Brian Helgeland Quotes

It's really hard to sell a script, and it's even harder to get a movie made. It just almost never happens.

Lots of scripts are written and not made, even scripts that people want to make.

It's very, very rare in this business [moviemaking] where a script lands on your lap ready to go.

My screenwriting credits in my career are probably not dissimilar to some other ones in the sense that a lot of the scripts you write don't get made, and the ones that do get made are certainly - as a writer, they're not your vision.

I remember when I first started, the first movie I wrote that didn't get made I was aghast. 'Wait a minute, that's not how this is supposed to work. You write a move and it gets made!'

I wrote a few unsuccessful screenplays before I wrote 'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.' I wrote them as television plays that never got made. I'm glad I wrote them - I think it was a good experience.

It's very hard to get a movie made. You could spend your life reading scripts that never got made.

I had written the script a few years earlier for Paramount, then later got hired with Sam [Fuller] to write an entirely new script that he was going to direct. And that was one of the great thrills of my professional life.

You have to write a lot of scripts to get any scripts that are worth making.

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.

Screenwriters get paid a hell of a lot more money but their level of frustration seems to be so high that I don't want that.

Every film starts with the script.

Something like Shakespeare in Love, which became such an established hit that it now seems like a foregone conclusion... but it really wasn't. The script was around for a very, very long time and had people chickening out all the time.

I structure the scripts and work on them on films and work on scenes with writers and but I haven't written a script myself, I really respect what they do and I'm fortunate I get to work with people that I really enjoy working with and we all kind of spitball and work together on these things, but I haven't written a script yet.

It's fairly common to get something optioned but really rare to actually see it become a movie.

Writing is the life blood of everything in Hollywood. Without writers, there are no scripts, no acting work.

When you're making an independent feature, there are so many difficult stages. One, just writing the script is difficult on its own. Then, when you get it to a place where you're happy with it, great - but then you need to find persons who are willing to produce it, who like the script.

After I made my first short film that wasn't terrible, people were interested in potentially developing a feature with me. Every time I read a script, it was a bizarre, too-dark, genre-less thing that no one wanted to make.

Good scripts are difficult to come by in the industry, especially if you are an outsider.

I get so many scripts a day but none of them inspires me. If I get a good inspiring script, then I will be most happy to make it into a film.

I started writing screenplays myself and eventually directing.

In Hollywood, they create banks of scripts, whether they are used or not.

I started out working as a script editor and storyliner.

It's hard to get movies made.

Usually with me, the ideas I have for movies just sort of pop into my head. I've read a bunch of screenwriting books over the years and, to be honest, they're mostly pretty crappy.