Austinist Interviews Writer/Director Shane Black

How did you become involved with the Austin Film Festival?

It seems a bit odd that it has been that many years. I think I was at the first or second one, I’m not sure, but I get so fed up with Los Angeles. I feel like I need a venue that is sort of more creative, more laid back. A place – not only to blow off steam and relax – but to get into these sorts of very calm dialogues with people who I respect, who I would like potentially to work with.

I find that the roster here – even from the early days of the festival – has always been very good, possibly because, as my one friend, Scott Rosenberg, used to say, this is the festival where they treat writers like rock stars. I know that’s a bit silly, but he seemed very enthusiastic. And Barry Josephson also, who still comes here, spoke up for the festival. It seemed like just what the doctor ordered to get out of LA, and get out of town. In addition to meeting people, amazing people whose words have sort of changed the way I think. People like James L. Brooks people like David Milch, who was here this year.

If he walked in off the street as just sort of a hard-on-his-luck writer and had told these wonderful stories and alluded to these books – to which he has encyclopedic knowledge – as though the books themselves were his best friends, that any great author was never less than this far from his thoughts, ready to nurture him, you’d say, “That’s an amazing accomplishment.” But then when he tells you what he has been through to get to this particular point, what he has come back from, and it borders on the miraculous.

We can see why the festival organizers sought you out as “that guy” who started the whole trend of the hot spec script.

There was a tendency back in the 90s to pay a lot of money for spec scripts, and pitches had sort of fallen out of favor momentarily. Studios wanted to buy a script, even a package – an attached actor, perhaps an attached director – and that had happened to me in 1994 with The Long Kiss Goodnight. I got Geena Davis to star, and Renny Harlin to direct. (Renny) had just done Cliffhanger, but he had not yet done Cutthroat Island. I was very enthusiastic. Unfortunately, I had to spin wheels for a year or more while they went off to do Cutthroat Island, which I didn’t know they were going to have to do. So, I ended up back here at the festival, just kind of cooling my heels.

Once again, it offered this sort of succor. I felt that it got me enthused to go back and write something else even, as it always does. Plus, Austin itself is a very different town than LA. I have yearned for the days where I have had the same sort of hunger for this sort of business as I did when I was in college. I have probably way too much nostalgia for collegiate behavior. I’ve walked out onto the street over here on any given Saturday night, that strip (Sixth Street), and I’m transported back to a time and a place, which I’m convinced was so much better than now. You make friends, whether it is among the people who are asked to attend, or whether it is just the people who show up and pay their dues to get in and listen.

Well, who else is willing to listen to crotchety, middle-aged people, blowing off steam over their writing troubles? So, I come here and I can rant. There is no one to do that to, or no environment in which to do that back home. In this place you find out what you know in the process of talking. You talk to people and then you find out by talking what it is you are trying to talk about – much the same as the process of writing. I think a lot of times, you just start typing and try to figure out what it’s about later.

In the course of trying to get a point across to these film students, I’ll blurt something out that is as intriguing to me as it is to them in the moment, because it is me trying to work through something of my own brain, my own subconscious. This lovely backdrop of people who are so willing to listen, so blessedly unaware of what a drag it would be if I just kept talking and they had to keep listening, but for an hour they’re spellbound. I can just sort of say whatever I wish, and in the process, I learn a great deal about myself and there is a certain reaffirmation value to just saying the same old stories with the same old encouragements as you talk to the writers and try to bolster their spirits. I think you can’t help but have to dig and find why you did it in the first place and sort of touch base with your own hopes, or aspirations.

I think part of it has to do with this festival, which is something I haven’t seen at other festivals involving writers. A lot of festivals are just mutual back-slapping parties. The writers all congratulate each other. They act very stiff toward the students, and they just stand there in collective adulation and then leave. Whereas, what I sensed here – certainly with Milch and Pollack the other day, and in general throughout the years – there’s not a lot of ego here. There’s not a lot of back slapping. What you do see in a room are people trying to figure stuff out and get to a point, and that’s pretty remarkable to me. The energy in a room, which is writers, but it’s not about being a writer. It’s not about how cool it is to carry a briefcase. It’s about really getting at some essential truths.

