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00:00 I'm Brian Helgeland. I'm the writer and director of Finest Kind, which tells the story of a

00:11 group of fishermen and their relationships with each other and two of their relationships

00:16 with their fathers. And it's a very personal film as I grew up in that world. And my father

00:24 was a fisherman. I fished when I got out of college and took a long time to tell the story,

00:31 but finally told it. First of all, it's deep sea fishing. So the guys are on the boat together

00:36 for a week at a time. They leave, leave sight of land, end up a hundred miles offshore.

00:43 And you're with that group of guys for seven to 10 days straight at a time, leaving your

00:48 family behind, not in communications. It's not like you can get on your cell phone and

00:53 talk to your family back home or your kids. So it's a very old fashioned in that we go

01:00 off to work and it's like being in a coal mine in a way and in tight quarters. So you

01:05 better all get along because if you get on each other's nerves, there's going to be trouble.

01:09 And there's a lot of, sometimes it's feast or famine because you make as much money as

01:15 you catch. So if you have a, if the engine breaks down, you incur all those costs, but

01:21 you haven't made any money and that can put on financial pressure. You're at the mercy

01:25 of the price of fish. And you live a life with your family ashore where you're only

01:30 there less than half the time really. So you have to find a way to make that work. And

01:36 it's a, so it's a very peculiar lifestyle in a way and it, and it creates, and you're

01:42 at the mercy of weather. You can be in a storm that you can't get back to port in time and

01:47 you have to ride it out. So it has that element of danger to it as well and creates therefore

01:55 a very tight knit community around it. I've always had a version of Finest Kind. I wrote

02:01 the very first draft 30 years ago and never could get it off the ground. And then I'd

02:08 change a few things. I'd adjust a few things. But the core of the story has always existed

02:17 as a script for 30 years. To put it in context, the first person I gave it to, the first actor

02:25 I gave it to to read was Heath Ledger. We had done Knight's Tale together. I wanted

02:29 him to play the Toby Wallace part and Heath was what, 22 years old at the time and he

02:33 read the script and said, "Yeah, I'm in." But he wanted to play Ben's, the part Ben

02:38 Foster plays. And I said, "You're too young to play the older brother." And in his mischievous

02:44 way he said, "Well, wait for me then." And I agreed. And obviously Heath passed and that

02:54 was the first attempt at making it. I was talking to different actresses about the part

02:59 and it was always like a thing like we can't get the schedules lined up to talk about this.

03:06 And I said, "Well, what's she shooting?" And someone said, "A show called Wednesday."

03:09 And I didn't put it together with Wednesday. So I'm like, "Okay, she's doing some show

03:13 called Wednesday." None of it, it's all like funny now but it was just the name of

03:19 the week. The sequel I guess is going to be Thursday. I don't know. So I had no idea

03:25 what she was about to become. Certainly she was popular from the stuff she had done previously.

03:33 But she is a total professional. She's a child actress originally. And my experience

03:44 is when you have a child, like Emily Browning was a child actress. And she's dead professional

03:50 and no fooling around and nails it. And Jenna's the same way. And I think a lot of work goes

03:56 into that that you don't see. She does a lot of prep and thinking about it on her own so

04:01 that she arrives being able to do that. And it's funny you say that because I would always

04:07 refer when she was up, I'd say, "Get the Navy SEAL in here. We need our Navy SEAL."

04:15 That's how I referred to her because she would just arrive, boom, two takes and we were done.

04:20 It has crime elements in it in a sense that they allow you to push the drama ahead much

04:27 quicker because those circumstances become so crucial and people have to sink or it puts

04:34 everyone in a crucible and you have to make these kind of life or death decisions. But

04:40 it takes a long time to get there. The first hour of it is just getting involved with these

04:47 characters and wanting to be with them and liking them. And then things go wrong rather

04:52 than things go wrong from the start and we really don't know who we're watching under

04:57 pressure. James Ellroy and I worked out an elaborate pitch for LA Confidential 2 that

05:05 takes place during the Patty Hearst when the Simeonese Liberation Army came down to LA

05:10 and we had Guy Pierce attached and we had Russell attached and I had Chad Bozeman playing

05:15 a young cop who's working for Mayor Bradley who just had been elected at the time. And

05:20 we pitched it everywhere and it was like, "No, no, no." Warner Brothers passed. We had

05:25 to go to Warner Brothers first and Warner Brothers is like, "We don't make movies like

05:29 this." Manny, he's my best friend and I'm going to miss him a lot. I showed him this

05:37 movie a few months before he passed and I was very happy to be able to show it to him.

05:44 We updated it about 10 years after we sold it and we did a new version of it and tried

05:50 to get that going and we couldn't. But I think that film could still be made. There's nothing

05:54 about it that is dated. It is a big 90s action movie with a lot of heart and stuff so you'd

06:02 have to get a little bit of a throwback. I have a thing at Sony which is a remake of

06:08 The Professionals, the old Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin movie which I think could be great.

06:15 That's a western and this is a modern day story but it's all on hold, you know, so obviously.

06:23 But I'd like to do that.

06:24 [Music]

06:28 [BLANK_AUDIO]

Finestkind | Deadline Studio at TIFF

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