William Monahan: I cut London Boulevard pretty aggressively, but I lik...

The empirical is very important, but merit is inherent and not acquired. A university is massively important because you can see where you stand naturally in the ranks, and try yourself out, but education is just reading and understanding what you read.

William Monahan

understanding reading trying

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

William Monahan

used want trying

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.

William Monahan

stars writing war

When I was young I was only thinking of writing, and whatever was going on was unreal and comparatively unimportant.

William Monahan

young writing thinking

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.

William Monahan

stars done thinking

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

William Monahan

trying people looks

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

William Monahan

atlantic-ocean ocean needs

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.

William Monahan

hero mean art

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.

William Monahan

cutting real heaven

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

William Monahan

stitches historical together

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.

William Monahan

achievement levels guy

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.

William Monahan

games jobs drama

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.

William Monahan

criminals character interesting

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.

William Monahan

bags criminals artist

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.

William Monahan

rights advice giving

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.

William Monahan

motion-pictures cases association

The first time I ever thought about doing a film seriously, I was in London. I was about 17 years old. I was just standing in the street, a bit dazzled by an Antonioni bus wipe, which by the way are inherent in London, and I imagined a film set in London starting out with the riff from The Yardbird's "Heart Full of Soul", and now, how ever many years later, I've done it.

William Monahan

soul heart years

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

William Monahan

film directors facts

All of a sudden I pulled up short and harked back to Ridley [Scott] holding up the script in Manhattan, at the St. Regis breakfast room, and saying, "It's very visual, isn't it," and realized it was the key to my whole life since then.

William Monahan

manhattan keys breakfast

I can work in London. A British journalist asked me if I had any trouble working with an English crew, as an American, and I said I might have if I was from Scotland, but I'm from Massachusetts, which is sort of Oxfordshire, but more intellectual. That's kind of unforgivable but you've got to let them have it.

William Monahan

massachusetts scotland intellectual

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.