The great thing about Milch, he started at level four – he didn’t talk down to the students. These people who are entry level students, he’s already talking at a high level, and they have to try and catch up, but that’s great, because you didn’t see them sort of throwing up their hands and saying, “I don’t get it.” You saw them leaning forward trying to concentrate harder. That’s what I love: A venue where it’s just a challenge to think about your own stuff, about encouraging others, about listening to people who have been brought here with you. It’s not about the back slaps. It’s not about feeling better. It’s about remembering why you decided that this was an important thing to do.

You took a hiatus from the forefront of screenwriting for a while, and came back as a writer/director. You spoke during the festival about your search for the childlike wonderment of movies. Has directing helped you find that?

Yes, and no. I managed to touch base more recently with enough of my core, my enthusiasm to let off some of the energy I still have left in me. If we’re all wizards, we all have a limited amount of magic, but the good news is it can instantly replenish itself. But we don’t know quite how to make that happen. It just seems to occur spontaneously. In the last couple of years, I went through a period where all of a sudden there was this big build up of energy which suddenly appeared and sustained me throughout this film process.

It didn’t mean that I wasn’t depressed from time to time, or that I didn’t have troubles with this or that, it just meant that all of a sudden I felt a sense of . . . I won’t say “wonder,” but I had faith in my story again. I had excitement about telling it again, and when those times come, when you have that energy. . . it might afford you the chance to work at your best, at your peak level. You’ve got to take it and not worry about tomorrow, because it may go away and all you have when you’re feeling good is that moment in that time, and not to worry about losing it, or when the next one is. So, yes, I touched base with the core and feel a lot more childlike, but it doesn’t last. You have to do it all over again next time.

I’m feeling these days, probably as old as I’ve felt. Once I get back to working steadily, I think that’ll go away, and I’ll be fine again. I’ll get some energy back and I’ll feel like a kid. I wish it would stick around. I wish it would perpetually self-replenish in a form of energy.

I think that’s a false – an unearned bit of adulation.

You’ve made statements since that the idea of genre, for you, is something to strive to avoid.

Yeah, to not be limited by the bounds of something that is as sorry-sounding as “action.” Action as a word, you know, it immediately demeans a film. You don’t even have to make a face or raise an eyebrow. When you say it’s an action film, you immediately take away anything else that film has going for it. It’s just, it demeans an entire body of work, including Hitchcock, whose films were full of these incredible action sequences, but you referred to them back then as “adventure thrillers,” or simply "thrillers.”

Do you feel like you might be once again responsible for a new genre? The press refers to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang as a comedic neo-noir.

Well, it was a cross between a romantic comedy and dark kind of murder-thriller from the 40s. I don’t know if it’s a new genre. It was an experiment on my part, one that probably doomed the film in a way, because it rendered it impossible to sell.

Well, fans of the film would argue.

No, no, I wouldn’t change it for the world. I wish there was. . . . It’s weird, because when people see something, even if it’s odd, 9 out of 10 times, if it’s good, they’re going to like it anyway, but getting them in the theater in the first place is a difficult process, and it’s sad to think that the worst film you can think of from last year that opened theatrically on 1000 screens – and there were some bad ones – is more well known and well reviewed than Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I mean, the worst one no less, you could still find more people who have watched it and talked about it than Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

Do you think some of that falls on the moviegoing public? That if they don’t like what they are seeing, there’s a responsibility on their part for that?

There sort of is. People don’t know what they want if they haven’t seen it. They don’t know what they’re not getting, so. . . . What is interesting is this sort of groundswell of internet support which is supposed to be people thinking about what they want to see and to define this. On our movie, Joel (Silver, producer) and I made an internet buy at one point to advertise on the internet, because it was less expensive and also, the internet had seemed like more and more the way to go. All I can say in terms of our advertising: The TV seemed to work, the radio seemed to work, the internet didn’t make a dent. It didn’t change a thing. Now, on the other hand, Harry Knowles was very helpful to us, spreading the word about the movie. I think the popularity it has achieved as sort of a cult movie is due largely to Harry and his website. Also the film festival here, (the premiere audience last year) who all went their separate ways talking about the film. (Ed. Note: We raved about it in our review during last year’s fest.)

