The Big Picture

Finestkind is a personal script that took Brian Helgeland 25 years to rework and get made, originally with Heath Ledger attached. The film follows two brothers from opposite sides of the tracks who get caught up in a dangerous situation. The movie was brought to Paramount+ thanks to the support of producer Gary Foster and their commitment to shooting on location in Massachusetts with minimal visual effects.

Editor’s Note: The following contains minor spoilers for FinestkindScreenwriter and director Brian Helgeland (Legend) returns to the Toronto International Film Festival this year with Finestkind, a crime drama on the high seas led by Ben Foster and Toby Wallace and co-starring Tommy Lee Jones and Jenna Ortega. Ahead of the film’s world premiere at TIFF, Collider’s Steve Weintraub spoke with Academy Award-winner Helgeland and producer Gary Foster (Sleepless in Seattle) about their collaboration in bringing this emotional feature to Paramount+ through hell or high water.

Finestkind is a personal script Helgeland tells Weintraub he’s been reworking “for about 25 years,” adding, “I never thought it was gonna get made.” In fact, this tale of two brothers was in the works decades ago, with the late Heath Ledger attached after working with Helgeland on A Knight’s Tale. A quarter of a century later, Wallace (Babyteeth) and Foster (3:10 to Yuma) play Charlie and Tom, brothers from opposite sides of the tracks who reluctantly work together on Tom’s fishing trawler for the summer, mining the seas for Massachusetts gold – scallops. Shirking his education for life on the water, Charlie makes a place for himself among his brother’s crew and in sleepy New Bedford with his girlfriend, Mabel (Ortega). Like his Oscar-nominated screenplay for Mystic River, Helgeland’s Finestkind is a thrilling suspense as the brothers are embroiled in a dangerous drug deal that leaves them no choice but to turn to their father, Ray (Jones), for help.

Set in his childhood hometown, Helgeland discusses the journey to getting Finestkind to TIFF, with the full support of Paramount and their Paramount creator, Taylor Sheridan. The duo talk about their Zoom call with Wednesday’s Jenna Ortega, how the price of scallops convinced Tommy Lee Jones to join the crew, and the strenuous training the cast endured, including a Coast Guard rescue. Helgeland also shares his thoughts on a Spenser Confidential sequel and Foster provides an update on that Community movie limbo. Check out all of this and more below.

COLLIDER: For both of you, you’ve been involved in a bunch of things; if someone has not seen anything you’ve done before, what is the first thing you want them to watch and why?

BRIAN HELGELAND: As a director, it would be A Knight’s Tale. I set out to do this crazy thing, and I thought I pulled it off. I had a great time shooting it, and I think that shows in the movie. I made a lot of friends, and it was like the thing you dream of as a director. Like I said, I think it all shows in the movie. Old-time horses and armor and dancing – it’s got sort of everything a movie can have. As far as writing and not directing, it would be Man on Fire. I love that movie, and I love Tony [Scott]. We both brought our A-game. He got A-game on my A-game and I got A-game on his A-game. [Laughs]

GARY FOSTER: Great movies. Man on Fire is one of my favorite movies ever. For me, I think would have to be Sleepless in Seattle for a number of reasons. It was, for me, a step up in my career to a level of film and working with a level of talent that was exhilarating and exciting, challenging in the best ways. I read it as a spec script by a writer who was living in Virginia and we built it. Having the opportunity to work with Nora [Ephron] and Tom [Hanks] and Meg [Ryan], and that entire cast and crew was incredible. And, as Brian knows, I wear my emotions on my sleeve, and that movie, while it is chock full of it, also has some fun edge to it. It just fits what I love. And, like Brian said with Tony on Man on Fire, Nora and I– It was a second movie for her, it was a big step up for her, and we both dedicated ourselves to making the best film we could. It was a great family that we formed over the year of making that film, so that’s where I’d go.

Image by Sony 

For both of you, I’m sure there’s a script or two in the desk that you’ve always looked at and been like, “God, when is this gonna get financed?” If you could get the financing for anything, what would you like to make and why?

