Inspiration For The Work / Live-Action Films

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• Will Smith conceived the story for After Earth when he was watching I Shouldn't Be Alive with his brother-in-law Caleeb Pinkett.
• The idea for Aguirre, the Wrath of God began when Werner Herzog borrowed a book on historical adventurers from a friend. After reading a half-page devoted to Lope de Aguirre, the filmmaker became inspired and immediately devised the story. He fabricated most of the plot details and characters, although he did use some historical figures in purely fictitious ways.
• According to Shirley MacLaine in her autobiography My Lucky Stars, the idea for All That Jazz was hatched when Bob Fosse was hospitalized for a heart attack. MacLaine claims she was the one who gave him the idea to do "a musical about his death", though she said Fosse seemed to not remember this later. However, Fosse did offer her the role of Audrey Paris, she wrote.
• According to his Oscar speech, screenwriter Alan Ball was sitting at the World Trade Center plaza when he saw a paper bag floating in the wind and was inspired by it to write American Beauty, which was originally conceived as a stage play.
• Paul Schrader first conceptualized American Gigolo whilst teaching screenwriting at the Film & Television School of UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles). During a class exercise, Schrader conceived of the idea of a male character working as a gigolo and that such a character could be called an American gigolo. Moreover, Schrader characterized his American gigolo character as an affection giver rather than one interested in just self-gratification. The title of the film ended up being "American Gigolo".
• The initial concept for The Apartment came from Brief Encounter, in which Laura Jesson has an affair with Dr. Alec Harvey in his friend's apartment. However, due to the Hays Production Code, Billy Wilder was unable to make a film about adultery in the 1940s. Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond also based the film partially on a Hollywood scandal in which high-powered agent Jennings Lang was shot by producer Walter Wanger for having an affair with Wanger's wife, actress Joan Bennett. During the affair, Lang used a low-level employee's apartment. Another element of the plot was based on the experience of one of Diamond's friends, who returned home after breaking up with his girlfriend to find that she had committed suicide in his bed.
• John Milius was inspired to write Apocalypse Now because of his college English professor, Irwin Blacker of USC. Blacker challenged his class by saying, "No screenwriter has ever perfected a film adaption of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness".
  • Milius was influenced by an article written by Michael Herr titled, "The Battle for Khe Sanh", which referred to drugs, rock 'n' roll, and people calling airstrikes down on themselves.
• Mike Myers got the idea for Austin Powers while driving home from ice hockey practice. Hearing "The Look of Love" by Burt Bacharach on his car radio, he wondered "Where have all the swingers gone?" and conceived the character who would become Austin Powers.
• Edgar Wright's repeated listening to Orange by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion provided the impetus for Baby Driver.
• The origins of Bachelor Party came from an actual bachelor party thrown by producer Ron Moler and a group of friends for fellow producer Bob Israel. In fact, several members of the cast and crew involved with the production of the movie were at that party when the idea began to take shape.
• Bob Gale conceived Back to the Future after he visited his parents in St. Louis, Missouri. Searching their basement, Gale found his father's high school yearbook and discovered he was president of his graduating class. Gale had not known the president of his own graduating class, and wondered whether he would have been friends with his father if they went to high school together.
• Baseketball was based on a real-life game that David Zucker created with his friends, literally played in the driveway of his home. Many of the reappearing teammates are friends of Zucker and actual original players of the Zucker-driveway game, asked by the director to be in the movie to pay homage to origins of BASEketball.
• Screenwriter Craig Boloting got the idea for Black Rain while visiting a friend in Japan. While standing on a street corner, he saw big American cars pass by. His friend told him that they belonged to the Yakuza.
• While film students at the University of Central Florida, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez were inspired to make The Blair Witch Project after realizing that they found documentaries on paranormal phenomena scarier than traditional horror films. The two decided to create a film that combined the styles of both.
• Brian De Palma got the idea for Blow Out while working doing the sound mix on Dressed to Kill.
• Brian De Palma came up with the basic idea for the story of Body Double after working with a body double for Angie Dickinson's infamous Shower Scene in Dressed to Kill.
• The idea for Breakin came from Menahem Golan's daughter who one day while at the beach saw a group of break dancers performing before a crowd in Venice Beach.
• Troy Duffy was inspired to write The Boondock Saints by his disgust at seeing a drug dealer taking money from a corpse across the hall from his apartment.
• Judd Apatow came up for the idea of The Bubble (2022) after hearing his wife talk about the troubles of filming Jurassic World Dominion during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
• Joss Whedon got the idea for Buffy the Vampire Slayer "from seeing too many blondes walking into alleyways and being killed. I wanted, just once, for her to fight back when the monster attacked, and kick his ass. It was a simple thing for me to write because I knew exactly how I wanted things to work. I have special powers and I thought it would be great to have vampires as the villains. She wouldn't be able to fit into normal society because she had these powers and this job that kept her from being what she wanted to be."
• Eli Roth originally got the idea for Cabin Fever while working in Iceland on a horse farm. He got such a bad skin infection from the rotting hay in the barn that his face broke out in sores, bled and peeled off when he shaved.
