William Monahan Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• 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

  Beach, Swim, Towels

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Scotland, Intellectual, Massachusetts

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Heart, Years, Soul

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Keys, Manhattan, Breakfast

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• I'm in the film industry, and I very seldom go to the theater now. It could be work, not being in New York, that sort thing - because in New York, you do go to theaters; you can walk to a theater and then walk to a restaurant. But in places you have to drive out to the cineplex to see a movie, it's starting not to be worth it anymore. It's like the days when you went to get a book at the public library. You don't have to do that anymore. You just go on your iPad and all of a sudden you're reading The Duchess of Malfi.

  William Monahan

  Book, Reading, Library

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Directors, Type

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Hero, Mean

  "Exclusive: William Monahan Candidly Discusses THE GAMBLER, His Severe Bike Accident Earlier This Year, His Approach to Writing, MOJAVE, VENGEANCE, John Le Carre’s A DELICATE TRUTH, Television, and More". Interview with Steve "Frosty" Weintraub, collider.com. December 12, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  William Monahan

  Honesty, Liars, Trouble

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Cutting, Heaven

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

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

  William Monahan

  Historical, Together, Stitches

  Source: collider.com

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Achievement, Guy, Levels

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Jobs, Drama, Games

  Source: collider.com

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Character, Interesting, Criminals

  Source: collider.com

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Artist, Criminals, Bags

  Source: collider.com

  5 Copy quote

• If I can give a young author any advice, whatsoever, never let anyone announce the film sale of your first novel. Film rights are sold to almost every novel, but it shouldn't be the lead story in your first engagement with the press. Then you end up getting reviews like "a novel made for the screen" and things like that.

  William Monahan

  Rights, Giving, Advice

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Association, Motion Pictures, Cases

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Guy, Ordinary, Six

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Writing, Class

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Cutting, Transition, Looks

  Source: collider.com

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Cutting, Reality, Heaven

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Thinking, Sight

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Sex, Grandmother, Thinking

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Gambling, Balls

  Source: collider.com

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  William Monahan

  Lying, Believe, Literature

  Source: collider.com

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  People, Creative, Firsts

  Source: collider.com

  5 Copy quote

Page 4 of 6

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

5

6

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin