42 Quotes by Brian Helgeland

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 know a lot of directors have a whole staff of people trying to find their next film for them. I always just end up writing mine.

It's always once the script's done in the first two years if it doesn't get going somehow or another, I've never had an old script that someone's made later on.

In my own experience, the scripts that I wrote, if they didn't go within two years and become a film, they never went and no one ever came looking for them.

Because I've been at it so long and very steadily, I have a lot of credits, but I probably have twice as many scripts that were never made for whatever reason.

I think writing is a difficult thing and you need to suffer a little bit, even if it's just to sit there and think what an idiot you are and how anyone else could do this better than you can.

In exchange for ten years of being on top, I'm gonna end up in prison or I'm gonna end up dead, and there's something fascinating about that.

I think test screenings with an audience are useful because they have no dog in the fight, they just say how they feel.

If you write an original, its like you went in and dug a well, and you hit oil. But an adaptation, its like the oil wells on fire, and they bring you in to put the fire out and get it working again - or something like that.