• First time screenwriter Lou Holtz, Jr. had the idea for The Cable Guy while working as a prosecutor in Los Angeles, declaring that he once saw a cable company employee in the hallway of his mother's apartment building and started thinking, "What's he doing here so late?"
• Tom Hanks said he first got the idea for Cast Away after reading an article about FedEx. "I realized that 747s filled with packages fly across the Pacific three times a day. What happens if one of those goes down?," he said. He took that idea and combined it with his interest in how to survive without the five required elements for living - food, water, shelter, fire, and companionship.
• According to Robert Towne, Carey McWilliams' Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946) and a West magazine article called "Raymond Chandler's L.A." inspired his original screenplay for Chinatown. In a letter to McWilliams, Towne wrote that Southern California Country "really changed my life. It taught me to look at the place where I was born, and convinced me to write about it."
• Collateral: Australian Screenwriter Stuart Beattie was only seventeen when he took a cab home from the Sydney airport. It was on that ride that he had the idea of a homicidal maniac sitting in the back of a cab, with the driver nonchalantly entering into conversation with him, trusting his passenger implicitly. Beattie drafted his idea into a two-page treatment. Later, when he was enrolled at Oregon State University, he fleshed it out into his first screenplay. Titled The Last Domino, he put the script away, taking it out occasionally for revisions and re-writes over the following years.
• Charlie Chaplin loosely based A Countess from Hong Kong on a woman met in France, named Moussia Sodskaya, or "Skaya", as he calls her in his 1922 book My Trip Abroad. She was a Russian singer and dancer who "was a stateless person marooned in France without a passport". The idea, according to a press release written by Chaplin after the film received a negative reception, "resulted from a visit I made to Shanghai in 1931 where I came across a number of titled aristocrats who had escaped the Russian Revolution. They were destitute and without a country; their status was of the lowest grade. The men ran rickshaws and the women worked in ten-cent dance halls. When the Second World War broke out many of the old aristocrats had died and the younger generation migrated to Hong Kong where their plight was even worse, for Hong Kong was overcrowded with refugees".
• The idea for "Crocodile" Dundee came about when Paul Hogan visited New York City and felt like an outsider and that people had thought he was Scottish and it inspired him to write the movie.
• In 1981, John Fusco's girlfriend, who was working at a rest home, told him that an old black man with a harmonica had been admitted. Fusco went to visit him and on the way dreamt up a story about what would happen if the player was a legendary blues player. This gave him the idea for Crossroads.
• John Schlesinger claimed that the original idea for Darling came from a chance remark made to him by newspaper columnist and television personality Godfrey Winn, when the latter was playing a brief acting role As Himself in Billy Liar. The character of Diana Scott was based on a real person whom Winn had known.
• The idea for Dawn of the Dead (1978) began in 1974, when George A. Romero was invited by friend Mark Mason of Oxford Development Company—whom Romero knew from an acquaintance at his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon—to visit the Monroeville Mall, which Mason's company managed. After showing Romero hidden parts of the mall, during which Romero noted the bliss of the consumers, Mason jokingly suggested that someone would be able to survive in the mall should an emergency ever occur. With this inspiration, Romero began to write the screenplay for the film.
• Days of Thunder was conceived by Tom Cruise when he and Paul Newman were allowed to test one of Rick Hendrick's race cars. Tom's first lap was in excess of one hundred eighty miles per hour.
• Doomsday: Neil Marshall lived near the ruins of Hadrian's Wall and fantasised about what conditions would cause the Wall to be rebuilt and imagined a lethal virus would work. Marshall had also visualised a mixture of medieval and futuristic elements: "I had this vision of these futuristic soldiers with high-tech weaponry and body armour and helmets—clearly from the future—facing a medieval knight on horseback." The director favoured the English/Scottish border as the location for a rebuilt wall, finding the location more plausible than a lengthy boundary between the United States and Canada. Additionally, Scotland is the home to multiple castles, which fit Marshall's medieval aspect.
• Spike Lee first got the idea for Do the Right Thing after watching the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode "Shopping for Death," in which the main characters discuss their theory that hot weather increases violent tendencies. He was also inspired by the 1986 Howard Beach racial incident, in which an African-American teenager was killed; and also the shooting of Eleanor Bumpurs by police.
• As a young man, Brian De Palma, at his mother's urging, actually followed his father and used recording equipment to try and catch him with another woman. That incident inspired Dressed to Kill.
• Peter Fonda got the idea for Easy Rider after seeing a picture of he and Bruce Dern on their motorcycles in The Wild Angels. He got Dennis Hopper (who was planning to get out of the acting business and become a teacher at the time) involved when he promised him he could direct the film.
• John Carpenter originally wrote the screenplay for Escape from New York in 1976, in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. Carpenter said, "The whole feeling of the nation was one of real cynicism about the President. I wrote the screenplay and no studio wanted to make it because it was too dark, too violent, too scary, and too weird." He had been inspired by Death Wish (1974), which was very popular at the time. He did not agree with the film's philosophy but liked how it conveyed "the sense of New York as a kind of jungle, and I wanted to make a science fiction film along these lines".
