The Yahoo Movies Interview: Oscar Winner William Monahan on Addiction, Screenwriting, and 'The Gambler'

William Monahan was a novelist before he became a screenwriter, and that heritage is very apparent in his long, detailed, monologue-heavy screenplays. His script for The Departed, which own him a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar in 2007, was 152 pages long. The screenplay for his latest film — a remake of the 1974 James Caan drama The Gambler — may not be quite as long, but it is brimming with theories on writing, self-destruction, and family (the film, which stars Mark Wahlberg as an English professor with an all-consuming gambling addiction, opens Dec. 25).

After smoking a cigarette in the bathroom of his suite in his midtown hotel in Manhattan, Monahan expounded on his writing philosophies in an interview with  Yahoo Movies that was as verbose and frank as his films, which are filled with the sort of confidence that the writer himself boasts.

"I’ve never had trouble in the way that I hear other people talk about having other trouble in screenwriting, all the people running around clutching their foreheads and saying, ‘The studios asked for the scene with a dog, they need the hero to have a dog so he’s more sympathetic to the audience,’" he says. "Nobody pulls that shit with me."

Where do you start on a remake like The Gambler?
Number one, I don’t like the term “remake,” because people use it as if it’s a new production of an old film, or something like that. Film doesn’t work that way. Unless you have something new, nobody’s going to do it. It’s not like you write a play and there’s a new production of it later if the first one doesn’t come off right, or it’s just time to do another production, or something. It’s not like that. A film has to be totally — or ideally — unmoored from the original text. Unless you have new text, it’s not really worth doing it.

You throw everything out?
Yeah.

So how do you attack it?
I need as much ignorance of the original as I can possibly get — otherwise, I’ve got no room to move, and I wouldn’t be interested. The original Gambler came out when I was 13. I didn’t watch it then. It seemed to be about sports gambling and it seemed to be kind of skeezy [Laughs]. [And] I don’t believe in addiction, I tend to think it’s self-indulgence.

Related: Mark Wahlberg on Starving Himself for ‘The Gambler’: I Was ‘Miserable’

All addiction or just gambling addiction?
Pretty much all of it. You have to take kind of a hard line with it. I hate to say that, because I know people have trouble with it, and I know there’s obviously physiological substance-dependency that happens if people aren’t careful. But I have to, as a New Englander, hold the line that everything is voluntary. When you look at things, everything is voluntary. I just came out of the bathroom after illicitly smoking a cigarette, but I chose to do it.

Could you quit smoking if you wanted to?
Oh yeah. It’s about 48 hours of mild discomfort.

And you just choose not to quit because you like smoking.
Yeah. So if you don’t believe in addiction, most of the original text just falls away, because it is about addiction. It contains a lot of fairly repulsive behavior. I think people thought photographing repulsive behavior was really fascinating and new in the 1970s. Which it was, because before that, you’d had Doris Day films. So all of a sudden, you’re hand-held in the kitchen with someone with mustard coming down their chin. It seemed like a great time in cinema, when all it was was a handheld camera and somebody with mustard coming down their chin. It wasn’t a breakthrough in cinema.

If you look at things that worked from that period, they tend to be structured, or have a strong controlling intelligence, which can be the same thing as being heavily scripted and plotted out — such as Scorsese, for example.

People look at the ‘70s and New Hollywood era as the guiding light today. Which of those movies do you think worked?
Well I tend to like the more formal pieces from the ‘70s. I like Apocalypse Now, which is a highly structured epic. And curiously enough, better in the studio cut than it is in the director’s cut, and I can’t quite figure that out, and I refuse to process it right now. But it’s actually true. While there’s no one more a fan of sudden inspiration on the floor, I do like formally planned art.

So you don’t write on the fly? Do you write highly structured things?No, no, I never outline anything. Writing is definitely improvisational performance. And it’s a performance that has to come out well, or none of the other performances will ever happen. So if I don’t perform on the fly using everything I know to make this script, the actors aren’t going to come, and if the actors don’t come, the money won’t come, and the film will never get made.

So if you don’t believe in addiction, where does this character’s self-destructiveness comes from?
In a certain way, it came from calling bullshit on some of the ideas in the original script. People aren’t like that [the character James Caan playe din the original].Everything in certain ways, you can never avoid that, the self invades everything you do. The writer is kind of an actor, and like the actor, the writer draws on what he knows — or what he imagines he would do in certain circumstances. So unfortunately [Wahlberg’s harsh, enraged] monologues before class, the two classes, they’re kind of inherent. It’s not like I thought, “Well, I’ll have a monologue here.” The man’s a teacher, he’s got to be saying something. So unfortunately, or fortunately, I don’t know which yet, some of what he says to the class is maybe what I would say, and some of it is what I avoid saying at dinner tables.

