William Monahan Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Doing crime films ... maybe it's to some extent a matter of taste. Certainly my first novel had a criminal element and was about the similarity of criminals and artists. Pretextually, it was sort of a money bag thriller. But it was aggressively not what it seemed to be. It was kind of Duchamps. — William Monahan

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

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

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. — William Monahan

I shoot very little film. If you just do coverage you're shooting any number of potential films instead of just one, and I was shooting just one specific film. Film is cheap but time is expensive. — William Monahan

Some reviewer might be out there saying, obviously Edge of Darkness didn't come off because of the script, blah blah blah, but everybody has read the script, except the journalist attacking it. — William Monahan

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

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. — William Monahan

I always write as I like to write, and I've been thinking about it because I honestly didn't realize how different my stuff is, until I started looking at other people's scripts as a producer. — 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

In Boston terms I was everyone and no one, with no social investment, no social insecurity, sort of Imitation of Christ in one hand and The Education of Henry Adams in the other, and because I was part of nothing I could observe everything without having anything personal invested in the findings. — 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

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

The empirical is very important, but merit is inherent and not acquired. A university is massively important because you can see where you stand naturally in the ranks, and try yourself out, but education is just reading and understanding what you read. — William Monahan

I think that scripts should be published, but they are published, really, because when you're a screenwriter, your stuff ends up in samizdat form on thousands and thousands of desks and shelves across the industry. — William Monahan

I don't have an aversion to quote unquote remakes, because I understand what dramatic writing is, what the dramatic profession has always been about, which is talent, not the pretext for its exhibition. — William Monahan

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

They're done by guys who have talked a good game and then have scrambled together the simulacrum of a drama, so actors are habituated to sometimes having to save a picture on the floor because it's usually part of their job, but they'd rather have a writer doing his job, so that they can do theirs. But I like nothing better than working with actors. — William Monahan

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. — 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

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

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. — William Monahan

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. — William Monahan

I have a library room with four desks in it. On one of them is a spec, on one of them is a present work, on one of them is reading for a future work, on another desk is a novel I'm not doing until I'm a hundred and fifty, and things like that. But, contractually speaking, you just do one at a time when it's on and paid and live. You do your real day on one project and the rest is just literary life. Or intrusions. — William Monahan

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. — William Monahan

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. — William Monahan

I started out as a writer with an hour removed from Kingdom of Heaven. You have to make one print for the entire world, and that's something that influences the theatrical cuts of pictures to an enormous degree. It's a reality. You can't have one cut for the Sunni, and one for the Shia, and one each for Tories, Whigs, vegetarians, one cut for the Cineplex, and one for literary intellectuals. — William Monahan

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. — William Monahan

If you need someone to come out of the sewer with a wire you don't hire someone who needs laborious collective instruction. You let someone do his job, whether he's a focus puller or a surgeon. — William Monahan

But the web is to some degree a broth of psychopaths seeing what they can get away with in circumstances of anonymity. Look, we live in a world where one is unsafe in various ways because of the Internet. Anything can be said. Someone can look at your house from space. — William Monahan

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

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

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

[Eugene] O'Neill made a living, certainly, at least. But each of these forms have sort of died the death in turn, and it's a simple fact of that universe that talent then migrates away from these forms, and then the amateurs get in, like lunatics in the ruins, sort of pretending to be artists. If you're ambitious enough to want to be a writer to begin with, you want to be a writer in some circumstances where there are rewards, where there's notice, where you don't have to be a teacher, and where you're frankly not nuts for wasting your time. — William Monahan

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

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

I never write with particular actors in mind. — William Monahan

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

The era I love most is the Federal period, just after the Revolution and the formation of the United States. The birth of America as a nation coincided with the Romantic era and I've always been thoroughly into the Romantics and I've always been thoroughly into America, particularly at the time when it was a brand new idea, when it was something brand new in the world. It was a very exciting time in the world because of the birth of America — 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

A criminal has a kind of freedom by definition that the ordinary citizen doesn't have. The criminal's able to realize himself in ways not available to the general population, if you want to put it that way. They're interesting and unpredictable. Characters always have to break some sort of bound or other to be interesting. It also helps if they're paradoxical. — William Monahan

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

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

The first time I ever thought about doing a film seriously, I was in London. I was about 17 years old. I was just standing in the street, a bit dazzled by an Antonioni bus wipe, which by the way are inherent in London, and I imagined a film set in London starting out with the riff from The Yardbird's "Heart Full of Soul", and now, how ever many years later, I've done it. — William Monahan