• Face/Off co-screenwriter Mike Werb got the idea for the face surgery from a friend who had a hang-gliding accident. They had to remove most of the skin from his face, reconstruct the bone matter, and put his face back on.
• Rob Cohen was inspired to make The Fast and the Furious (2001) after reading a 1998 Vibe magazine article called "Racer X" about street racing in New York City and watching an actual illegal street race at night in Los Angeles.
• Peter A. Dowling had the idea for Flightplan (2005) in 1999 on a phone conversation with a friend. His original pitch for producer Brian Grazer involved a man who worked on airport security doing a business trip from the United States to Hong Kong, and during the flight his son went missing.
• John Carpenter stated that the inspiration for The Fog (1980) was partly drawn from The Trollenberg Terror. He has also said that he was inspired by a visit to Stonehenge with his co-writer/producer (and then-girlfriend), Debra Hill. While in England promoting Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), Carpenter and Hill visited the site in the late afternoon one day and saw an eerie fog in the distance. In the DVD Commentary, Carpenter noted that the story of the deliberate wreckage of a ship and its subsequent plundering was based on an actual event that took place in the 19th century near Goleta, California (this event was portrayed more directly in the 1975 Tom Laughlin film, The Master Gunfighter). The premise also bears strong resemblances to the John Greenleaf Whittier poem The Wreck of the Palatine which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1867, about the wreck of the ship Princess Augusta in 1738, at Block Island, within Rhode Island.
• Following: Christopher Nolan's home was broken into, and he found himself wondering about the identity of the burglars.
• Billy Wilder came up with the idea for The Fortune Cookie when he saw a player run into a cameraman on the sidelines while watching a football game.
• The inspiration for Four Weddings and a Funeral came when writer Richard Curtis was flipping through some old diaries and realized that he had been to 72 weddings in 10 years.
• Martin Scorsese got the idea for Gangs of New York in 1970 when he came across Herbert Asbury's book The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld while he was house-sitting and saw the potential for an American epic about the battle for the modern American democracy. While growing up in New York in The '50s, he noticed there were parts of his neighborhood that were much older than the rest, including tombstones from the 1810s in Old St. Patrick's Cathedral, cobblestone streets and small basements located under more recent large buildings; this sparked Scorsese's curiosity about the history of the area:
  I gradually realized that the Italian-Americans weren't the first ones there, that other people had been there before us. As I began to understand this, it fascinated me. I kept wondering, how did New York look? What were the people like? How did they walk, eat, work, dress?
• David Howard stated he got the idea for Galaxy Quest while at an IMAX presentation, and while waiting for the show to start, one of the trailers for an upcoming "Americans In Space" film featured the voice of Leonard Nimoy. The trailer got Howard thinking about how the other Star Trek actors had becoming pigeonholed in these types of roles since the cancellation of Star Trek, and then came up with the idea of what if there were real aliens involved. From there, he considered the rest of his script "that, in a lot of ways, just wrote itself, because it just seemed so self-evident once the idea was there".
• Buster Keaton got the idea for The General from William Pittenger's 1863 memoir The Great Locomotive Chase, about the 1862 Great Locomotive Chase.
• Charlie Chaplin claimed he got the idea for The Gold Rush when he saw pictures of gigantic lines of prospectors heading up to the Alaskan gold fields. He was also inspired by the Donner Party.
• For his 1993 film Golden Balls about a showoff Social Climber who stops at nothing (including manipulating women) to get rich and build the real estate project of his dreams, Spanish director Bigas Luna said the inspiration for the story came from an imposter who usurped his identity to eat in his favorite restaurant. The man was a showoff who dressed expensively and had a Rolex watch on his wrist, and upon observing him and seeing him cry at one point Luna had compassion for him, as it felt as if he was a "lost child".
• Gillian Flynn said she inspired to write Gone Girl after hearing about the Laci Peterson case, where the handsome, seemingly perfect husband of a heavily pregnant woman was shown to be curiously unfeeling and calm regarding the disappearance of his wife. Turns out he was having an affair, too, and attempted to continue the affair all throughout the search efforts. The difference is that the husband was eventually convicted of murdering his wife, while Amy was actually the mastermind behind her disappearance.
• Charlie Chaplin was inspired to make The Great Dictator after viewing Triumph of the Will with French filmmaker René Clair at the New York Museum of Modern Art. Luis Buñuel reports that Clair was horrified by the power of the film, crying out that this should never be shown or the West was lost. Chaplin, on the other hand, laughed uproariously at the film, thinking Hitler was the greatest comedian he'd ever seen.
• Chris Columbus' inspiration for Gremlins came from his loft, when at night "what sounded like a platoon of mice would come out and to hear them skittering around in the blackness was really creepy".