HELGELAND: Well, I think we just did it because it was Finestkind. I’ve had different versions of it ever since film school, and I couldn’t get anything going with that. I’d rework it and change it, but it was always called Finestkind. And in its current form it’s probably existed in its current form for about 25 years, and I never thought it was gonna get made. Everything I’ve made always got made within the first couple of years after it was written. In fact, this script had Heath Ledger attached to it at one point in the early 2000s, and Gary’s been involved probably the last 20 years of it. I can’t speak for Gary, but it’s Finestkind. It finally got made, so now there’s nothing left, really. It’s time to go home.

FOSTER: I actually concur because, as Brian knows, and at times I’m sure he was ready to tell me to get the hell away, I’ve been pushing to try to get– I loved this script from the first time he gave it to me. We were both building our careers and doing things, so for various reasons it sat for a while, and I just never wanted to give up on it. Every year or so I’d give him a call and say, “Hey, Brian, Finestkind. What do you think?” And we finally got there. Honestly, I think it’s probably the most gratifying moment in my career that we got it done, and we got it done as well as I imagined, if not better. But I think I would have been very frustrated if we never made this movie. I remember on the first day of filming, we looked at each other and we said, “We’re actually doing it.” It was pretty great and just an incredible experience once we got the go-ahead.

If I can ask, Brian, way back when you showed it to Heath, that version that you showed to him to what people are gonna see, how much of the story and script changed along the way, or was it always those core central characters and that central story?

HELGELAND: Yeah, the script that Heath read is the script, basically, that we shot, with a few updates and things. Just technology-wise, there were things that I had written—the way boats navigate, and stuff—that had been superseded by technology, and a couple of scenes. I mean, hardly anyone used cell phones back then, or not hardly anyone, but it just wasn’t the thing that was in a movie, so there’s a couple of updates with cell phones and stuff like that. But essentially, the script he read is the script we shot. I gave it to him to play the Toby Wallace character, the younger brother. He read it—I don’t know how old he was, 22 at the time, maybe 23—and he started talking about the Ben Foster character, Tom. He said, “I wanna play Tom,” and I said, “You’re not old enough to play Tom,” and he said, “Wait for me then.” I’d do anything with Heath, and I was like, “Yeah, I’ll wait for you.” The bad joke is I’m still waiting. But it’s essentially the same script.

I am from New England and I appreciated the filming on location and everything that you brought to it from the New England perspective, but I do have one complaint which is you have a film taking place in New Bedford and you don’t have anyone drinking Dunkin Donuts. What’s up with that?

HELGELAND: [Laughs] Well, the donut shop they’re always going to—speaking of changes—was a Dunkin Donuts in the script.

So, in actuality, you wanted Dunkin to be in the movie, you just didn’t get it.

FOSTER: We tried.

Image via TIFF

Well, I do appreciate that you at least tried and now I feel better that you weren’t just blowing off the chain that everyone drank.

FOSTER: But by the way, the Supreme Donuts that we shot in is real in Brockton—sorry, it’s not in New Bedford—and there’s actually two of them. So it is a real donut/coffee place in New England. We at least got some of it.

I appreciate all of this. So, how did Paramount+ end up with the movie? Was it ever gonna be more of a theatrical play? How did it all come about?

FOSTER: David Glasser, who runs 101 Studios, had been chasing this script for years. Like I called Brian all the time, he kept calling me and Brian all the time, saying, “Finestkind, Finestkind.” And when we got to a point where Brian and I were ready to try to put this together, we went back to David and said, “Okay, but here’s the deal: it’s shooting in Massachusetts. We’re not going to Nova Scotia or Vancouver or Australia or New Zealand, and we’re going to shoot a minimum of three weeks in New Bedford. It’s going to cost a little bit more because New Bedford is outside of the zone, but that’s the deal.” And the third thing was Brian was determined to shoot the scenes on the water as practically as possible with very little visual effects. And David came back and he said, “Okay, I know it’s gonna cost more, but I wanna make this. I wanna make this movie the way Brian wants to make the movie.”

