Words matter. These are the best Beau Willimon Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
You just have to re-wire your brain when you’re shifting from the stage to the screen or the silver screen or the HD flat screen.
At home I mostly stick to online Scrabble, or chess or Risk – games I find far less addictive than the spectacular games created for consoles these days. But, whenever I get the chance, I head over to my friend Kyri’s house to play his PS3.
The economics of being a playwright are abysmal. I like to think of the work I do out in Hollywood as a way to actually make a life in the theater easier.
People in D.C. are so psyched when anyone dramatizes them in an exciting way. They’re a lot more open to looking at the nastier side of themselves than the media is.
When you have both parties who will not find ways to compromise, who won’t meet in the middle, you have paralysis. It’s the perversion of idealism.
In the best possible scenario, whenever you get notes from people, they’re good notes, and they see things that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise, and they make you a better writer.
Tales of power and ambition and intrigue and betrayal and desire – when you’re telling those in a big way, you automatically want to go to Shakespeare.
Real leaders have to live a paradoxical life, where they must break the rules in order to maintain them. If your expectations are high, you’re setting yourself up for disillusionment. The land of governance is paved with gray streets, not black or white ones.
The way I see politics is, I don’t think it’s cynical to accept the fact politicians are human beings, that they’re flawed, and they represent the best and the worst of us.
My jobs on campaigns were pretty low on the totem pole – I was an advance man.
I refuse to buy a PS3 or Xbox for my home for fear that it might ruin my life. I think I would cease to accomplish anything productive, would quickly dispense with all human contact, and would very well end up with a nasty case of arthritis in my over-used digits from constant gameplay.
A lot of people have asked me whether I am a cynic or take a cynical view of politics and are often surprised when I say that I consider myself an optimist, but an optimist dressed in the robes of a realist.
Film is much more visual, a scene is typically a lot shorter, you’re dealing with a lot more characters, a lot more locations, and you’re able to rely on things that you just can never do on the stage.
Is self-interest a bad thing? We want our leaders to be pure and good, but at the same time we want them to be effective, and to be effective you often have to be ruthless and not bound by ideology or the same morals that we pretend to hold ourselves to.
The checks and balances is a way to prevent government from either devolving into an autocratic tyranny or an autocratic mob mentality.
I was always a writer – working on campaigns was never a profession for me. It was something I did on the side, really, so the trajectory hasn’t been a political operative who likes to dabble in writing and finds himself into stumbling on film and TV – that was always my goal.
There were many years when I was hand-to-mouth and didn’t know how I was gonna make rent. I’ve done every job under the sun, from busing tables, temping, and working in factories to SAT prep and detailing cars. So to be able to make a living where all I do is write is absolutely liberating.
You always want to try, in everything you do, to attempt something you’ve never tried before, and the only way to succeed at that is through failure, and the only way to succeed through failure is just banging your head against the wall over and over until you get to that interesting thing on the other side.
I don’t think that Washington is a fundamentally bad or corrupt place.
In Washington, if you’re a congressman or a senator or the President, you make much more money than the average American, but you’d think that if you were the leader of the free world you’d be making major bank, and you don’t.
The press don’t wake up in the morning simply to be a mouthpiece for pols – they’re out to uncover and expose news. That often is at odds with what politicians are setting out to do – it’s both symbiotic and antagonistic. They need each other, they work in concert with one another, they work against one another.
The reality is that politicians, in terms of the amount of power they wield and the amount that they work, don’t actually make that much money.
The political world is a dark place. If you want to portray it accurately, authentically, you’ve got to turn out the lights from time to time.
The media doesn’t create narratives, really. They’re not that powerful. What they do is they tap into narratives that are already bubbling amongst their viewership or readership.
We all experience power struggles in our lives – at the workplace, with our friends, in our love lives. In a way, we’re all politicians.