• Grindhouse came to Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino when Tarantino set up screenings of double features in his house, complete with trailers before and in between the films. During one screening in 2003, Rodriguez noticed that he owned the same double feature movie poster as Tarantino for the 1957 films Dragstrip Girl and Rock All Night. Rodriguez asked Tarantino, "I always wanted to do a double feature. Hey, why don't you direct one and I'll do the other?" Tarantino quickly replied, "And we've got to call it Grindhouse!"
  • Rodriguez first came up with Planet Terror during the production of The Faculty:
  I remember telling Elijah Wood and Josh Hartnett, all these young actors, that zombie movies were dead and hadn't been around in a while, but that I thought they were going to come back in a big way because they’d been gone for so long. I said, "We've got to be there first". I had [a script] I’d started writing. It was about 30 pages, and I said to them, "There are characters for all of you to play". We got all excited about it, and then I didn't know where to go with it. The introduction was about as far as I'd gotten, and then I got onto other movies. Sure enough, the zombie [movie] invasion happened and they all came back again, and I was like, "Ah, I knew that I should've made my zombie film".
  • Tarantino came up with the idea for Death Proof when he was having a drunken hotel night with friend Sean Penn. Tarantino wanted to buy a Volvo because he "didn't want to die in some auto accident like the one in Pulp Fiction". In regards to the safety of the car, Penn said, "Well, you could take any car and give it to a stunt team, and for $10,000 or $15,000, they can death-proof it for you." The "death proof" phrase had stuck to Tarantino after that.
• Groundhog Day: While waiting in a theater for a film to start, Danny Rubin was reading The Vampire Lestat and began musing about vampiric immortality and what one would do with their time when it was limitless. He reasoned that vampires were like normal people without being forced to adhere to the same rules or moral boundaries. He questioned if and when it would become boring or pointless, and how a person would change over time, especially if that person was incapable of substantial change within their own limited mortal life. He singled out men he deemed to be in arrested development, who could not outlive their adolescence.
• Halloween (1978) was based on an experience John Carpenter had in college touring a psychiatric hospital. Carpenter met a child who stared at him "with a look of evil, and it terrified [him]."
• Hannah and Her Sisters was originally about a man who fell in love with his wife's sister. Then Woody Allen re-read Anna Karenina "and I thought, it's interesting how this guy gets the various stories going, cutting from one story to another. I loved the idea of experimenting with that."
• Gregory Widen was inspired to write Highlander while visiting Scotland on vacation. He was visiting a museum in Edinburgh, came across a suit of armor, and wondered what it would have been like if the man who wore the armor were alive today.
• Wes Craven got the idea for The Hills Have Eyes (1977) while looking up "terrible things" at the New York Public Library. While going through the library's forensics department, Craven learned of the legend of Sawney Bean - the alleged head of a 48-person Scottish clan responsible for the murder and cannibalization of more than one thousand people. What interested Craven in the legend was how, after Bean's clan was arrested, they were tortured, quartered, burned and hung. Craven saw this treatment of the Bean clan by supposedly civilized people as paralleling the clan's own savagery.
• Producer David Kirschner came up with the idea for Hocus Pocus one night. He and his young daughter were sitting outside and his neighbor's black cat strayed by. Kirschner invented a tale of how the cat was once a boy who was changed into a feline three hundred years ago by three witches.
• Home Alone arose from a personal experience of John Hughes. Imagining that children are naturally most scared of robbers, Hughes also worked that aspect into the plot of the film.
  I was going away on vacation, and making a list of everything I didn’t want to forget. I thought, 'well, I'd better not forget my kids". Then I thought, "what if I left my 10-year-old son at home? What would he do?"
• Eli Roth came up with the idea for Hostel while brainstorming in Quentin Tarantino's pool. He was inspired by a Thai "murder vacation" website he came across on the dark web.
• Tom Six claims that he got the idea for The Human Centipede from discussions with a friend on how to punish pedophiles. One of them came up with stapling the pedophile's mouth to the ass of a fat truck driver.
• Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin got the idea for Independence Day while fielding a question about the existence of alien life during promotion for Stargate. A reporter asked Emmerich why he made a film with content like that if he did not believe in aliens. Emmerich stated he was still fascinated by the idea of an alien arrival, and further explained his response by asking the reporter to imagine what it would be like to wake up one morning and discover fifteen mile-wide spaceships were hovering over the world's largest cities. Emmerich then turned to Devlin and said, "I think I have an idea for our next film."
• Chuck Norris said he got the idea to make the Invasion U.S.A. (1985) after reading an article in Reader's Digest that said hundreds of terrorists were running loose in the United States.
  I thought, "Boy, that's scary. What if some guy on the order of a Khomeini or a Khadafy mobilized those guys and started sending them out to every major city?"... know it's going to happen, and even in the movie, the head terrorist says, "It's so easy because of the freedom of movement in this country". So we're really accessible to this. The movie is not meant to scare people, but to make us aware of a potential problem.
• The idea for The Jerk came from a stand-up routine of Steve Martin (included on his debut comedy album, Let's Get Small), in which he claimed to have been "born a poor black child" and how, after hearing his first Mantovani record, he "decided to become white."
