American - Writer | January 17, 1961 -
It's as boring to see a completely evil villain as it is to see a completely good guy.
Brian Helgeland
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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.
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It's okay to lie as long as you reach a higher truth doing it.
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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.
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It's such an egotistical thing to be able to just stand there and say, 'Action!' It's like being a little mini-god.
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I think when I start out writing, I always try to write the version of the movie that I want to go see. I don't mean it in a way that ignores the audience, but I really set out to make a movie that I want to see and that, hopefully, other people will want to go see it. So whatever's amusing to me, I guess, I throw it all in there.
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I think 'Cool Hand Luke' was probably the first movie in which I was aware of the writing as its own separate thing. It was that speech when the guy reads Paul Newman the riot act. The speech about going in the box.
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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?'
GoodMindCoolThinkYouLiving
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.
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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?'
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There are plenty of writers who are going to become a director after their next job, but no one will believe you're a director unless you believe it.
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I was in a bookstore one afternoon, and I stumbled across this book called 'A Guide to Film Schools.' I always loved movies growing up and had never even conceived that it was something you could do for a living. Realizing most of them were in Los Angeles and knowing that was warm, I ended up applying.
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