Shane Black: The Hollywood Interview

Writer/director Shane Black.



BACK IN BLACK
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the October 2005 issue of Venice Magazine.

Shane Black created one of modern cinema’s most enduring genres at the tender age of 22, when he sold his first screenplay, Lethal Weapon, to producer Joel Silver. The film series that resulted, teaming odd couple cops Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in four slam-bang action films punctuated by large dollops of black humor, dominated the box office in the late 80s and 1990s. Black followed the success of Weapon with The Last Boy Scout in 1991, which sold for a then-staggering $1.75 million, and was turned into a box office hit starring Bruce Willis, helmed by Tony Scott. Shane followed this with a re-write on 1993’s The Last Action Hero. In 1996, Shane sold his spec script, The Long Kiss Goodnight, for a record $4 million, raising the expectations, and in some cases the ire, of the Hollywood community. After Long Kiss tanked at the box office, Shane Black, once the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood, seemed to vanish like one of the mysterious characters that populated his neo-noir stories.
But fear not, gentle readers, Shane Black is back, making his directing debut with the romantic comedy/film noir hybrid Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. Starring Robert Downey, Jr. as a petty thief who finds himself embroiled in a Hollywood murder mystery, it marks a welcome return to form for Black who, at 43, has matured gracefully, slipping easily into his auteur shoes as a writer/director. Kiss Kiss features the usual stellar work by Downey, one of our best and most under-used actors, as well as a terrific turn by Val Kilmer as a gay private eye who reluctantly takes Downey under his wing. Lovely Michelle Monaghan scores a slam dunk putting a modern spin on Nora Charles to Downey’s Nick, as the two prowl the bowels of Hollywood, searching for a killer and the path to each others’ hearts. The Warner Bros. release hits theaters in limited release October 21, and goes wide November 10.
Shane Black sat down with Venice recently in his magnificent house located in LA’s historic Freemont Place. Here’s what transpired:

Do you know the history of your house?
Shane Black: I don’t know a lot about the architect, but it was built in 1929. Freemont Place was sort of old Hollywood before Beverly Hills. Although the only Hollywood guy who ever owned this place wasn’t old Hollywood: Ed Weinberger, who produced Taxi and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, along with Jim Brooks. It was the third house built here. I have pictures when the trees out front were like little shrubs. It’s about 75 years old, and probably haunted. I don’t know what history would lead to it being haunted, but a great many people who’ve stayed here have been like “I think I saw something…” They tend to point to the same places consistently. I worry not so much about ghosts’ ability to physically harm me, but more their ability to subtly, psychologically impose a kind of malaise or depression.

Writers don’t need any help with that.
No, it’s the last thing I need! (laughs)

You mentioned Jim Brooks. He’s a mentor of yours, right?
Yeah, he’s one of the spiritual fathers of this film, the one who got me started writing it, after a bit of a pause in my career. He was very encouraging. After he got me to write it, Joel Silver was the only guy in town who understood it, and wanted to make it. Basically, this movie is the bastard child of those two fathers. It’s half romantic comedy and half thriller, so it kind of fits.

I’m a big Raymond Chandler fan, so I loved the way you paid homage to The Master throughout the film.
I was so happy. It’s stupid, but when I can do Lady In the Lake and The Little Sister in the same story, I was like a kid at Christmas. (laughs) The story is so completely convoluted…

I really enjoyed it, though. It’s filled with memorable dialogue, my favorite of which is the line about the East Coast being held upside down and all the crazy women tumbling down to California.
(laughs) Yeah.

I also liked how you didn’t dwell on the violence, even though it was definitely there, and kept the focus on the characters.
Yeah, I wanted to keep it realistic enough to have an impact, but I thought it was important for the film to have kind of an old fashioned feel. When you’re carting bodies around in the middle of the night, it’s kind of like a caper picture, like Mickey Spillane, even, but it would have been very shocking and much too modern to have people’s heads explode with gunfire, and stuff. In fact, he does shoot someone in the head at one point, but you don’t see chunks of flesh flying. It’s important that you’re paying attention to the beats of the story, not to the body count.