• Denys Arcand was inspired to make Jesus of Montreal when he went to see a Passion Play, starring an actor who had auditioned for one of his works, performed at St. Joseph's Oratory, a church in Montreal.
• Jingle All the Way drew inspiration from the high demand for Christmas toys, such as the Cabbage Patch Kids and Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which often led to intense searching and occasional violence amongst shoppers. Randy Kornfield wrote the film's original screenplay after witnessing his in-laws go to a Santa Monica toy store at dawn in order to get his son a Power Ranger. While admitting to missing the clamor for the Cabbage Patch Kids and Power Rangers, Chris Columbus experienced a similar situation in 1995 when he attempted to obtain a Buzz Lightyear action figure. As a result, he re-wrote Kornfield's script.
• Part of the Kingsman concept came about as Matthew Vaughn was being measured for a new suit and he saw all the portraits and photos of notable customers on the walls of his tailor's shop. He wondered what might have happened if such powerful men banded together and pooled their resources to shape world history from behind the scenes.
• In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Alfred Hitchcock revealed that The Lady Vanishes was inspired by a legend of an Englishwoman who went with her daughter to the Palace Hotel in Paris in the 1880s, at the time of the Great Exposition:
  The woman was taken sick and they sent the girl across Paris to get some medicine in a horse-vehicle, so it took about four hours. When she came back she asked, "How's my mother?" "What mother?" "My mother. She's here, she's in her room. Room 22". They go up there. Different room, different wallpaper, everything. And the payoff of the whole story is, so the legend goes, that the woman had bubonic plague and they dared not let anybody know she died, otherwise all of Paris would have emptied.
• According to Screenwriter Jonathan Beutel, the idea for The Last Starfighter came about because he wandered into a video arcade and saw a young boy playing a video game, and also at that time, he read The Once and Future King and it occurred to him, that what if a video game had been a sword in a stone, and a boy had scored an incredible number in the video game, which sent out a ripple effect across the universe.
• The Lavender Hill Mob: screenwriter T. E. B. Clarke is said to have come up with the idea of a clerk robbing his own bank while doing research for the film Pool of London (1951), a crime thriller surrounding a jewel theft. He consulted the Bank of England on the project and it set up a special committee to advise on how best the robbery could take place.
• According to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the idea for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp did not come from the newspaper comic strip by David Low but from a scene cut from their previous film, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, in which an elderly member of the crew tells a younger one, "You don't know what it's like to be old." Powell has stated that the idea was actually suggested by David Lean (then an editor) who, when removing the scene from the film, mentioned that the premise of the conversation was worthy of a film in its own right.
• Little Miss Sunshine was apparently inspired by a speech by Arnold Schwarzenegger, where he stated that the people he hates most in the world are losers. The screenwriter took offense to this comment, believing that everyone is a loser in some way, but that doesn't make them a bad person. He wrote the screenplay to refute that kind of black-and-white thinking.
• Adam Sandler says he got the inspiration for Little Nicky when he and his friends went to see Angel Heart. Afterwards they joked about the idea of Satan in that movie having a loser son that he has to drag around.
• Hal Roach came up with The Little Rascals when he looked upon the antics of a group of children from his office window and felt that a series of shorts about a motley group of moppets could make good comedy and have audience appeal.
• Al Ruddy says that his inspiration for The Longest Yard came from a friend of his who was a promising football player. After a career-ending injury, his life took a downward spiral. He was working a minimum-wage job at a sandwich shop and was being mistreated by his snobbish girlfriend. Ruddy took the scenario from there.
• The Long Good Friday: Living in a Greenwich flat at the time, Barrie Keeffe could see the derelict Docklands from his window, and his ideas entwined following a chance meeting with an Irish Republican in a pub. Gangsters against terrorism soon became a going concern. Harold Shand's vision about how the Isle of Dogs could make Britain proud again was based on rumblings about the redevelopment of the Docklands that Keeffe heard from council officials.
• Amy Heckerling was inspired to write Look Who's Talking after her husband and writer Neal Israel started playfully talking in a different voice to pretend what their new baby would say. Her husband also has a cameo as Mollie's boss.

M-Z

• Sam Levinson based Malcolm & Marie on a personal incident where he forgot to thank his wife at the premiere of his previous movie, Assassination Nation.
• The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) was inspired by a poster that showed various haircuts from the 1940s that The Coen Brothers had seen while filming The Hudsucker Proxy.
• The idea for Manhattan came when Woody Allen was listening to a George Gershwin album of overtures and thought, "this would be a beautiful thing to make ... a movie in black and white ... a romantic movie".
• Michael Gottlieb got the idea for Mannequin when he was walking by a store window and was startled to "see" a mannequin move by itself. He realized it was just an optical illusion caused by a combination of lights and shadows, but began to wonder what would happen if a mannequin actually DID come to life.
• Mark R. Burns got the idea to write Married to the Mob when he was ten years old, a house in his suburban Long Island neighborhood was raided, and the father was discovered to have been in the mob.
