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Quote by William Monahan

“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.”

Quote by William Monahan

Author

William Monahan

William Monahan, born on November 3, 1960, is an American screenwriter known for his profound insights into crime themes and his exquisite narrative skills. His works, including 'The Departed' and 'The Departed', have earned him an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. more

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“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.”

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Author:William Monahan

“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.”

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

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Author:William Monahan

“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.”

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Author:William Monahan

“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.”

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Author:William Monahan

“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.”

Ifs Way Want Kind Character Helping Able Realizing Interesting Break Citizens Ordinary Bounds Population Definitions Available Criminals Unpredictable Paradoxical Ordinary Citizens

Author:William Monahan

“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.”

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Author:William Monahan

“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.”

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Author:William Monahan

“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.”

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Author:William Monahan

“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.”

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Author:William Monahan