SHANE BLACK

Buddy minded…

EXPLOSIVE START

A prolific writer, UCLA theatre-arts major Shane Black (born 1961) had never considered penning a screenplay until college friend (and future filmmaker) Fred Dekker showed him one he’d been working on. After graduating, Black wrote the spec script for a supernatural thriller called The Shadow Company that landed him an agent, but went unmade. However, the 24-year-old’s next script - Lethal Weapon - was snapped up by Warner Bros for a cool $250,000.

WRITING CHEQUES

Ditching Lethal Weapon 2 after the studio refused to let him kill off Mel Gibson’s Riggs, Black turned to his next script, The Last Boy Scout (1991) – which sparked a bidding war, eventually selling for a then-record-busting $1.75m. Although that sum was swiftly surpassed by the $3m paid for Joe Eszterhas’ Basic Instinct script, Black regained the crown again in 1994 when New Line shelled out $4m for The Long Kiss Goodnight.

ACTING OUT

‘I wanted to be an actor, but it didn’t work out,’ says Black of his early Hollywood aspirations. Even so, he hasn’t stayed off the screen entirely, with brief turns in the likes of Night of the Creeps (1986) and As Good as It Gets (1997). Black’s biggest role, though, was playing Hawkins in Predator (1987) - a role handed to him so that he’d also be available for last-minute rewrites.

DOUBLE DOWNEY

After The Long Kiss Goodnight flopped, Black spent nearly a decade in the wilderness, eventually re-emerging in 2005 with his celebrated directorial debut, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. That film’s star, Robert Downey Jr., later helped Black land the writer/ director gig on 2013’s Iron Man 3, which in turn led to Black returning to a familiar franchise – albeit now behind the camera – with 2018’s divisive (and controversial) The Predator.

FEELING FESTIVE

Several key themes and ideas repeat across Black’s work, including self-aware humour, mismatched protagonists, villains who are dark mirror images of the story’s heroes and freakishly smart kids. The most obvious, though, is surely the way Black weaves Christmas into almost every story. ‘Christmas represents a little stutter in the march of days,’ he says. ‘A hush in which we have a chance to assess and retrospect our lives.’