Obviously, he and 101 do a lot of business with Paramount+ with their shows with Taylor [Sheridan] and all that, and he went to them and said, “I wanna make this movie and you guys need to be a part of it,” and they jumped in. So, they’ve been our partners from day one as we started to move this along, and they’ve been nothing but supportive as we’ve done it. And it actually got a little bit more expensive as we learned things, as we were in prep, and there’s always debates and things, but at the end of the day—I think you would agree with this, Brian—they allowed us to make the movie that Brian wanted to make.

HELGELAND: Yeah.

FOSTER: You can’t ask for any more than that.

At this point, Taylor Sheridan just owns Paramount+.

HELGELAND: I think he is Paramount+. [Laughs]

It’s rare for a company/producer/creator to have so much juice at a place.

FOSTER: Yeah. David had read the script and always loved it, and he sent it to Taylor, obviously, because they’re partners on things, and I remember the phone call. David called, and he said, “Brian’s one of [Taylor’s] favorite writers. He thought the script was fantastic, and he said, ‘I support it from afar. Let Brian go make his movie.’” And he was a man of his word. He just let us go.

Image via 6666 Ranch

One of the things that I commend you on is the shrewd casting of Jenna Ortega because she is blowing up. Obviously, everyone knows her, everyone loves her, and she’s great in the movie, but what was it about her as to why you wanted to cast her, and how early on did you cast her? Was it before Wednesday? She’s gonna get a lot of people to watch this because they’re fans of her.

HELGELAND: When we first met Jenna, I think she had just wrapped Wednesday.

FOSTER: No, she was there when she auditioned for you. She was on Zoom.

HELGELAND: Oh yeah, she was shooting Wednesday. We met her remotely. She was shooting Wednesday in Budapest. So, obviously, it’s The Addams Family and it’s Tim Burton, but the viral dance was a glint in its father’s eye at that time, I guess is the best way to put it. She just seemed like the right person to play Mabel, but she was up-and-coming and all that. But yeah, we had no idea how it was gonna all blow up like that.

FOSTER: I remember having a conversation with the studio and saying, “Look, she’s got Scream whatever-number coming out and then Wednesday, and The Fallout,” which both of us thought was just an incredible film, and she gave a fabulous performance. One, Brian has to believe she’s right for the part, but two, from a commercial standpoint, you make a bet and you hope that those films and the series, Wednesday, were gonna take off. I think it exceeded our even modest expectations.

HELGELAND: [Laughs] Yeah. Really, the short answer is we were lucky.

Images via TIFF

For sure, but I think every single Paramount+ executive is beyond ecstatic. I’m sure she’ll be the focal point of advertising because she’s very, very popular.

HELGELAND: Yeah, they’re gonna put out a poster that says “Jenna Ortega’s Finestkind.” [Laughs]

Talk a little bit about filming in New Bedford because that, to me, adds just so much to a movie, the on-location. What was it like actually filming there and having big Hollywood stars, and how the neighborhood reacted?

HELGELAND: They were excited. She’s very well known to younger teenagers and stuff from Disney stuff, so anyone that was young was like, “Is Jenna Ortega around?” And anyone over 50 was running around going, “Where’s Tommy Lee Jones?” So we had them kind of coming and going with that. They’re not used to it [laughs], but they’re the most polite group of onlookers. It wasn’t like shooting in Boston where, you know, someone’s blowing an air horn, going, “Give me 1500 bucks if you want me to move!” And they knew that I was doing it, and so a local boy comes home and doesn’t forget where he came from. I get all that kind of stuff going for me.

