Written Interview: Brian Helgeland
A WGA interview with screenwriter-director Brian Helgeland about his newest movie 42:
Raised in Rhode Island, Helgeland briefly followed in father’s footsteps after high school by working as a scallop fisherman but a storm at sea forced him to rethink his career goals. He majored in literature at the University of Massachusetts then drove across the country to try to break into Hollywood. He succeeded by writing horror features like Nightmare on Elm Street 4 and 976-EVIL. Then in 1997, he won an Oscar for L.A. Confidential, which set him on a path of lengthy credits that include A Knight’s Tale, Mystic River and Green Zone.
He spoke with the Writers Guild of America, West Web site about his rigorous, outline-obsessed writing style, how baseball is a great metaphor for the United States, and why, as much as people talk about networking in this town, he never got a job through anything but his writing.
Was this script a challenge in the sense that the story of Jackie Robinson is so iconic and well-known, or was that kind of an advantage because you were able to play against that and tell a lesser-known version of his story?
Yeah, everyone has this image of him as a very brave man who integrated baseball and went through a lot of adversity, and rightly so, but what I concentrated on was his relationship with his wife and with the other players and with Branch Rickey, so you see a lot of the interpersonal stuff going on. It was a way to get to a drama that people might be a little less familiar with.
So you were able to get at the major, known drama by seeing it from a lesser-known vantage point?
Yeah, because what people know about him [are] all these sweeping ideas, but baseball is still a game that’s played out over six months. Every single day just about, there’s a game, there’s a grind to it… There’s stuff going on in his life as well, or just the clubhouse stuff — being able to get inside the Dodger clubhouse and see how his story is affecting them.
A big choice early on was to try to dramatize all that stuff through the clubhouse and through his relationship with other players on his team and other players that they played against, and show the change in that world as a way to illustrate his impact on the greater world.
For the rest of the interview, go here.
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