William Monahan quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by William Monahan

William Monahan Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from William Monahan on Wise Famous Quotes.

If you see, as I do, in edited film, you're going to end up as a director.

I sound like Warhol but only because I'm tired.

Casting is all about availability, as much as anything else.

It's interesting to think that my children know more about the process than many mature critics.

Without English art, I never would have understood myself, my own family, or the New England world I lived in.

I write drama in the English language. If I wasn't working in London I'd be doing something wrong.

As a director, you're given a tremendous apparatus to work with, and very great talents are available to you.

On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing.

I'm not very precious at all, which I think people find surprising.

Refreshing honesty has been getting me in trouble since I was five, but it's probably had some positive effects - like not being a liar.

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

The only answer to "Are you Beatles or Stones?" is, "I'm both."

The old days of screenwriting, and myths about screenwriting, are maybe over. It's a literary form, if you can wake up to it.

Dialogue is used to reveal not what we want to say, but what we are trying to hide.

I don't think the latest Star Wars pictures have any artistic intentions, but the original picture opened up epic science fiction.

I'd been working so hard making the film that I hadn't even emotionally processed the fact that I was a director.

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.

You just have to know what you want and what you're doing and it leads to a kind of general well-being, which I think you sensed when you were there.

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.

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.

Most films go out like skydivers who have had their chutes packed by a committee of blind schizophrenics.

It wasn't just British gangster films that really did for me as a kid, personally, it was British films in general.

I'm a homebody, as many writers are, and need to be by myself, and I like to be by the Atlantic Ocean.

You never know what people are going to go and see.

London matters to me because it's the center of what I do for a living and has been since Tudor times.

I never write with particular actors in mind.

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.

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.

You don't write for actors. Actors come for characters you've made up.

I learned my job from English dramatists. Tennessee Williams was no good for me, New York stuff was no good to me.

When I'm shooting, as much as writing, I see edited footage in my mind, so I work that way, and it's economical.

I was particularly anxious that I shoot the tires out of the class system. All it is these days is a hobby of certain masochists, and certain sadists.

If you write a screenplay that gets circulated, you have a bigger readership than any literary novelist. And it's an educated audience as well.

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.

I don't like scripts leaking. On the other hand, the more real attention a script gets, the better.

You know a shooter when you see it. At least the creative people do. If a picture isn't obvious in the first draft you're kind of screwed.

I'm interested in stories about human beings. I don't care where or when they are set.

I love editorial and sound and music, and I was working with the best people, so you learn a lot.

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.

I never viewed screen drama as a vulgar form, or a lesser one, and I've never written it left-handed.

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.

Casting is always subject to availabilities.

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.

If you decide to do Hamlet in a funny hat staged in a ruined factory, it doesn't make you Shakespeare.

Wisdom is not having illusions, especially anything in your own mind that elevates you above others.

Look at what people are trying to conceal, and you'll see that they're revealing everything.

For some reason, I seem to work well with actors. I love working with them.

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.

When I was young I was only thinking of writing, and whatever was going on was unreal and comparatively unimportant.

I think probably everybody works most on the beginning and the ending.

Whatever you cut when there's no deadline isn't really a cut. You're just pushing colors around.