But it’s a kind of sleepy town in a lot of ways, and they made it very easy to move around and shoot and get from A to B, and company moves weren’t a big deal. It was very strange for me because when we were scouting locations, we’d go look at a house, and the location manager would say, “Okay, well–” and I’d say, “No, not this one.” And he’d say, “Okay, well I’ll keep looking,” and I’d say, “No, no, go to the corner down here, take a left, and the house we need is on Durkin Street,” or whatever I’d say to him. So that was interesting. But it was surreal. There’s this big scene on a bridge at the end of the movie, and it’s a bridge I used to ride my bicycle over when I was 10 years old. It was like my sister would walk down to set from her house. Many times we were, like, four blocks from my sister’s house. It’s very odd. [Laughs] Very odd. I didn’t know what to even make of it a lot of the time.

FOSTER: The town and the government, everybody just bent over backwards to help using things and docks, and as Brian said, the bridge. I mean, that bridge is the artery that crosses between New Bedford and Fair Haven, and we took it over for a full day. It was incredible.

The other thing I wanna say, and Brian, this, to me, was one of the most emotional moments in this whole experience – we had to find a boat to use in the film, and we needed it for weeks, and we needed to control it. I mean, Brian can talk about his relationship with Yvonne and his father, but we went and had a tour of their boat, and there was this older guy. He looked at him, and he didn’t say much, but you could tell, I mean, you felt him, and when Brian was a kid working on scallop boats, this guy was his captain. The two of them—I don’t know how many years it had been since you’d seen each other, Brian—but this stoic man suddenly broke, got emotional because there was Brian. I have a great picture which I can send you the two of them, but it was really powerful.

I’m curious if you talk a little bit about Tommy Lee Jones and casting him because he works, but he doesn’t work a lot. Can you talk about approaching him for the role? Did you have to convince him or did he read the script and say, “Oh, I want to do this?”

HELGELAND: This actually is a little bit of a slight change to the script and I’ll sort of make myself a bit of a liar from your previous question, but I sent it to Tommy Lee, and he called me up and basically he said, “I read the script, liked it. Let me ask you something, what in the world is a guy from Texas doing in Massachusetts fishing?” I anticipated the question, so I had a quick answer, and I said, “You had a shrimp boat in Galveston and it sunk. You came up to New Bedford to make enough money to buy another shrimp boat and then go back down, but you met this woman, you had a child, and you never went home.” And he said, “Well, why did I come to New Bedford?” And I said, “Because the price of New England scallops is a lot higher than Gulf Coast shrimp,” and he nodded his head and thought about it for a second, and then went, “Alright, I’m in. I’m in.” But I think if I didn’t give him an answer, he wouldn’t have been. He’s always sort of testing you to see how deep you’ve thought things through.

I fished when I was a kid, and there were fishermen from all over the place that would come up to New Bedford because it’s a huge fishing port. The first time we location scouted, we got to a dock in New Bedford. I got out of the scout van, and I’m standing in front of a Dodge Challenger with Texas plates. It looks like it’s been driven through hell and back, and it’s obviously a fisherman’s car. I got my iPhone and I did a video there. I started on the Texas plate, and then I pulled back, and I did a 360 of the New Bedford fishing fleet, and I sent it right to Tommy Lee and didn’t hear back from him. Then about a month later, when I finally met him face-to-face, I said, “Did you ever get that video I sent you?” And he went, “The one with the Texas license plate?” And I’m like, “Yeah,” and he goes, “I got it.” [Laughs] End the discussion.

Image via TIFF

I’ve interviewed Tommy a few times. He is what we call very tough to interview. He is a no-bullshit guy. I’ve had successful conversations with him because I asked intelligent questions, and I’ve gotten along great with him, but I’m curious as a director, what is it like directing him?

HELGELAND: We have a relaxed set, but everyone knows what they’re doing, everyone’s done their homework, no one’s flailing around anywhere, and he gets to set, and he’ll ask you, “Where’s the scene? Which way’s the camera looking? Where do I start? Where do you want me to finish?” You just walk him through it as he arrives, get him here, “This is what we’re doing. We’re going here, there.” He’ll take it in. If we’re close on him, he wants to know his eyelines right away. He doesn’t want to sit in front of the camera and have you figure out his eyelines, he wants to know what they are. When he knows you’re prepared, he’s like a pussycat. Pussycat is not the right word, but he’s just, “Okay, let’s go. I know what I’m doing, and you guys know what you’re doing, so let’s go.”

