William Monahan Quotes

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

Star Wars was great at the beginning and crap at the end while Star Trek has always been interesting, and the difference is in the writing, and the thematic intentions.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

I was always entirely about work, about getting where I am now. If I'm not working I'm thinking about it, though at some point I learned not to talk about it very much.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

There's only one way to prep, so far as I know. You have your script, you hire the people you want, you find your locations and your setups, everybody shows up and you shoot the film.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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