond that stuff, because I was not only a tinkerer in ways to do things, I'd started from Dylan Thomas. As a screen dramatist he was a very intense visualist, with great timing and fluency.
William Monahan
Image
When I started writing screenplays, as early as I started writing anything, I hadn't seen any ordinary screenplays. I saw movies and figured out how I thought they should be written.
William Monahan
Image
Saying directors don't write because they don't type is very wrong, it's like saying Dylan doesn't write music because he doesn't write notation.
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
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