And as far as directing him goes, I’d be lying if I said I directed Tommy Lee Jones. He’s smart enough and in tune with the script enough that he knows what that character is, and he arrives playing that character. All I have to do is say cut and thank you and let’s move on.

FOSTER: I just wanted to add, Tommy is who Tommy is, but Brian is an authentic guy, too, and Tommy knew there was no bullshit with Brian. Brian knew the world. He wrote the script, he lived there, he lived it, and you could see that these were two guys who were pretty comfortable with who they were. So I think Tommy immediately understood that Brian wasn’t just inventing this stuff. It was stuff that he had lived. I’ll just say, after the movie finished, he sent Brian—and I’d worked with Tommy before, and I’d never seen this before—he sent Brian a really genuine note thanking him for the opportunity of playing a role in that movie, and I gotta hope and feel that the experience was really good for him.

I love talking about the editing process because it’s where it all comes together. For both of you, how did the film change in ways you didn’t expect after the first friends and family screenings or test screenings?

HELGELAND: There’s kind of an alchemy, really, to editing because you don’t really know everything. When you write the script, you know enough to shoot it. As you go, there’s that old saying that a film gets written three times – when you write it, when you shoot it, and when you edit it. But what I really find is that when you shoot, you build collateral that you don’t even know about. Certain shots hold, and you’re with the character, and certain things happen, and there’s a collateral that you build up, that, when you look at the rough cut of it, you realize, “We don’t need this scene anymore because we already understand this about Ben Foster,” in the collateral we built. Until we got to this point, we know the two brothers have interacted in a certain way that by the time we get to Brother Scene Six, we need it anymore because we feel it. Those are my favorite things when scenes just drop out and you don’t need them anymore.

Ratcheting everything down, trying to start later in the scene, trying to get out of scenes earlier if they’re done…I think that you lose a few scenes and you tighten a bunch of scenes and all of a sudden, 40 minutes have dropped out of the film. Once in a while, you realize there’s something you don’t need to focus on and you don’t really need, it’s not helping you, but it’s all just a feel. You sit there and watch it over and over and over again, so you kind of become numb to certain things. You become numb to your favorites or your least favorites. I find it hard to articulate. It’s an experience in a way.

That’s the reason I wanted to ask you about friends and family screenings because I’ve spoken to a thousand directors and they tell me that they’ll sometimes cut out something that they know is very funny because they’re no longer laughing or they’ll cut out a scene because they’ve just watched it too much and that’s why showing it to new people all the time will remind you, “Yeah, this scene works, don’t mess with it.”

HELGELAND: Yeah, I think that can be really helpful, certainly with stuff that you wonder if it’s funny or not because if no one laughs, you can talk about how funny it is all day long, but it’s not funny. I had an opening in the film that was very almost surreal in a way where everything’s already happened already – the boat sinks at the beginning of the movie, and they’re already in the life raft, and it was a way to try to propel you deep in and start that way. When people saw it, they always were a little confused as to what are these guys doing here? How did they get here? You piece it together but never in a satisfying way.

The very last thing we did was we added a couple of shots of that boat, which we didn’t have, so we had to take our boat that we had and kind of repaint it and rig it to make it that boat so that you’d see the boat that they had gone out on at the beginning of the movie. That was thing we learned from people watching it is that they were a little bit unmoored in a way at the beginning, that just a couple of shots of a boat fixed.

FOSTER: That’s what I was gonna say, that we found that people were 20/15 minutes into the movie still trying to figure out, “Did that boat explode, and is something that I need to think about?” You gotta fix that confusion, which Brian did beautifully. I think that was the biggest thing we learned from those screenings.

Those whale shots that are in the film, did you get those just because you were out on the water and all of a sudden there are whales?

