CS Interview: Shane Black Shoots Straight About The Nice Guys

When most people think of Shane Black, they think of him as a success machine, hitting it out of the park with his second screenplay called Lethal Weapon at age 24, subsequently setting paycheck records for a screenwriter several times over before parlaying that clout into co-writing/directing the $1.215 billion-grossing Iron Man 3 in 2013. The only problem with that narrative is it neglects to mention many fallow years Black spent between 1996’s The Long Kiss Goodnight and his recent Marvel Studios success, dealing with the same struggles that all creators deal with, i.e. writer’s block, confidence, honing the craft and, yes, lack of industry interest. Somewhere amidst this purgatory period he directed 2005’s underseen-but-highly-praised noir comedy masterpiece Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (which helped resurrect Robert Downey Jr.’s career) as well as hashing out (with Anthony Bagarozzi) the screenplay for a similar buddy action two-hander called The Nice Guys.

Much like Black, the screenplay for The Nice Guys spent a long time in its chrysalis stage before — not to prolong an already hacky metaphor — it emerged as the fully-realized shoot ’em up disco butterfly it is. The film being released to theaters this weekend takes place in the smog-choked/porn-soaked world of 1977 Los Angeles, following a private investigator (Ryan Gosling) and a muscle-for-hire (Russell Crowe) as they navigate one seriously twisty-turny missing persons case. It was, however, at one time or another planned as a contemporary crime movie, a network TV series and an HBO series until Black finally convinced Warner Bros. to make it as a period piece. The result is a clever take on the “scrappy detective” genre, with more Shane Black-isms (mismatched protagonists, Christmas setting, snarky kidult, conspiracy plot, bone-crushing action) and gallows humor than you can shake a stick at. Not that you’d want to. Why would you shake a stick at a movie? Or anything? Maybe a rabid squirrel. 

When we weren’t shaking sticks at things we took the opportunity to talk 1-on-1 with Shane Black about that evolution of The Nice Guys, as well as the trick to writing kid characters in adult situations and his favorite scene in Captain America: Civil War.

RELATED: Shane Black Talks The Predator Costume Upgrade for the Upcoming Sequel

CS: At my first production company internship they had these shelves of solicited screenplays, and my first job was to fill hefty bag after hefty bag full of these scripts and throw them in the dumpster.

Black: Oh cool, yeah. Pretty symbolic, yeah.

CS: I certainly learned the value of a script. And “The Nice Guys” used to be one of these screenplays that nobody wanted to make. What makes a script like this a survivor, and what makes it age like wine instead of milk?

Black: I think adaptability, if anything, in the sense that the first draft of “The Nice Guys,” which Anthony, my partner and I wrote back in 2001. First off, it took place present day. And the conceit wasn’t a film, it was a sex tape, because back then, the big thing was everyone had this leaked sex tape, sometimes leaked on purpose. And online, what you’d see is everyone trying to get a lookalike and say, “Look, Britney Spears has a sex tape.” And people would click on you and give you money, but it wasn’t really her, but if you could convince people it was her… So that seemed like a good thing to do for a detective story, and that was the plot of the first one, involving that.

Then we did a TV version where it was an old woman was the villain. We did an HBO version, where we outlined a whole series of 10 episodes that we would do. We had all this material accumulating, but no one was buying. So eventually, we gave it one last shot around 2010, and the ’70s, which is a great time for this. If you’re looking for a window onto an era, the ’70s in LA, I mean, Jesus pornography everywhere. And then, the smog was so bad you had air raid type sirens that would alert people, “Take your kids indoors or they’ll get sick.” You had these sort of faded, tarnished gumshoe guys, trying to fill these epic, glamorous private eye shoes that they could never fill in a town presided over by this crumbling Hollywood sign that no one bothered to fix and it crushed the purple smog. That seemed to me a great way to go with it. And I also loved the ’70s private eye novels that people were reading at the time.

So that didn’t even get traction. But Joel Silver was the angel throughout this thing. He consistently was the proponent of it and just kept putting it out there. And finally, in 2013, Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe got it within a couple days of each other and they really each just said, “I’ll do it if he does it.” So after 13 f*cking years, this thing came together in 72 hours, and I don’t know. They were our first picks, too. I mean, that never happens, it just came together with the best guys incredibly quickly.

