Shane Black and Joel Silver on The Nice Guys, Finding a Voice, and Defending Mel Gibson

This week sees the release of ‘The Nice Guys’, a new crime thriller meets buddy comedy starring Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe as a pair of deadbeat private investigators searching for a missing girl in the seedy underbelly of 1970s LA.

From writer-director Shane Black and uber-producer Joel Silver, it’s everything you’d expect from the creative team behind ‘Lethal Weapon’, ‘The Last Boy Scout’, and ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’.

From its whip-smart dialogue and subverted genre conventions, right down to its mismatched heroes and a wiser-than-the-adults youngster embroiled in the action, it’s very much a Shane Black movie.

(Above: Joel Silver and Shane Black - Credit: PA)

We spoke to the pair about the film, what constitutes “a Shane Black movie”, the future of ‘Lethal Weapon’, on-screen chemistry, literary influences and much, much more.

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We start off with a question about a line Ryan Gosling’s character Holland March has where he vehemently slams ventriloquism as a form of entertainment…

Yahoo Movies UK: First things first - what have you got against ventriloquists?

Shane Black: The fact is, it never works. It never works! Because my eye automatically – they want to distract you with the puppet – but you go straight to the guy. That’s all you’re watching and you can always see his lips moving.

It’s a great aside and it’s moments like that that made the film seem different to me…

Joel Silver: It’s his voice.

Is it always scripted or is it every improvised?

SB: Ryan [Gosling] and Russell [Crowe] were very, very effective at adding and throwing things in, sometimes on the spur of the moment, or more likely we’d sit in a room like this at the hotel, the night before, and talk about the next day’s work, or the next week’s work if it were a weekend, and that’s when we would hope to get on board with some of the things they wanted to add or change.

You want to get through your day. You can’t just turn on the lights and have them start improv-ing. But the good news is they make it all look improv-ed. That’s what great actors can do. They’ll come up with stuff and then they just execute it like it just occurred to them. You get a real spontaneous feel out of the feel of the movie for that reason.

Did you know it was always going to be Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling playing Jackson Healy and Holland March?

SB: No.

JS: It comes together. You never know whether it’s going to come together. When we finally decided to make the movie about 2 years ago, it just happened very quickly. Russell was interested, Ryan wanted to work with Russell, and it all came together very quickly.

It was lucky, then, that there was good chemistry between them?

SB: Yeah. I think Russell says it best. He says: “Look, chemistry isn’t as complex as it may seem. We just listen to each other. You just focus in.”

I’ve noticed this too when I saw them for the first time in a hotel room, prior to filming. That great actors like these guys, they’ll meet each other and they sort of suss each other out. They don’t have to talk about the movie; they can talk about sports. But they circle each other, figuring out how best to feed off each other, then pretty soon even after 20 minutes they’ve got it and they can talk as though they’ve known each other for 20 years.

Because actors’ chemistry comes from listening to the other actors and being generous with the other actors. These guys really knew about that concept of generosity, they can let the other guy shine in a way that made them look great.

JS: It also came from his voice too. These characters were created by Shane and when they read the characters they loved the characters and that starts the chemistry. The writing starts the chemistry and then they have to bring to it.

To me it felt very much like “a Shane Black film” which i’m struggling to define in my head exactly…

SB: Me too.

What is it though that makes a Shane Black film a Shane Black film?

JS: He just has a unique, singular voice. He just does. Lethal Weapon was 30 years ago and you had lines where, you know like where Murtaugh (Danny Glover’s character) says: “God hates me” and Riggs (Mel Gibson’s) says “Well, hate him back, it works for me”. And that’s just two lines. That’s just Shane.

Murtaugh says “Is there anyone you haven’t killed?” and he says “Well, I haven’t killed you yet”, and that was 30 years ago. So he’s built on that. I used to say that when I was a kid I had Lionel Trains and the carriages would couple together. They’d come and they’d click together, and that’s what the dialogue is like in these movies. They flow in a way that is just very effective and again, that’s what a Shane Black movie is.

