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:
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)
“I began my editorial career with the presidency of Mr. Adams, and my principal object was to render his administration all the assistance in my power. I flattered myself with the hope of accompanying him through [his] voyage, and of partaking in a trifling degree, of the glory of the enterprise; but he suddenly tacked about, and I could follow him no longer. I therefore waited for the first opportunity to haul down my sails.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)