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. — William Monahan

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. — William Monahan

All of a sudden I pulled up short and harked back to Ridley [Scott] holding up the script in Manhattan, at the St. Regis breakfast room, and saying, "It's very visual, isn't it," and realized it was the key to my whole life since then. — William Monahan

As first time director, though, you're like a new officer coming up to be in charge of very serious veterans, and you're always going to have guys looking at each other for the first day until they realize you're not screwing around. — William Monahan

I need as much of the business of making a film to be in my own workspace. It really ought to be a bit more like doing a novel, alone, at first. I'm feeling my way. — William Monahan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm usually the first guy to propose a change because I'm continuing my process. We're in a context, in this business, a context in which most screenplays work on a very modest level of achievement, in that a lot of them aren't really written by what you would call writers. — William Monahan

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

Poetry died as a commercial form and then it died as a serious art form. No one serious touches it. It used to be that somebody like F. Scott Fitzgerald could make a high middle-class income from working as a short story writer for the Saturday Evening Post and other outlets. That doesn't happen anymore. It used to be that a legitimate playwright could make a living on Broadway from writing decent plays. — William Monahan

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. — William Monahan

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. — 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

I didn't have anything to do with selecting IFC. I don't have anything to do with distribution, or business, or marketing, but think it's a good choice by Graham, and perfect for London Boulevard. It gets the picture straight into a dialog with the public, and it doesn't set the sights too high. They're very hip at IFC, and they get the film. The cineplex hasn't done film any favors as an art form. — William Monahan

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

When I was a kid in London there was just something about the light and there's something about the way London went onto film in those days, whether it was Technicolor or Technicolor plus the flatness of the light, or whatever. — William Monahan

I had a guy at the Groucho bar clawing at my arm nearly in tears saying that until he saw The Departed he thought Americans were the ones on TV. I didn't know you had accents. I didn't know you had a class system. I didn't know you were like us. To which the answer is, probably only where I grew up, but while we're at it don't watch television and think it's the United States of America. — 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'm a huge fan of director's cuts or reassemblies if they're good, but I remember being really excited about the restored version of Apocalypse Now, and then I preferred the original film. Kingdom of Heaven as a director's cut is the real picture, but in fact someone recently told me that there was another cut, the original first cut, which he said was just extraordinary. I've never seen it - and of course now I want to, if it exists, and so would everybody else. — William Monahan

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

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. — William Monahan

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

When I was very young, you would get the TV listings from The Globe and The Herald, and you would basically go through them, circle things, and map out your viewing week. — William Monahan

Casting is always subject to availabilities. — William Monahan

Because you're running an enterprise with two hundred-odd people, and it's really your responsibility to keep it moving quickly. So you have to know what you're doing, do it, and move on. — William Monahan

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

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

London exists normally in a state of bleach bypass. There's the artistic context of "Blow Up" and "Performance" and all the Sixties and Seventies British films that I grew up on, because I did very much grow up on British films. — William Monahan

I can work in London. A British journalist asked me if I had any trouble working with an English crew, as an American, and I said I might have if I was from Scotland, but I'm from Massachusetts, which is sort of Oxfordshire, but more intellectual. That's kind of unforgivable but you've got to let them have it. — William Monahan

I'm a guy whose first motion picture experience was seeing Ridley Scott glide past on a camera on a hundred and fifty million dollar film, and prep two movies, and there is no way to overstate that when you've worked with Ridley, it's like having been a quarterdeck lieutenant to Lord Nelson. — William Monahan

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

Henry Adams was scared shitless, politically, by the discovery that England isn't alien to a boy from Boston, but it was true, and it is true. It's a Boston and coastal Massachusetts thing. Henry Adams blocked it out. — William Monahan

I don't trust a lot of popular films because they seem to indicate that people would like to be super-heroes or vampires, and that's the last thing I mean by the useful mirror of art. — William Monahan

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

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

I put no stock in religion. By the word religion I have seen the lunacy of fanatics of every denomination be called the will of god. Holiness is in right action, and courage on behalf of those who cannot defend themselves, and goodness. What God desires is here [mind] and here [heart] and what you decide to do every day will make you a good man ... or not. — William Monahan

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

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

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. — William Monahan

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

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

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

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

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. — William Monahan

When they see you get what you want and move on, quickly, you've done a contract with the crew from that point. In Britain if the sparks call you Guv on day two, you never need an award of any other kind. — William Monahan

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. — William Monahan