• A Million Ways to Die in the West originated as an inside joke between Seth MacFarlane and co-writers Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild while they were watching Hang 'Em High. The joke evolved into "riffing on the idea of how dull, depressing, and dangerous it must have been to live in the Wild West."
• Charlie Chaplin got the idea for Modern Times while on a European tour promoting City Lights, from both the lamentable conditions of the continent through the Great Depression, along with a conversation with Mahatma Gandhi in which they discussed modern technology. Chaplin did not understand why Gandhi generally opposed it, though he granted that "machinery with only consideration of profit" had put people out of work and ruined lives.
• Monty Python's Life of Brian came when Eric Idle, frustrated by paparazzi badgering Monty Python about what their next project would be, said that their next film would be Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory. He only said it to shut them up, but John Cleese was intrigued and suggested developing it.
• Mel Brooks was a writer for the Sid Caesar variety program Your Show of Shows early in his career. Errol Flynn was a guest on one episode, and this real-life occurrence inspired Dennis Palumbo's largely fictional screenplay My Favorite Year.
• The Navigator came about when Buster Keaton's art director Fred Gabourie was scouting shipyards in San Francisco for another project, The Sea Hawk. He was shown the former USAT Buford, a 5,000 ton, 500 foot ship that was being sold for scrap metal. He was told that a film production could do anything with the ship, including set it on fire or sink it. Gabourie rushed back to Los Angeles to tell Keaton about the ship. Keaton immediately began planning a film centered around the Buford and had producer Joseph Schenck chart the boat for $25,000 with a crew and sail it to Los Angeles.
• Dan Gilroy conceived the idea for Nightcrawler in 1988, after reading the photo-book Naked City, a collection of photographs taken by American photographer Weegee of 1940s New York City residents at night. Often lewd and sensationalized in content, Weegee would sell these photos to tabloid newspapers. Intrigued by what he described as "an amazing intersection of art and crime and commerce", Gilroy wrote a film treatment with a "Chinatown feel". However, when The Public Eye was released, a film loosely based on Weegee's life, Gilroy shelved the idea. Two years later, he moved to Los Angeles, and noted the predominance of violent crime stories on local news stations. "I suddenly became aware of and intrigued by the idea that it must be a powerful force for a TV station, when they realize their ratings go through the roof when they show something with the potential for violence, like a police chase", says Gilroy. Sometime later, he discovered the stringer profession, and considered it to be the modern day equivalent of Weegee. Unaware of any film that focused on the livelihood of stringers, he began writing a screenplay.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) was inspired by several newspaper articles printed in the Los Angeles Times in the 1970s about Southeast Asian refugees, who, after fleeing to the United States because of war and genocide in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, suffered disturbing nightmares and refused to sleep. Some of the men died in their sleep soon after. Medical authorities called the phenomenon Asian Death Syndrome. The condition afflicted men between the ages of 19 and 57 and was believed to be sudden unexplained death syndrome or Brugada syndrome or both. The 1970s pop song "Dream Weaver" by Gary Wright sealed the story for Wes Craven, giving him not only an artistic setting to jump off from, but a synthesizer riff for the movie soundtrack. One night, a young Craven saw an elderly man walking on the sidepath outside the window of his home. The man stopped to glance at a startled Craven and walked off. This served as the inspiration for Freddy Krueger.
• According to Thandiwe Newton, Eddie Murphy got the idea for Norbit after watching online videos of large African-American women beating their tiny husbands.
• Nothing but Trouble: was based on Dan Aykroyd's personal experiences. In 1978, he was pulled over for speeding in upstate New York and was taken to the justice of the peace to stand trial in what Dan referred to as a "kangaroo court", and after he was fined $50, the justice of the peace invited Dan to stay for tea, and he ended up staying there for four hours.
• The idea for Old School came when Todd Phillips was talking to a friend of his who had seen and enjoyed Phillips' movie Frat House and told him, "You know what would be funny is a movie about older guys who start a fraternity of their own." After being told by Phillips to write it, he presented Phillips with a "loose version" of the finished product.
• The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure: After seeing Madea Goes to Jail in a theater, where he saw how the audience members would shout out advice to the characters on screen, Ken Viselman was partially inspired to create a children's film in the vein of Teletubbies with the interactive aspect, allowing the children to sing, dance, and respond to the characters on screen. He felt that "The idea of interactivity isn't new, but the idea of interactivity in a theater is."
• Around 2009, Quentin Tarantino discovered the centerpiece for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood while filming a movie with an actor that had the same stunt double for 20 years. Even though there was nothing but a small bit for the stuntman to do, Tarantino was asked to use him, and he agreed. The relationship fascinated Tarantino and inspired him to make a film about Hollywood.
• The idea for On the Waterfront began with an expose series written for The New York Sun by reporter Malcolm Johnson. The 24 articles won him a Pulitzer Prize and were reinforced by the 1948 murder of a New York dock hiring boss which woke America to the killings, graft and extortion that were endemic on the New York waterfront. Budd Schulberg was captivated by the subject matter, devoting years of his life to absorbing everything he could about the milieu. He became a regular fixture on the waterfront, hanging out in West Side Manhattan and Long Island bars, interviewing longshore-union leaders and getting to know the outspoken priests from St Xavier's in Hell's Kitchen.
