Career
After managing an animal show at Nashville’s Opryland, Wallace moved to Hollywood to pursue a career in singing and songwriting. He began writing short stories, novels and scripts for movies. Wallace was taken under the wing of leading television producer Stephen J. Cannell and spent several years writing for television in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
He gained recognition and commercial success by penning the screenplay for Braveheart (1995), which was inspired by a trip to Scotland to learn more about his Scottish roots. While there, he discovered the legend of the medieval Scottish patriot William Wallace. Braveheart became Wallace’s first screenplay to be produced after it drew the interest of director and star, Mel Gibson. It ended up as one of the most successful films of 1995, earning the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director as well as garnering other Oscar, Golden Globe, and Writers Guild Award for Best Screenplay nominations.
Wallace made his directorial debut with his own screenplay in The Man in the Iron Mask, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, John Malkovich, Gabriel Byrne, Jeremy Irons and Gérard Depardieu. Shortly after, he wrote the screenplay for Pearl Harbor (2001), directed by Michael Bay and starring Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett and Kate Beckinsale.
This was followed by Wallace’s second film as director We Were Soldiers. Moved by its starkly honest account of a singular battle in the Vietnam War, Mel Gibson re-teamed with Wallace to star in the film. Wallace trained with career soldiers at U.S. Army Ranger School in order to understand the motivation of his characters.
In 2010, Wallace directed Disney’s Secretariat, the true story of the racehorse that won the Triple Crown in 1973. The film chronicled the struggles and courage of owner Penny Chenery-Tweedy, portrayed by Academy Award-nominated actress Diane Lane. Wallace also wrote the end title song, It’s Who You Are, which was released with the Secretariat soundtrack.
Wallace has been developing a movie about the Vikings with Mel Gibson.
Read more about this topic: Randall Wallace
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“I’ve been in the twilight of my career longer than most people have had their career.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)