But, right, I think if people don’t want all of this garbage, they have to sort of stand up and say it. I mean, the right wing for years has been saying, “we don’t want people to say nasty words on TV, and we don’t want a liberal sensibility in our media.” I just think that it’s time for people who want more sophisticated product to stop putting up with such mediocre entrées in the summer market. I used to stand in line for two hours and be happy to do it, because I was so excited about the new Spielberg film and maybe I’ve lost the childlike sensibility, or maybe movies just aren’t worth standing in line for.

You made Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in a very unusual way, with studio financing, but limited studio involvement without a development department. Do you see this as the new way for filmmakers – writer/director types – to make their films?

Austin is a thriving community for filmmakers who are inventing new ways to finance smaller films. They’re getting picked up. They’re getting shipped off to Hollywood. Maybe not at the big studios, but there is a bleeding-off of the power that once stayed with the big five (studios), and I think it will continue. The problem is, and always will be, that the studios have tremendous marketing departments. As much as you talk about the wonders of word-of-mouth filmmaking and word-of-mouth distributing and marketing, all of the great buzz that Snakes On A Plane had on the internet, it didn’t make it a $100-million-dollar hit. It comes down to the fact that sometimes a studio just pumps something into advertising, and they make a lot of money by. . .

By fooling people into going?

Well, yeah. Or if it’s good, then they’re not so fooling, but they have these tremendous distribution arms and machines for just making awareness soar, tracking results and that’s why people want to work at the studios. Not because they get treated better, but because they feel that their film will be distributed better. Which turns out was not the case with me. I would have probably done better working independently and trying to sell it to Miramax later on. My producer, Joel Silver – who is the reason the film got made – worked at Warner Bros. It was great, because Joel and I together managed to find a common ground in this piece of material that we both worked on collaboratively. We’d like to believe that it was a nice time, and it’s a good film, a good product that results. But, once again, people didn’t know how to sell it. In a cross-genre film there’s no easy way to package it; so what is needed is a smaller, sort of project-intensive, way of marketing that deals with things situationally and not just a way of marketing that, if you don’t fit, then you get thrown out.

While I have all the respect in the world for Warner Bros., I would be delighted to experiment with these sorts of other alternative forms of distribution and financing, so that you are more in control of the way your movie is distributed and disseminated to the public.

But once again I used to write movies that were meant to be these sort of summer pictures and the studios were good for that. I don’t think I want to do that anymore, and so I’m drawn more to Austin’s kind of low-key, smaller budget, kind of vision-oriented approach to filmmaking, where they concentrate on a person with a unique voice.

That’s what television does, by the way, and that’s why it’s kicking the ass of all of the studios in town. They take someone with a unique voice, and if the show is even doing okay ratings, they just throw the show at ‘em and say, “You guide us. Go with it.”

All of the creators – note to Deadwood, a particularly good example, but it’s not really television, it’s cable -- that’s where you find a lot of the money is and I think you’ll find that TV shows are riskier in a lot of ways, more powerfully written, less developed and worked over by people not in a creative position.

I used to think of TV as a restrictive medium. It was full of censors and editing, and it still is to some extent, but to keep up, they’ve had to really address the writer/director, or the writer/creator as a force to be reckoned with. They give them a lot of leeway. That’s what this festival celebrates, is the individual writer/filmmaker, emphasis on writer. And (this festival) has gotten all of its priorities right. I think Hollywood is coming to realize that if you can find someone who really has a cockeyed vision, instead of teaming them up with 27 people all vying for his attention – leave him alone!

Do you feel your experience – selling a spec script that launched a franchise at such an early point in your career – helped to give power back to the writer?

It opened a window, which I think stayed open very briefly. I think it was sort of a happy coincidence for me of time and place and chance that allowed for me to arrive on the spot at the proper moment with something people needed and wanted to buy. In the long run, do you want to be the world’s highest paid screenwriter. . . in your twenties? The answer is “Probably not.”