Tell us some more about how this story was born. Has it been fermenting for a while?
After Y2K didn’t shut down our way of life, I had been desperately trying to get back in the business, and felt like I was slipping way too far off the map. I was trying to be James Brooks, because he’d been kind enough to give me an office. He said “Look, I think you have a block going on, but I also think you have some talent,” and he asked for no proprietary claims, he just wanted to give me a place to write. There might be some kind of ulterior motive there, but I really don’t see one. He was just a good guy about it. And so I went to his office, and started typing. I’d show it to him, from time to time, and he’d like bits and pieces of it. I kept banging my head up against the wall, trying to do this romantic comedy stuff. We had lunch one day, he and I, and he said “Look, you’re trying to be me in a sense, but I’ve always pictured you writing something more like Chinatown, which has all the great characters and interpersonal stuff. It doesn’t have to be an action film, it could be a mystery.” It suddenly hit me at that moment: I could do both. I could do my romantic comedy, but would be so much more comfortable doing it as a murder mystery. Instead of taking a giant step, I took a baby step. I wasn’t going to write Lethal Weapon, but I wasn’t going to write Steel Magnolias, either. Let’s do a film that’s half James Brooks, and half Joel Silver, essentially. And from that lunch, evolved the script that became Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang. I took it to every place in town, and all the doors were shut. It was very humbling for me, because when I was writing back in the mid-90s, I had the weird ability where my agent would put out a script, and my agent would say: “You have to respond by the end of the day, or you’re out of the bidding.” And people would drop what they were doing, and read the script. So here I came with a brand new spec script in 2003, and no one wanted to even read it. At best, they’d call back two weeks later and say “It was okay, but we didn’t really like it,” or “It feels too much like a period piece,” which I still don’t understand. I’d get all these comments, many of which clearly revealed that the person hadn’t even read it, or just skimmed it, or had coverage done. And I thought ‘Wow! Am I humbled by that!’ They don’t give a shit about me anymore. All these executives, they’re all ten years old, they’ve never even heard my name.

Do you think also that perhaps there was a great deal of resentment towards you because you had such huge success at such a young age?
There may have been in the 90s, but I think the doors shutting had more to do with the turnover in the industry that had occurred. “Oh yeah, Lethal Weapon. I saw that when I was a kid.” Executives literally saw it when they were about 11, 12. So, they don’t give a shit about me, anymore than if Arthur Penn (Bonnie & Clyde, 1967) walked in the room and wanted to direct a movie. “Who’s Arthur Penn?”

You know the famous story about Fred Zinnemann (From Here to Eternity, 1953; High Noon, 1952)?
No! What?

In the early 80s, Zinnemann walks into one of the major studios for a meeting with that week’s development exec of the moment. Zinnemann is sitting across from this kid in his mid 20s, slick as all hell with his Armani suit and Wharton MBA, and the kid says “So Fred, tell me about yourself.” Without missing a beat, Zinnemann says “You first, sonny. It’ll be shorter.”(laughs) Yeah, those kinds of comebacks are, to me, what makes the filmmaker. I just love that fuckin’ stuff. In my case, I had to find someone in that environment who, during my lapse into obscurity, still got my work. And the one unmutable constant in the ever-changing world of Hollywood has been Joel Silver: he always looks the same, talks the same, makes the same kinds of movies. He’s just Joel, and he’s the only one who got the script. He said “Let’s make it. I can’t get you a lot of money, but I can get you enough.” As it turns out, he got me about $15 million, which is what this movie costs. It got me back in the game, for which I’m infinitely grateful to him. In addition, he stayed on the production from start to finish as a hands-on guide, who helped shape the entire process. I think I’ve also helped him a bit with this. I don’t think it’s going to be a terrible thing, that he made this movie. So now I just want another job, that’s really it. After having a glimpse of what it’s like to be completely on the outs, I’m happy if someone just gives me a job.

You’re in a rare position for a writer who was in a slump, though. You were in a slump career-wise, but you still had financial solvency. That must be a really weird dichotomy.
Yeah, it’s hard to be hungry when you don’t have to be. People who write from desperation or absolute necessity are obviously going to be more prolific than someone who has the luxury of screwing off, going to parties, hanging out with friends. Pretty much, squandering time, which I did a bit of, before I got back to it. I had money and I’d go out with my friends on weekends, and we really were like the guys in the movie Swingers. Three carloads of us, and we all thought we were really cool, going to the great parties, and our lives were a waste! They were a fuckin’ waste! We’d talk about movies, but none of us would actually do anything.

