Quotes from William Monahan

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I put no stock in religion. By the word religion I have seen the lunacy of fanatics of every denomination be called the will of god. Holiness is in right action, and courage on behalf of those who cannot defend themselves, and goodness. What God desires is here [mind] and here [heart] and what you decide to do every day will make you a good man...or not.

God will understand, my lord. And if he doesn't, then he is not God and we need not worry.

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 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.

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.

When I'm shooting, as much as writing, I see edited footage in my mind, so I work that way, and it's economical.

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

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.