William Monahan Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I never write with particular actors in mind.

I don't watch anything. I work so much. If I see a film, it's usually that I'll go in after working 15 hours and slam in The Bridge on the River Kwai or something.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's absolutely true, but one problem with the digital revolution, which may tie into what I said earlier, is that there can be a collapse of quality. You may not have liked the decisions made by publishers in the past, you may not have liked the decisions made by magazine editors or newspaper editors in the past. At least there was some quality control

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For me, film has been good because I'm able to work at top crack, working at something I love to do, in the only literary form in which you can still make money. There are no famous novelists, not as novelists used to be famous.

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

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

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.

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.

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.