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I never work until I have a deadline. You have to fit so much in a given day that you just don't get serious until you know when the deadline is.
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
Given
Work
Much
Never
Deadline
Fit
Serious
More quotes by William Monahan
I think the only real referent for anybody writing drama is probably Hamlet. You have the most extreme tragic drama, this sort of blood-boltered thing, but it's also very funny, which is simply a matter of the playwright being alive and observant and entertaining, and understanding not only the world but what will play.
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
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.
William Monahan
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
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
London matters to me because it's the center of what I do for a living and has been since Tudor times.
William Monahan
You're not turning the picture over to a system or a process, you are the process, and the most important thing is to have things exactly as you want them.
William Monahan
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
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.
William Monahan
I write drama in the English language. If I wasn't working in London I'd be doing something wrong.
William Monahan
Out of all of the Star Trek movies, I happen to like the most recent one the best. I think it was the best one ever done.
William Monahan
It wasn't just British gangster films that really did for me as a kid, personally, it was British films in general.
William Monahan
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
I never viewed screen drama as a vulgar form, or a lesser one, and I've never written it left-handed.
William Monahan
Without English art, I never would have understood myself, my own family, or the New England world I lived in.
William Monahan
If you change a location opportunistically, to gain a day on the schedule, which I did more than once, you have to re-rig everything creatively on the spot, and you not only have to be able to do that, but do it with great fluency to keep moving. I used to go apeshit when anything got changed in a film but you live and learn, and I have learned.
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
Novelists who get shitty about screenwriting invariably can't do it, or they can't hack it in the world of what's really, in truth, very bold and very public enterprise.
William Monahan
For some reason, I seem to work well with actors. I love working with them.
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
