I think Will Smith's character says it best in his opening speech when he says, We long for love, we wish we had more time and we're afraid of death.

I like to walk a lot and various ideas come in my mind. Many of them I discard.

I wrote [Collateral Beauty] on my own. I didn't get paid to write it. I didn't sell it as a pitch. It was an idea I had that I really, really felt needed to be in script form before showing it to anyone in the industry because of the uniqueness of the idea, and the weirdness of the idea, to be frank.

I decided to write [Collateral Beauty] on my own which made it the first spec script I wrote in 11 years.