HELGELAND: Yeah! So, we’re headed out to where we’re gonna shoot and where we’re gonna pull the dredges along the bottom, so we have to get there. So we’re just shooting odds and ends that don’t involve the boat working as we’re headed out, and as an ad-lib, I said to Toby and Aaron Stanford, “Get up on the bow and pretend that you see whales and talk about the whales that you’re seeing out there.” We’re shooting it. It was in case we saw whales, which we hadn’t. We changed their eyeline – first, they’re pointing here, then they’re pointing there, then they’re looking over here. We had nothing else to do so we just shot all this stuff, and it was almost kind of silly. Then a day later, we were about 10 miles out to sea, and we have a camera boat that’s following us with the crane on it, and the drone operator is on that boat, and we got camera guys with us on our boat, too, but the heavy-duty cameras are on that boat. They radio us and say, “There are whales!” We can’t even see them, and I said, “Get the drone up and shoot them!” They send the drone up and shoot the whales, and they were Humpback whales, which are the whales that they talk about in the movie in a later scene. We got the footage, and then I gave it all to the editor and hope it works, and the stuff we shot in case we see whales, of them talking about the whales, the shots of the whales ended up kind of cutting seamlessly in. But if we had written it in and had to have it, we wouldn’t have got it.

I love seeing whales. Not to switch the subject, but it’s a tragedy to me that people would still even hunt these creatures that are so majestic, that are the kings of the ocean.

FOSTER: I will tell you that—because Brian couldn’t do it—I heard about the whales at that moment, and we weren’t close enough, so I had the guys bring a speed boat over. We were not supposed to do boat transfers, but I said, “I wanna go see those whales!” [Laughs] They took me in the speed boat, and I went out. It was amazing.

HELGELAND: I turn around, and I see Gary going over the side, and I’m like, “What’s going on?” And then the next thing you know, a boat is speeding away, and I’m like, “Oh, he’s going to look at the whales!” [Laughs]

For both of you, what do you think would surprise soon-to-be fans of the movie about the making of the movie?

HELGELAND: I think how few effects there are in the movie will be surprising, especially in the fishing, and how the actors are actually doing all the work. The seas, we never faked the seas. We’re shooting that boat in some pretty rough water, and we got all that stuff for real in camera. Put it this way, there’s not a frame of CGI water in the entire movie, and I think that’s gonna be the most surprising thing in this age of, “Oh, that’s an effect shot.” There’s some shots of the fishing boat in this movie that you’re like, “Oh, I wonder how much that shot cost,” because it absolutely looks like it has to be visual effects, and in fact, it’s all in camera, all for real.

Yeah, that’s one of the reasons why I bought into it. Just like you guys, I’ve seen countless films that do too much green screen, and I’m just ready to be like, “When does this movie end?” It looks so fake, and movies that shoot practically, that are in camera, it’s just night and day better.

HELGELAND: When I got out of college, I did that job, I was a commercial fisherman for a year and a half. One of my really good friends fishing was this 19-year-old kid…his name is Ivan, and he since has become captain of the boat that is the Finestkind in the movie. It’s called the Sandra Jane, and before we started shooting, he took all the actors on a real fishing trip. They all went out to sea for 10 days, and he taught them basically as much as you could teach a guy how to be a fisherman in 10 days. So a lot of the work that they’re doing in the movie, they really did on this fishing trip. They got their sea legs, and they got to feel comfortable around the gear and everything. It was, if you will, like a boot camp, a fishing boot camp. Scotty Tovar and Aaron and Toby and Ben had gone on a previous trip, so their actual mechanics of moving around and handling the gear and doing everything and feeling comfortable around everything was real, too, because they had learned how to do it.

I couldn’t have done it, the waves would have broken me.

HELGELAND: [Laughs] Yeah, it broke them a little bit when they went out. Yeah, many stories about vomiting and things like that.

FOSTER: Since you’ve seen the movie, the Coast Guard rescue, that was the real Coast Guard unit from Cape Cod who trained the guys and did the rescue as if they did a real rescue. It was incredible watching that helicopter and those guys jumping out of the helicopter into the ocean with the cage. It was amazing.