You know, I like money as much as anybody, but let me be number four. There can be a big fight among the top three people, all vying – “I’m the best! No, I get paid more!” – and I’ll just try to do a good job. But I think it spawned – at the beginnings of the festival (in the ‘90s), it was a good keynote, because that was exactly the time that writers were getting that respect, that spec scripts were taking off and that’s when this festival was just starting. It didn’t last . . . that “writers trend.”

You’ve been quoted as saying that “directing is good dessert.” Do you feel like you’ve sort of found where you’ve always belonged?

Well, yes and no. Writing is where I belong, it’s just purgatorial. The same way that you may say where I belong is my proper weight, and no cholesterol, but it’s no fun to get there. Now, once you do all that hard work, then it’s really fun to go out for a mile jog, it invigorates you, because you’re fulfilled and you’re already working at peak capacity with all the gears turning. The writing process engages that. Now, the directing process is the social extension of that, in which you have comrades and people to get excited with, and people to commiserate with and . . . it’s just so much more fun to stand on a hilltop and think about how to stage something and have your buddies around you for the moment as entranced with something as you are, and to know that you’ve been working for 12 straight hours, but it doesn’t matter, because the last shot worked and you’re just so thrilled because you got it in the can.

Even when you reach those moments when there is no time left, and you have to get a shot or the whole scene is going to fail, and everyone looks at you and says, “We don’t understand how to do this,” and you’re suddenly – this is what directing is about, this is what it’s all about: Being alone, with no time, running out of night, you can see the sun (rising), and you have 10 minutes to figure out how to do this, and everyone is looking at me! There’s a wonderful fear, but also a kind of relaxation that overwhelms you at that moment. You just sort of stand and let them look at you and say, “Okay, let’s do this.” You think, and you come up with the idea. “Okay, I want you to do this. Well, okay we can do that, good. Let’s move over here, this will just take a second. We’ll spin it around. Do we have the time? You think we can do it? Yes? Okay, good.” And it’s not the moment of executing it, or the moment of coming up with it, it’s that moment of being poised where you don’t have an idea, and everyone is looking at you and you have no time. It’s a crisis moment.

There is no escaping the moment. If you just do what you want to do, which is go to your trailer and cry, then you know, you’ll regret it the rest of your life, because the scene won’t work. When you get through the moment, you go to bed that night and you think, “Okay, it’s not going to get that bad again.” It’s just a wonderful exhilaration to be put in a place where you know – or you’ve heard about – that kind of pressure and to have it placed on you.

There are some you admire for sensibility. Some you admire for cinematic sense and the look of the film. I’ve always loved, for instance, Sydney Pollack, for his sensibility. He’s a faultless actor’s director. He never hits a wrong note when it comes to finding the hook inside a character that drives a story forward that leads us to care about and become invested in that character’s future.

David Fincher has that same sensibility about character, but it’s coupled with an overview of this entire richness of background. This visual sense, which allows the backdrop to become a character in a way, where the style of the film and the characters in the film work together to create this feeling that’s unlike either one by itself. I mean, Fight Club, for instance is just the perfect fusion of film style, which mimics the character’s madness, which reflects the tone of the film, but you never feel like you’re distanced from those characters either.

James L. Brooks. He’s not a filmmaker who has stunning visuals, he has intuitive visuals, story-driven, character-driven visuals. He shows you what he wants you to see to reveal what the character is like. It almost seems like there’s a spectrum of people: On the one hand it’s totally character driven, on the other hand it’s totally shot driven. Somewhere in the middle there is this great mixture with Brooks and well, (Martin) Scorsese, of course, in style and character seamlessly combined. It’s hard to say. I used to love (William) Friedkin, because he had such a gritty sensibility, gritty edge to his work. You felt like you were watching real people. Like The Exorcist and The French Connection together were comprised within the set course of three or four years, and are two of the best films I think I’ve ever seen. The ‘70s as a rule were great.

Images courtesy the Austin Film Festival, Warner Bros. and Eric Uhlir.