CS: So the moral is, have a mega-producer like Joel Silver in your corner.

Black: Yeah. And also, I don’t think it hurt that “Iron Man 3” came along and I actually got some…

CS: Also direct a movie that grosses $1.2 billion.

Black: Yeah. And then they said, “Want do you want to do next?” And I said, “Well, let’s go back to the well. Let’s try it one more time, Joel.”

CS: Choosing 1977, what was the specific significance of that year for you?

Black: It could have been ’76, it could have been ’78. It was all about this period where although LA was still sort of the ultimate endgame destination for every American dreamer -they all wanted to come to the coast and they’re streaming off the buses – but what they find there is not the prom queen they expected to meet, but the sort of demented Alzheimer’s version, tottering around in the ripped dress. It’s the fallen LA. It’s this sort of modern, latter day Sodom and Gomorrah. And I’ve found that in memory, there was still the kind of sun-blinded glamor, in a way, the sort of innocence that the city was known for. But it had become ragged at the edges. And you want to catch something, it seems to me, an era right at the point where it’s ragged, maybe not necessarily where it’s corrupt and downfallen, but it’s starting to fray. It’s starting to come apart and people aren’t doing anything about it. There’s an old expression in Hollywood, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.” Don’t politicize your script. But inevitably, there’s going to be parallels between what you’re doing in a period piece and modern day themes and current issues. So I think there will always be crusaders, here’s our two knights in tarnished armor trying to step up and fill the shoes of the mythic crusader here. And you could do the same thing modern day, but it’s much better I think to do the timeless version and still feel like, “Well, yeah, I guess we got sh*t going on like that today, huh?”

CS: Right, yeah. “Chinatown” was basically about the environment and land deals and all that stuff.

Black: Yeah, this whole thing of pollution now and the people who are denying it and the big money about pretending it’s not a problem, that could just easily be climate change today.

CS: Someone was doing an interview with Jodie Foster the other day, and they asked her a question she’s probably gotten a million times, “Did you understand what ‘Taxi Driver’ was about when you were making it?” And she’s just like, “Yeah, sure.” And to me, that gets to the heart about what’s great about the 13-year-old daughter character Holly, because she’s exposed to all this porn and murder, yet at the end of the day she’s still a kid who can go play “Pong” with her friend.

Black: Yeah. She’s able to exist in this world with the big boys, but their innocent version, the purity of her is not compromised yet. And she’s still reading the “Nancy Drew” books, which you see lined up.

CS: Yes, in the background in her room.

Black: So to her, the fantasy of what a detective is is still pure, and her father’s not it. But she’s holding out. If she just continues to keep the faith and carry the torch of being that inquisitive pure youth, maybe her father will catch fire and become that and he does at the end, even if it’s for a few minutes. And I think there’s a lot of that in the movie at the beginning. For instance, you have a kid who’s looking at this perfect airbrushed fantasy centerfold, and taking it back to his room. And then, all of a sudden, here comes the girl in the same position, naked on a rock bleeding, and the last thing he ends up doing is covering her up, because the police are coming and she’s naked. He goes from a complete fantasy to the really harsh reality in five minutes. And I think that’s pretty much what we’re doing with LA here, is dealing with issues of fantasy and reality. The fairytale party, where everyone’s dressed up like Pinocchio or Rapunzel, they’re fiddling while Rome burns. These people are having this ridiculous fantasy life in the backdrop of a city that’s decaying around them.

CS: She is almost like Jiminy Cricket to Russell Crowe’s character. She’s like, “Don’t choke that man, Pinocchio!”

Black: She’s absolutely his conscience. And it’s the one person who can get to him. There’s only, to my thinking, one real important lie that’s told in the movie, and it’s something that he says to her and it just destroys him. It really, really gets to him.

CS: I did love seeing all those Nancy Drew books, all the yellow binding on the wall. You have a few hardboiled paperbacks on your walls too, right?

Black: I have all the Nancy Drews as well, yeah.

CS: I’m wondering how much of your work is informed by your love of pulp novels, versus actual field research shadowing cops and PIs and things like that?

Black: I think it’s a mixture. I think you have to present what’s best about the way things really go down, whether it’s the awkwardness of a situation that you’ve seen a million times, like the “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” example. Cops will tell you those kinds of stories about, yeah, you read about it this way, but let me tell you how it really goes down. And those are fun to hear. At the same time, I don’t like being beholden to that reality, when you’re trying to do something timeless, especially when you’re taking a detective story, like the swinging d*ck private eye of the ’60s and trying to say something of a fairytale nature with it. “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” and this both share the quality of being part fairytale.