He’s mean and discouraging. He says to that class, “Most of you suck. There’s no point in being mediocre.” Would you say that?
I don’t know if I believe it as thoroughly as he does. I do think it’s kind of important because people do address writing, especially screenwriting, as if it’s something anybody can do. And that’s understandable, because every single book about screenwriting basically starts with story: “You can [write screenplays] if you follow these beats of story, everybody can do it, everybody can do story.” Well, screenwriting isn’t f—ing story. There’s only about half a dozen stories since the beginning of time, it’s all about execution. Or, as I’m starting to say again and again, more about the teller than the tale, which also goes back to the idea of a remake.

Movies have become quite formulaic, or even dumbed down; those big action movies are broken down by those easy steps. So, in a way, maybe everyone can do screenwriting.
I mean, it doesn’t say anything good about the culture, I suppose. Anybody can decide it’s time for a subway train to blow up and that sort of thing. The whole point is, I think people who do that sort of thing are working in a different tradition. I’m happy to be working in a way where I can be walking down the street, and two guys will be walking past me, and I’ll hear they’re quoting something from a film I’ve written. That’s more important to me, and that comes from a broader tradition of dramatic writing, which I’ll be happy to keep inserting into this industry as long as they’ll keep paying me.

In The Departed screenplay, you have lines of description like this: “NOTE: The box could contain an eyeball, money, drugs, a picture of Colin f—ing his school teacher…we will never know.” What’s the purpose? Who is that for?
It’s for everybody. It’s for the directors, it’s for the actors, it’s for whoever else needs to react to this particular thing or object.

Couldn’t you just say “We don’t know what’s in the box” there?
That leaves you with a can of worms, doesn’t it? It leaves people dangling in the wind about what to do. If you listen to these completely bonkers people who write these screenwriting books, they say “Don’t write like a director,” when the fact is you f—ing well should write like a director. Because anybody who is a real director is going to do his own thing anyway, so what you’ve got to do is put down a fully realized film on the page.

It’s almost as if you’re watching a film and writing it down and trying to convey every piece of information that might be useful. And as you get older and more experienced, you start to incorporate what you know about physical production into the script as well. So there begin to be two things. First, make it a fully realized motion picture that somebody can see while they’re reading it. And the second thing, make it practical.

So because he’s not an addict, how much do you feel like you have to justify acting this way? Or will audiences buy it right away?
He makes a journey towards the only sort of gamble that I kind of recognize, which is a gamble with his own life. And he pulls out of it in a rather romantic fashion and redeems himself. Of course, you don’t know what happens the next day. But he is very much an individual, but that could be a problem. Writing an individual can be a problem. If you describe any individual in the context of dealing with less enlightened film people than I deal with, if I described you as an individual to these people, they’d say, “Well can’t we give him a dog? How do we make him likable?” That sort of thing. Characters have the right to be individual human beings.

In real life, people can just be screw-ups, they can be assholes, they can be damaged, for whatever reason. But it seems like when people watch movies, they need a reason for people to be that way.
And they’re always mechanical and stupid. I remember having a meeting where somebody wins a fist-fight, and I remember a little executive saying, “Well, I could believe that he could win this fight if he had special-forces training.” And I thought, “Jesus Christ, I can name seven guys off of the top of my head who could kill somebody with their hands, and they’re white-collar workers. Where have you been?” Where does this mechanistic idea of people come from? Because it doesn’t come from reality. It doesn’t come from the street down there, it comes from f—ing boardrooms in Los Angeles where people sit around pretending that people are some sort of different substance than actual human beings.

They insist on giving characters convenient backstories that explain their faults?
Well, it dates back to one of the earliest filmmakers, [which] established  that the good guy in a western would come out of the saloon and pat a dog, and the bad guy would come out of the saloon and kick the dog. That’s a sort of simplification, which is okay, because one can imagine it in real life. But the other sort of simplification … is that we are somehow made by our experiences or circumstances, rather than whatever we happened to be or wish to be or decide to be. If we want to go to [Anthony] Burgess, people are not A Clockwork Orange. In real life, how many times have you seen somebody changed?