Paramount+ 'Finestkind': The movie 'L.A. Confidential' Oscar winner Brian Helgeland always wanted to make
Helgeland wrote the first version of the script 30 years ago
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L.A. Confidential co-writer, and A Knight's Tale and 42 writer-director, Brian Helgeland, gave us a piece of his hometown with the Paramount+ movie Finestkind, starring Jenna Ortega, Tommy Lee Jones, Toby Wallace and Ben Foster.
"Many directors say there was a movie they always wanted to direct and they just never could figure out a way to pull it off, and that was always mine," Helgeland told Yahoo Canada during the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in September. "So now, unfortunately, I managed to pull it off, so now I'm left with no movie I always wanted to direct."
Where to watch Finestkind: Paramount+
Director: Brian Helgeland
Cast: Jenna Ortega, Tommy Lee Jones, Toby Wallace, Ben Foster, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Clayne Crawford, Tim Daly
Runtime: 126 minutes
Finestkind is set in a fishing community in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Charlie (Wallace) has the opportunity to go to law school in the fall, which his father (played by Tim Daly) expects. While he's not particularly enthusiastic about the idea, Charlie wants to spend the summer with his older half-brother Tom (Foster) on his fishing boat.
The first journey is more disastrous than expected, with Charlie quickly being in a position to bond with the crew. The story takes a turn when they head into Canadian waters, resulting in some trouble with the Coast Guard. They then get caught up in a drug smuggling deal to pay off their fine, with Tom’s father, Ray (Jones), getting involved.
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New Bedford is Helgeland's hometown, where he lived until he was 23, and Helgeland's father was a commercial fisherman, with other family members involved in the local fishing industry.
"That was a world I grew up in," Helgeland said. "I fished when I got out of college for almost two years, and so I always wanted to tell a story about fishing and I've always had a version of that script."
"The very first version I wrote of it, it was probably close to 30 years ago, and it would change a little bit, ... mostly it was a story about a kid and his dad, and then it slowly evolved. Then it became about brothers and dads, but I just never could get any traction to get it made. So it kind of sat around and I'd revive it here and there, when I was between movies."
'You can't make people like each other and get along'
A core aspect of Finestkind is the bond we see develop between this fishing crew and as Helgeland stressed, "camaraderie is hard to capture on film if it doesn't exist."
"I mean, you can fake it and everything, actors can not like each other all that much and you still buy what's going on, but art needs to imitate life in a lot of ways with that," he said.
Helgeland connected the concept to when he was working on A Knight's Tale, which stars the late Heath Ledger.
"People always said they loved how much the characters loved each other, and it was because the cast loved each other and you just saw it on film," Helgeland said. "You could just feel it."
"In this case, it was the same way. ... You can try to create an atmosphere that is conducive to that, but you can't make people like each other and get along. They just all clicked."
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But part of what helped foster the camaraderie was that Helgeland got the cast out on a fishing boat, with a captain that Helgeland himself fished with as a kid.
"He took the entire cast out, ... fishing out to sea, 100 miles offshore for a week, and they didn't watch, they actually fished," Helgeland said. "So when we were shooting, they didn't have to learn how to do any of that, they had actually done it and now they were pretending to do it, which is kind of interesting."
"But they bonded so much on that experience. They were all seasick and they were all scared, really. It's like, when you hear about a war movie being made and they send them off to boot camp and have people shout at them. Except this was kind of real boot camp because they were really out there fishing and you're all on location, and you're in this town that the movie happens in."
'Nothing happens in the first hour, but a lot happens in the first hour'
With a drama, especially, building tension is an essential aspect of the storytelling. Helgeland described it as a "tricky" process, but it does involve how the audience feels about the characters.
"I've learned that over the years, from different films, you have to get the audience to like these guys, and Jenna as well," Helgeland said. "To do that in a big ensemble, you need time."
"The joke I always used to make was, nothing happens in the first hour, but a lot happens in the first hour because you see them, you get to know them. ... So the approach was really to try to spend the first half of the movie just entering that world with them and becoming part of that gang of people, and then tick all the dramatic elements that have been introduced. And you kickstart them all by bringing in the crime element, because that forces everything and drives the drama forward in a way that a street drama can't do without more time, without making a three hour movie."
Helgeland explained that he did something similar with the script for Man on Fire, starring Denzel Washington and Dakota Fanning.
"Nothing happens in the first hour except they kind of fall in love with each other, and so when everything goes wrong, you really care, ... because you care about them," Helgeland said.
"So you're taking the time to enter this world, understand the world, understand relationships, understand the problems they have with their families, or the dads, or whatever it is, and that was the approach to it."