• Pacific Rim: While walking on the beach near Santa Monica Pier, Travis Beacham imagined a giant robot and a giant monster fighting to the death. "They just sort of materialized out of the fog, these vast, godlike things." He later conceived the idea that each robot had two pilots, asking "what happens when one of those people dies?"
• Paparazzi came about when a group of celebrities talked about their nightmares involving the paparazzi. One of them, Mel Gibson, thought that these stories had the making of a great revenge fantasy; he would become one of the film's producers.
• For Parking (1985), Orpheus and Eurydice's characters and general relationship were inspired by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, with Eurydice sharing the latter's sculpting hobby.
• Halfway through writing Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Paul Reubens noticed everyone at Warner Bros. had a bike to get around the backlot, and so he requested one of his own. After receiving it, he was inspired to rewrite the film to center around Pee-wee trying to get back his lost bike.
• Brian De Palma got the idea for Phantom of the Paradise in 1969 when he was shocked to hear "A Day in the Life" by The Beatles as elevator muzac.
• The inspiration for making Pineapple Express, according to Judd Apatow, was Brad Pitt's character in True Romance, a stoner named Floyd. Apatow "thought it would be funny to make a movie in which you follow that character out of his apartment and watch him get chased by bad guys".
• Régis Roinsard got the idea of making Populaire after watching a documentary on the history of typewriters.
• Predator came to be as the writers decided to follow a joke regarding how Rocky was receiving so many sequels he would soon be fighting an extraterrestrial.
• John Hughes was inspired to write the story for Planes, Trains and Automobiles after an actual flight from New York to Chicago he was on, was diverted to Wichita, Kansas, thus taking him five days to get home.
• Paul Maslansky says he got the idea for Police Academy when in San Francisco filming The Right Stuff:
  I noticed a bunch of ludicrous-looking police cadets being dressed down by a frustrated sergeant. They were an unbelievable bunch-including a lady who must have weighed over 200 pounds and a flabby man of well over 50. I asked the sergeant about them, and he explained that the mayor had ordered the department to accept a broad spectrum for the academy. "We have to take them in,"...[he said]..."And the only thing we can do is wash them out."
• Once brothers Jim and John Thomas heard a joke that Rocky would need to fight an extraterrestrial after running out of earthly opponents, they wrote Predator, about muscled men forced to fight an alien hunter.
• The genesis of Pretty in Pink emerged when Molly Ringwald asked John Hughes to write a movie based on The Psychedelic Furs song "Pretty in Pink", which was her favorite song at the time.
• James DeMonaco got the idea for The Purge from a road-rage incident. He and his wife were driving on the freeway when a drunk driver cut them off nearly killing them. After both cars stopped, the other driver's lack of remorse enraged DeMonaco enough to engage in a fistfight and police eventually had to get involved. After the incident was over, DeMonaco's wife turned to him and commented how great it would be to have one free murder a year. He felt bad admitting this because she's normally a "sweet woman".
• John Carpenter became inspired to make Prince of Darkness while researching theoretical physics and atomic theory. He recalled, "I thought it would be interesting to create some sort of ultimate evil and combine it with the notion of matter and anti-matter."
• Bruce Montgomery wrote the recital scene in Raising the Wind based on anecdotes of the formation of the Celtic String Quartet, told to him by composer Eric Coates.
• Roar was conceived by Noel Marshall and Tippi Hedren in 1969, after she had starred in Satan's Harvest in Mozambique. During filming, they came across an abandoned plantation house in Gorongosa National Park which had been overrun by a pride of lions, and were told by their bus guide and local residents that animal populations were becoming endangered due to poaching; this inspired them to consider making either one or a series of films.
• Edward Neumeier stated that he first got the idea of RoboCop (1987) when he walked with a friend past a poster for Blade Runner. He asked his friend what the film was about and his friend replied, "It's about a cop hunting robots". For him, this sparked the idea about a robot cop.
• Sylvester Stallone wrote the screenplay for Rocky in three and a half days, shortly after watching the championship match between Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner that took place at Richfield Coliseum in Richfield, Ohio on March 24, 1975. Wepner was TKO'd in the 15th round of the match by Ali, with few expecting him to last as long as he did. Despite the fact that the match motivated Stallone to begin work on the script, he has subsequently denied that Wepner provided any inspiration for the script.
• Harold Lloyd got the idea for Safety Last! when he saw Bill Strother climbing the Brockman Building in Los Angeles as a stunt one day. Lloyd - who had a difficult time watching anyone else perform a dangerous stunt because he had no control over that situation - hid behind a corner, peeking to check on Strother's progress every few moments. After Strother reached the roof, Lloyd went up and introduced himself.
• Mike White was inspired to write School of Rock when he moved in next to Jack Black - who would frequently play loud rock music and streak in the halls.
