Brian Helgeland
(Director/Screenwriter)

New England native Brian Helgeland left his job as a commercial fisherman to pursue a screenwriting career in Los Angeles. He collaborated on two horror scripts, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, starring Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger, and Englund's 976-Evil (both 1988). Helgeland got his first solo screenwriting credit for Highway to Hell (1992). Soon after he began an association with director Richard Donner, co-writing the action thriller Assassins (1995) before working with Mel Gibson for the first time on Conspiracy Theory (1997). He adapted and co-produced James Ellroy's noir crime saga L.A. Confidential, which garnered many awards, among them, an Oscar® for Best Adapted Screenplay. He continued his association with both Donner and Mel Gibson on Lethal Weapon 4 and finally moved to directing with Payback (1999), which he also co-wrote.

Helgeland masterfully conducts Payback's pastiche of Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler. The basis for the story was the marvelous tome, The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake, which was filmed once before as Point Blank (1967), with Lee Marvin in the leading role. Both films reflect the moral values and cultural identities of their eras. What Helgeland does with Payback is create a hip, jovial and frighteningly violent portrait of American society collapsing onto itself in a vile heap of easy money. At this level, the film works as a lurid magnifying glass. These characters care less about each other than what they have. Possession is everything. Walker's health and well being are never as important as his money. Helgeland peppers the film with many film noir touches, and Payback also has a deliberately dated '70's look (almost all of the telephones are rotary). Helgeland also adds a touch of dark humor to the proceedings. He wastes few moments, and his crisp, stylish direction provides a good cinematic equivalent to Westlake's terse prose. In spite of this, Gibson, himself a director, decided to re-shoot some of the later scenes in an effort to change Helgeland's more audience-friendly version of the film into a more hard-edged interpretation. Since Payback, Helgeland has worked on developing the script of Blood Work (2002) for Clint Eastwood and continued as director-writer with A Knight's Tale (2001), which he also produced, and The Sin Eater (2002).