Is this during the infamous “Pad O’ Guys” days?
No, no. This is post Pad O’ Guys. Pad O’ Guys went off and got married. They went off and left me. They abandoned me. They betrayed me. We used to have a sign in the window: “Open 24 Hours.” There was always someone at that house. You’d drive by at four in the morning. The lights were on. The sign was lit. Someone was in there making a short film, or having an argument about Preston Sturges, or whatever. But now, they all went off and had the unmitigated gall to have wives and disappear from the Pad O’ Guys. So now I’m the only one left with the “24 Hours Open” sign. I run this little hotel here where people come in and out of town to stay, otherwise I’m alone here with my dogs. But yes, I had financial solvency. But in a way, I wish I hadn’t. There was a bit of resentment engendered for having made such a large sum of money, for an action script (The Long Kiss Goodnight,1996) number one, which people almost universally disdain, but secondly, one that bombed and everyone had a chance to go “Ah, ha, ha, ha, ha!” I didn’t mind that part as much, but the anger that people felt when I sold that script for that amount of money. Even my good friend Peter Bart, who runs Variety, wrote a full page column on what a schmuck I was, and how horrible it was that I sold this script for that amount. I had never seen people made quite that angry before.

Did you ever ask one of them what they wanted you to do with the money?
Yeah! Say you wrote this idea on a napkin and someone said they’d give you a million dollars for it. Would you say “No, no. I insist on being paid five dollars for this napkin.” Anybody would take the money! But in addition to making people pissed and resentful towards me—I lost more than one friend because of it—it made me less hungry and made me procrastinate more. So for that reason, I wish I hadn’t done quite so well, because I needed to get back to work about three years before I actually did. I would give anything to get those three years back, as I enter midlife crisis anyhow. (laughs) I found myself panicking a bit, but this movie has calmed me. It’s not the greatest movie ever made, but it’s a solid piece of work, and it’s gotten my foot back in the door. I also learned some things and met some challenges that I’d never faced. So all-in-all, I think it’s been good.

Yeah but wisdom never comes easily, right? The old wise man with the long gray beard on the mountaintop whom everyone consults didn’t get there because he was born that way. He got there because he fucked up a lot.
(laughs) Yeah, that’s true.

What was directing like for you?
I’d love to say that it was incredibly difficult and murderous, but it was a snap. If you’ve done your preparation, including storyboarding the more complex sequences, ultimately your only job on the set is to execute your preparation and be flexible enough and social enough to go beyond it in places and hopefully get something better, and change things according to the order of the day, like if the actors come up with something better. I would watch movies all night to prepare. I can almost give you shot-for-shot on Panic Room (2002) just because I watched it so many times. I would go to the set for as long as I could to just sit there, and look around, then you have all the possibilities in your head. Then you take your cinematographer with you, and you ask him about all the possibilities. So when you walk in, you’ve already covered all your bases, even if you want to throw it all out and do something different.

What were some of the other movies you studied?
The Exorcist (1973). I love that movie. A lot of David Fincher’s stuff: Fight Club (1999), Seven (1995). I knew that there was a very raw, desaturated look to those films that were very appealing. I’d point at things to my D.P. and I’d say ‘Why do I like that?’ Jaws (1975) I watched a bunch of times. There were so many. Now that you’re asking, I’m blanking. Also, the commentaries on the DVDs. I listened to Jim Brooks’ commentaries on his movies. It really is a blessed time to get these movies with all these extra features on DVD. You watch and listen and pretty soon you get the flavor of what it’s like to do this. Also I read books, lots of books.

How did you work with your actors?
I would write memos to them a lot. I find that I’m much better at expressing complex ideas on paper than I am in stating them. So I’d go home and generate these memos about the sense of the film, and I’d just keep shoving paper at these actors. I don’t know if they liked the notes, but they read them, and we talked about them. So they finally said “Okay, we get it! We know who you are now! We’ve read your fuckin’ life story!” (laughs) It was good.