There are other pictures that try to copy that or try to deal with that flow, that evolution, but then he does it better than anybody.

SB: But I go back too. I think I have a theory about this. First off, there’s William Goldman (American novelist and screenwriter - won two Oscars for ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ and ‘All The President’s Men’) who was a tremendous influence on me and his dialogue was different than anybody else’s at the time. It had that snap and crackle that no-one could emulate. But I studied those scripts and I’ve read his novels.

Secondly, I think that other people who may go back in the well, or go back to other movies for their inspirations, but my – especially in the suspense genre – my influences were more often in books, in literature. So the stuff I put out there, people say “what is this? This is a Shane Black movie” but no, it’s because I’ve read a thousand of these books, man.

They’re all in my house with the crazy covers, with the lurid imagery, usually painted by Robert McGinnis (prolific American artist, illustrated over 1000 paperback covers and many early James Bond movie posters), and those kinds of pulp paperbacks that were occasionally just knock off exploitation, but in which you could sometimes find true greatness.

Certainly writers like Ed McBain (American author, wrote ‘Blackboard Jungle’, and countless crime novels often under pseudonyms) AKA Evan Hunter, who wrote the ‘87th Precinct’ books, those are incredibly playful and the dialogue is so memorable, so from these people.

Gregory McDonald who wrote the ‘Fletch’ books, that are very different from the movies, those are the people who influence my voice. Warren Murphy who I’ve actually worked with (the American author and co-creator of the Remo Williams series, co-wrote the story for ‘Lethal Weapon 2′), who died recently, but was a tremendous voice in the suspense genre.

Sorry to keep referring to you in the third person, but does having Shane Black direct this make it more of a Shane Black movie?

JS: The first few scripts that he wrote and we worked together, I don’t know if the directors really understood the tone he was trying to get. They got a lot of it, but I think it took him to really interpret his own voice.

The purest Shane Black movie up to now was ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ (2005 comedy starring Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer, pictured above) because he wrote it and directed it. You can hear Shane Black’s voice in ‘Iron Man 3′. It’s very different from ‘Iron Man 1 and 2′, because you have Shane’s voice in there, but this one I think is the best film he’s done.

I think ‘The Nice Guys’ is the best film he’s done.

SB: This is arguably Shane Black’s best film. His earlier work I didn’t like. [Laughs]

JS: You have great characters. You have great actors playing those characters. I always say this is not a comedy. It is a thriller. It is a mystery. It is a suspense story but it’s very funny, that’s what it is. It’s all those things but it’s very funny.

SB: A comedy would be Healy and March have to transport an elephant from LA to Chicago. This is not that. There’s no premise that says this is a comedy. The premise, in fact, says everything but. The premise says ‘holy s*** this is a dark piece’. And then these two schmucks who are confronted with what would normally be associated with the real tough guy private eye solving this, they’re thrust into a situation, and their inabilities to deal with it are what creates the comedy.

How is Hollywood different now to when you both started back in the 1980s?

SB: Well I’d love to say that Hollywood now is really smart and wonderful and helpful but it’s the same.

JS: It’s not that different. It’s the same. The technology is different. There’s guys like you that have a better sense of what we’re doing and know how we get there.

SB: Yes. You know more. The audience knows so much more thanks to you.

JS: But I think we’ve still got to find inter-personal relationships, we still have to find characters, we still have to find a way to put them in situations that the audience will be engaged in, and we’ve got to entertain the audience. It’s the question – how do we get there?

We’re not having teams of superheroes fighting each other. We have these two guys trying to solve a case, and it’s just trying to keep it fresh and original, and keep it moving, and entertain the audience.

SB: We did the superhero draft where Healy gets bitten by a boar from space and he develops teeth, but it just didn’t work.

How would the film have differed if it had been a TV show?

