William Monahan Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I never write with particular actors in mind.

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

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.

Casting is always subject to availabilities.

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.

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

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

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.