• Akira Kurosawa had originally wanted to direct a film about a single day in the life of a samurai. Later, in the course of his research, he discovered a story about samurai defending farmers. The result was Seven Samurai.
• Shadow of a Doubt began when the head of David O Selznick's story department, Margaret McDonell, told Alfred Hitchcock that her husband Gordon had an interesting idea for a novel that she thought would make a good movie. His idea, called "Uncle Charlie," was based on the true story of Earle Leonard Nelson, a mass murderer of the 1920s known as "the Gorilla Man".
• Writer Marc Norman got the idea for Shakespeare in Love when his son Zachary called him from Boston University and suggested doing something on William Shakespeare as a young man in the Elizabethan theatre. It took two years for Norman to come up with the idea of having Shakespeare struggling with writer's block on Romeo and Juliet.
• The Shape of Water was primarily inspired by Guillermo del Toro's childhood memories of seeing Creature from the Black Lagoon and wanting to see the Gill-man and Kay Lawrence succeed in their romance.
• Peter Howitt got the idea for Sliding Doors after almost getting hit by a car. He was late in meeting a friend, and innocently walking along London's Charing Cross Road. "I couldn't decide if I should run for the train or first call my mate at a public phone," Howitt recalled. "I impulsively dashed across the street, and was nearly hit by a car, and that brush with death got me thinking. Something inside my head thought, 'That's interesting. What if he had hit me then?' What are the knock-on effects, the domino effects."
• Short Circuit was conceived after the producers distributed an educational video about a robot to various colleges. Studying other films with a prominent robot cast for inspiration, they decided to question human reactions to a 'living' robot, on the premise that no one would initially believe its sentience.
• Where did the idea for Smokey and the Bandit come from? Hal Needham, after being given a case of Coors by a friend, began to notice it vanishing from his fridge... and after installing a hidden camera, discovered his maid was stealing it. He pondered over the lengths people would go for Coors, and it spiraled from there. At the time of filming, Coors would not ship beer more than 1000 miles from the brewery in Golden, CO. Possibly due to their beer not being pasteurized. Texarkana, TX, is roughly 975 miles from Golden.
• While working in an alien invasion film and reading an Arthur C. Clarke article on how space is too big for extraterrestrials to actually reach Earth, Dennis Feldman had an idea about aliens contacting through information, and a message would contain instructions from across the void to build something that would talk to men. The result was Species, about an alien-human hybrid created through such a message.
• Robert Rodriguez got the idea for Spy Kids: All the Time in the World from an incident on the set of Machete. Jessica Alba had her then-one year old baby Honor Marie and was dressed to appear on camera when her diaper "exploded". Watching Alba change the diaper while trying not to get anything on her clothes prompted Rodriguez to think "What about a spy mom?"
• Roland Emmerich decided to make Stonewall (2015), about the 1969 riots, centered around a recently uncloseted migrant after doing charity work for the Gay and Lesbian Center in Los Angeles, where many of the people helped were from the countryside who moved to the big city only to find themselves in unfavorable conditions of homelessness, drug abuse and prostitution.
• Graduate school friends start a discussion about topics too taboo to be explored, ultimately deciding that a son molesting his father was the most unfathomable thing they can think of. One of the friends in the discussion later went on to play the main antagonist in the short film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, which another friend — Ari Aster — later wrote and directed as his thesis film.
• Strange Way of Life was inspired by a scene in another Gay Cowboy film, Brokeback Mountain, where the two leads discuss living on a ranch together.
• For The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Tobe Hooper credited the graphic coverage of violence by San Antonio news outlets as one inspiration for the film and based elements of the plot on murderer Ed Gein. The idea of using a chainsaw as the murder weapon came to Hooper while he was in the hardware section of a busy store, contemplating how to speed his way through the crowd.
• The Tremors films were inspired by writers/producers S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock after they were climbing a large boulder in the desert and suddenly wondered "What if there was something that wouldn't let us off this rock?"
• The inspiration for TRON occurred in 1976 when Steven Lisberger, then an animator of drawings with his own studio, looked at a sample reel from a computer firm called MAGI (who would work on the film itself, handing the iconic Light Cycle scene and shots of the Master Control Program) and saw Pong for the first time. He was immediately fascinated by video games, and wanted to do a film incorporating them.
• Ben Stiller got the idea for Tropic Thunder while working on Empire of the Sun. A few actors were getting cast in war movies and compare it to boot camp, prompting Stiller to wonder what would really happen if actors were in a warzone.
• The basis for Videodrome came from David Cronenberg's childhood. He used to pick up television signals from Buffalo, New York, late at night after Canadian stations had gone off the air, and worry he might see something disturbing not meant for public consumption.
• Michael Crichton became inspired to write Westworld after a trip to Disneyland, where he saw the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, and was impressed by the animatronic characters.
• Roger Corman became interested in making a film about the Hells Angels after seeing a photo in the January 1966 of Life magazine for a biker funeral. The result was The Wild Angels.

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