You got two of the best actors of their generation with Robert Downey and Val Kilmer. The only other name I’d put up there is Sean Penn.
I don’t think anybody at the time felt that either one of them were box office draws. But after seeing the movie, a lot of people have said “Why didn’t anyone think of putting these guys together before?” Somehow by teaming these two actors, both of whom are acknowledged as being so good, the pairing of them became kind of an event status. The fact that these two are in a movie together excites me as much as if I found out Harrison Ford has a new movie coming out. So I’m happy we didn’t go with a big name like Ford, or Mel Gibson. Who knows what would have happened then? I remember when Val was trying out his different gay voices. He’d start out very broad and then we’d sort of pull him back. Like he’d start at a 7 or an 8, on a scale of 10. But then he’d bring him down to 4, with just the slightest inflection, so it’s not an obvious gay characterization. He could go up and down until he was giving you exactly what you wanted, and not a penny more. It was amazing to watch his process.

What was Downey’s process like?
Downey is a very hands-on guy. He loves to talk about things, get them on their feet. His process pretty much is once we rehearse, and once he’s got in his head what he’s going to do, he would just practice kung-fu with his trainer, to stay focused. You’d see Val pedaling around on the little bicycle that he brought. They became friends. Robert said something, that he and Val were very strange people, in different ways. Somehow their respective strangeness complimented each other.

Let’s talk about your background. You were born and raised in Pittsburgh.
Yeah, my dad was in the printing business: doing graphics and desktop publishing and all that. He printed business forms, basically. If you fill out a form in a hospital or a police report, he might have designed it. My mother joined him in the business, as did my brother, and it became a family business, until he died three years ago. I’ve got two older brothers, and a younger sister. All great people. She just had her first kid, my niece, actually the first kid any of us have had. I had a very normal childhood: public school education. I came out here for two years of high school, and then went to UCLA. It was such a Mickey Mouse time then. I studied theater and the classes were so simple. It’s so different than if you would go to the south campus where all the math majors were. That’s hard shit. But here I am painting scenery, or pretending to be a rock. It was too easy.

So you started out wanting to act?
Yeah, it was a kid thing. The sad thing is, I finally know how to act, but I don’t want to do it anymore. You get all the teaching and go “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” then five or ten years later it all clicks. “Oh! I get it!” So that’s the way it happens, but now I’m not acting anymore.

When did you discover screenwriting and fall in love with film?
When I was still in college, through the Pad O’ Guys, and two of my roommates: Fred Dekker and Ed Solomon. Ed wrote for the last season of Laverne & Shirley, long after they’d jumped the shark and become silly. But it was amazing, because he had a job writing for TV! Ed helped Fred get an agent, and Fred’s stuff was really sharp, and I started reading it one day, his feature scripts. I remember being so entertained by them, and thinking ‘Hey, there’s no formula here. No rules, really.’ I thought screenwriting was something so difficult, such a lofty proposition, that screenplays were these things that floated out of the ether and magically appeared on the screen. But it never occurred to me that they were easier to write than a novel. I found that within that format, I could do whatever I wanted. I think why my initial scripts got me so many meetings is that nobody had taught me what you’re supposed to do when you write a screenplay. I just assumed there were no rules, and went ahead and did it. So the supposedly “unique style” that I had wasn’t born out of any need to show off or be bratty, it was just me having fun. And I ended up selling a bunch of scripts, but still found it very unsatisfying because the process of writing was so tortuous, and then you send the script off into the world for someone else to bring it to life. Meanwhile, I have to sit down and go back to the typewriter all over again. What I didn’t realize at the time, is that directing can be the reward for writing. And that’s the part I never thought of back then.

You just said that writing is both fun and tortuous. Is the tortuous part also cathartic for you in some way?
Well yeah, when it gets cooking, there’s no feeling like writing a script and feeling it click. But it doesn’t happen a lot. A lot of it is struggling for ideas. ‘God, what comes next? Please, let me think of something!’ It’s just murderous. You have to do it in the same way you have to climb Everest. It’s just not easy, that’s all. But then again, if you want to be strong, you have to go to the gym and lift weights. Yes, it’s gonna hurt, but if you keep doing it, after a year, you’re strong. Writing hurts. It’s miserable. But then when it’s done, it can really be an accomplishment, if you actually allow something of yourself to transfer to the paper, I think it’s one of the most amazing things a person can do.