Top 135 Quotes & Sayings by William Monahan - Page 3

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.

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

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.

I've always been a bit repelled by "Sunset Boulevard", which is wrong about almost everything it touches, whether it's fame, Hollywood, screenwriters, or old ladies. Sunset Boulevard would only make sense to me if it was about John Gilbert and the pool boy.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Martin [Campbell] is very energetic and precise. He'll on the set like four hours early with a flashlight and I thought, well, I'll certainly try to be very neat about my script like Martin, which I wasn't, but I'm not going to do that bit with the 4AM and the flashlight. I'd love to be able to say I was nervous, but I wasn't. The only time I ever had anxiety it turned out to be asthma.

Whatever you cut when there's no deadline isn't really a cut. You're just pushing colors around.