HELGELAND: When Toby in the movie is coming up in the cage on the side, and when we’re looking down on him and he’s screaming, that’s really Toby being hoisted into the helicopter. He went to their swimming pool at the base on the cape and learned how to do all that stuff and got certified so we could shoot him for real doing that.

Image via Paramount+

Again, this is just another reason. That as green screen would have been, “Get the F out of here.” It’s also because the lighting never works, like it never matches the lighting, and that’s just the giveaway on every shot like that. Did you end up with a lot of deleted scenes? Do you have an hour of footage on the cutting room floor?

HELGELAND: Yeah, I think the assembly, as we call it, was about 2:45, and the final version, I think, not counting the credits, is about 2:05. So about 40 minutes. Honestly, most of that is we have much longer scenes of the scenes that are in the movie. But I didn’t really cut. We probably cut three or four scenes out of the film, and then everything else is just ratcheted down right to its essence in a way. Put it this way, there’s no director’s cut I’m wanting to put out.

100%. I think the last film you made, Brian, was Legend in 2015. Was there gonna be another film that you were thinking about directing after that before Finestkind, or was this always the thing that you were gearing towards?

HELGELAND: No, I had a thing at Netflix for quite a long time called Button Man, based on a graphic novel, kind of a cult graphic novel. I worked on that for about three years, and it just never would go, so it was ultimately kind of a big waste of time. But yeah, I worked on that for a long time in between the two. It was mostly trying to get Finestkind going, especially the last couple of years before it went, and then it was Button Man at Netflix.

Then we also had a thing that one of my sons wrote, Tapping the Source, based on the Kem Nunn noir surfing novel, that I had at Universal that a bunch of people have tried to make and no one’s ever been able to make it. Put it this way, Sean Penn was attached right after he did Fast Times at Ridgemont High, by whoever was trying to do it back then. So, yeah, those two things, but I couldn’t get them off the ground.

I believe wrote Spenser Confidential, which was a huge hit for Netflix. Do you think that movie ever gets a sequel, or is that just a one-and-done?

HELGELAND: I hope so. I had a lot of fun working on that, especially just kind of writing gags and comedy and stuff like that. I really enjoyed working with Peter Berg. He’s so full-on dedicated to what he’s doing, it’s fun to be around a guy like that. But they’ve talked about it. I wrote a sequel to it, but so far, nothing. They haven’t done anything yet.

Gary, I have a question for you. The ever-in-development Community movie, do you think that film actually gets made because it sounds like it came close, or it’s actually something that could happen? What do you think?

FOSTER: It was going to go into production this summer, but the strikes put an end to that. The cast and Dan [Harmon] are committed to do it with Peacock who really wants it. So, you know, once these strikes get resolved we can work on everybody’s schedule, the hope is that it will be shot in 2024. But there’s no hesitation from any of the cast or Dan or Chris [McKenna], any of those guys, to do it. So, six seasons and a movie – we gotta deliver on the movie, and I think we will. The strike is really gonna screw up with people’s schedules, but we’ll figure it out. They all want to do it, so we’ll find a way.

Image via NBC Universal

I want you to do it as well. Because it’s been a while since it’s been on the air, and there’ll be some people out there who haven’t seen the show, will you be able to watch the movie without having seen the show or is it something you guys have thought about, or is it sort of like, “We’re just gonna expect people have seen the show?”

FOSTER: That’s really a question for Dan to answer, but what I will say is this, Netflix, about three years ago, did a three-year license of Community just about when COVID hit and millions of people who never saw the show on NBC, or the great Yahoo! Screen, saw it. We were getting all this information about a whole new generation of younger people, even older people, because they were stuck at their homes, like, “Oh, we should watch that show Community. We never did,” and that was a huge boost to the title.

This is Dan’s baby, so you should ask him that question. I don’t wanna guess on what he’s thinking. There’s been some conversations, but really he’s the guy who’s gonna make those decisions. And Joel [McHale] and that whole group, they have a plan. We know we have a broad sense of it, but I defer to him.

Finestkind is world premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival tonight.