Before reading L.A. Confidential, director Curtis Hanson read over a half a dozen of James Ellroy’s novels. Quite frequently, he said that he was drawn to the book's characters, but not their plot. When he finally read L.A. Confidential, Hanson initially didn’t like the novel because he didn’t like the characters. As he continued to read, however, he started to like and connect with the characters. Wanting to make a film set in the “golden era” of Los Angeles, Hanson decided that L.A Confidential would be his next film.
Hanson later met up with co-writer Brian Helgeland, who loved Ellroy’s body of work and thought that the two would be best-suited to craft the film together. Because of their passion for the project, Helgeland worked on seven drafts for free and Hanson turned down countless jobs while they wrote the script over the course of two years.
And the result was, to say the least, breathtaking. Not only did the film receive - and win - countless Academy Awards, it received a very positive endorsement from Ellroy, who was skeptical that his book could be translated to film."They preserved the basic integrity of the book and its main theme,” Ellroy said, “Brian and Curtis took a work of fiction that had eight plotlines, reduced those to three, and retained the dramatic force of three men working out their destiny."