CS: And they both end in basically the same place, with these two disparate people coming together.

Black: Right. And I think you’ll find that even in both cases, there’s no humongous victory that takes place. There’s no parade at the end. It’s just simply a small victory that in years to come no one will even be aware of. But it was a time where alliances were forged and decisions were made and people became who they could be and they loved each other until they could love themselves. And I think that’s important, is that victories—my favorite “Rocky” is still the first one, because he doesn’t win. He just keeps his feet. And that’s the wonderful speech where he says, “I want to be standing. I just don’t want to fall down.”

CS: To go the distance.

Black: Yeah, that’s all he cares about. And that’s been much more affecting to me than taking the fairytale to its fairytale conclusion, which is that, oh, everything’s perfect, they live happily ever after, you know?

CS: I also loved Ryan going into the Lou Costello-type non-verbal yell when he sees the dead body, “Nuah, nah, nah!”

Black: Yeah, (Laughs) that’s great.

CS: When I think about the movies that you’ve directed, they’re more comedies than anything else. Can you talk a little bit about your comedic influences?

Black: Yeah, they’re more literary than movie. I love movies like “What’s Up, Doc?”, you know, Bogdanovich at his best. I think that there’s just such a wellspring of stuff to be found. If you read Evan Hunter, aka, Ed McBain who wrote the 87th precinct police novels, they’re fun. They’re interesting, they’re wrenching, but ultimately they’re playful, and it’s playfulness that keeps me awake to do these things. When you’re doing something that’s sonorous and one note and the tone never changes… and by the way, it’s what Marvel manages to get so right. I’m a big Kevin Feige fan, because Kevin knows that if someone comes striding out of the darkness backlit, smoke around them and they’re slow motion with a chiseled jaw, that’s great, but they have to stub their toe and fall over. My favorite example of that, “Civil War,” The Winter Soldier, you see him just tortured and brutalized. But then, there’s the moment in the car where he’s just looking at the Falcon, nudging him because Captain America’s kissing a girl.

CS: Right.

Black: And they know to do that. It’s not keeping one tone throughout. So I don’t look to make exclusively comedies, but I do think is that the mistake would be to keep the tone completely consistent and not know that there’s shifts that you could do. I was really worried in “Kiss Kiss,” for instance, when Robert Downey has one scene where he shoots a guy and he’s never pulled a trigger before and he starts crying. He says, “I’ve never killed a guy, man,” and then three scenes later, he kills a guy by accident and he’s like, “Oh, whatever. Let’s cover him up.” “Sh*t, that’s not going to match. Everyone’s going to notice.” No. It’s seamless. You could make those tonal shifts. And I realized, sh*t, you can do almost the exact opposite tone in the same movie and just tie it together with a through line and people will appreciate the ride and the variation.

CS: Going to “Predator,” which you were in, was there a certain sense of you being kind of like an armchair director while you were there, being like, “Oh, I wish John would do this. I wish John would do that”? And now, are you kind of trying to live through that?

Black: No, no. I watched John [McTiernan] very carefully, but I didn’t have the skills back then. I didn’t know what I was watching. I had to really dig in roundabout the year 2000, when I started to seriously consider directing. I bought the books. I watched the movies. I clicked through them a frame at a time. You really have to just undertake it, because just being exposed to it doesn’t teach you how to direct, unless you’re paying really f*cking close attention, and I wasn’t when I was just a writer. That’s what Marvel was so good at. Very early on, Joss Whedon came to me and he said, “Dude, you can’t control every moving part. Just trust the machine. They’re there to help you.” And I realized, “Oh sh*t, I’m supposed to listen instead of just trying to stay focused on everything being the way I wanted.” I just watched. And listen, Feige, Victoria Alonso, Lou D’Esposito, Stephen Broussard, all those voices, and I learned so much. I owe them a great debt of thanks, both to Robert Downey for giving me my career back, and to Kevin Feige and the gang for showing me what the machine looks like at that level of filmmaking, so that now people will trust me with that kind of money again.

The Nice Guys opens everywhere tomorrow.