JS: At one point, through part of the process, after ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ we were approached by a lot of people saying “do you have something like this for a television series?”

So we hauled this out and dusted it off and said “what about this?” and there was interest in it, but it luckily never happened, or we would never have been able to have done it like this.

SB: Yeah, this is better. TV’s great, it’s lucrative, they say it’s the writer’s medium – I’ve yet to experience that – but I think that features are the way to go. It’s just more full-blown, it’s more fully realised. You get Joel behind it, you get more money to spend making it look impeccable.

And these two actors that you won’t find on television, are just sent from heaven. They make the piece sing.

You’re both responsible for some of the greatest action movies ever – what do you think of the state of modern action cinema?

JS: We’re in the best place. We are in a really brand new golden age of Hollywood, of movies, people are seeing these movies all over the world. It’s an incredibly exciting time. Yes, there is a preponderance of high-end visual effects movies but there always were.

In the era of the 70s, the fantasy science fiction films were like a niche and there was everything else. Well, now it’s reversed. These kinds of movies are a niche and fantasy science fiction is everything else.

But with movies like ‘The Hangover’, there have been movies that come out that have had incredible ideas. Like ‘Sherlock Holmes’ that we did, that was not a big visual effects movie, it was a two hander, like this is, but I think if we do our job and make things fresh and original and present something that people really haven’t seen before – even though it’s set in the 70s – they haven’t seen THIS before, it can be successful. I hope it is.

I hear you’re thinking of making ‘Sherlock Holmes 3′ pretty soon - is that true?

JS: We’re trying. It looks like we have a shot in the fall to maybe make the movie and I hope that can happen. [Robert] Downey Jr. wants to do it, Guy [Ritchie] would like to do it, everybody wants to do it, but we just got to see if we can get it all together, we haven’t got a lot of time, because Downey is very busy.

Downey being in the MCU is a very difficult – his time isn’t really his own – he’s like an NBA player, he has to follow the season. But we have a shot, we’re going to try this fall.

You said in an interview with Uproxx recently that RDJ wants Mel Gibson to direct ‘Iron Man 4′, were you joking?

SB: He had mentioned it to me once, I don’t know if that’s still his opinion, but he’s said that publicly. He said that he would be a great choice. Those two are good friends.

I’ll go on record. I love Mel. I’d love to see him direct it. I will say that I have no interest in persecuting anyone for something they say while they are drunk. Because if I’m drunk, I’m gonna deliberately try to p*** you off by being as belligerent as I can. And that’s not me.

I don’t believe in that whole “In vino veritas” thing. “Oh that’s more who they are with drink!” - No. It’s not him. If you’re drunk, you’re drunk. You’re an asshole, you shouldn’t be held accountable.

You should be held accountable, but it’s certainly not who you are. So…

So, talking of Mel Gibson and ‘Lethal Weapon’ – is that franchise dead and buried for you guys now?

JS: They’re doing a TV series of ‘Lethal Weapon’ in the States.

SB: We could compete with our own movie series!

JS: When we finished the last movie, ‘Lethal Weapon 4′ (above), we felt like we’d closed the book on ‘Lethal Weapon’. I really felt like the story had run its course. Now this television series is starting in the fall, which is a reinvention for television of the material.

It was exciting, thrilling time to make those movies, but…

SB: It was a good run.

JS: It was a good run, but I try to find other ways other forms to do it, and I think that ‘Sherlock Holmes’ is another form, ‘Kiss Kiss’ was another form, ‘The Nice Guys’ another form…

SB: And if we’re lucky, god willing, The Nice Guys is a success and people like these characters and want to see them. We have to break out into a niche that transcends the competition of very big, highly publicised, tentpole movies, and I hope people find this.

I think they will, but let’s see cross our fingers that this is a nice summer.

‘The Nice Guys’ is in cinemas now. Watch a trailer below…

Image credits: Rex/PA/Icon/Warner Bros.