Words matter. These are the best Brian Helgeland Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
It’s such an egotistical thing to be able to just stand there and say, ‘Action!’ It’s like being a little mini-god.
Working on an adaptation is not as satisfying, because it’s not your original work: you’re interpreting. With ‘L.A. Confidential,’ I loved the book. In that case, I felt I was guardian of the work, staying as true to the novel as I could. I’ve since met the novelist, and he loves the movie and the script.
The studio is spending great amounts of money, and they want some insurance they will get money back. They go for the middle of the road, broad in appeal. It’s restrictive. It’s a constant struggle, but if you give in, you’re just making cottage cheese, and that’s the end of it.
Movie dialogue is movie dialogue. It can sound real, but no one speaks that way.
If you write an original, it’s like you went in and dug a well, and you hit oil. But an adaptation, it’s like the oil well’s on fire, and they bring you in to put the fire out and get it working again – or something like that.
I’m not like a Sears Catalog of ideas. I don’t have that many ideas. I’ve more or less written them over the years. Usually, I come up with a situation or a character, and it rattles around in my head until the story or the plot emerges.
I don’t really write with living actors in mind. I guess I write for dead actors. I’ll think of like, you know, Burt Lancaster would be good in this part, and so on. With ‘L.A. Confidential,’ it was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if Dean Martin played the Kevin Spacey part?’
If I’m in the bookstore, and I see a 700-page novel, my first thought is, ‘Ooh, how could you cut this down to size and make a movie out of it?’
As much as I love period movies and especially more swashbuckling movies, I think that sometimes they tend to be, umm… it’s hard for the audience to relate to them.
You can write anything you want on paper, like blowing up the bridge on the River Kwai, but when you actually have to do that as a director, it’s not the same. Ninety percent of directing is not creative – it’s putting the theoretical into the practical world.
I write R-rated action dramas, and every year that goes by, that gets to be a smaller and smaller world you have to work in. You have to think of how to get the studio excited and sell them something.
It’s okay to lie as long as you reach a higher truth doing it.
