The real reason why all of Shane Black’s movies are set during Christmas: “It struck a spark”
Shane Black is one of Hollywood’s best proponents of the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” principle of moviemaking.
He first burst onto the scene as a screenwriter in the 1980s and then became a director in his own right. However, his storytelling style has remained largely the same throughout his career. Thankfully, though, it’s a brilliantly entertaining and unique style, and Black has always found new wrinkles that make the vast majority of his projects shine. What is that style, though? Well, his tales usually involve two mismatched protagonists who bicker while becoming involved in a labyrinthine, pulpy crime mystery. Oh, and they’re nearly always set at Christmas; Black’s affinity for which can be traced back to one movie in particular.
In 1985, Black was a UCLA graduate who had landed a Hollywood agent thanks to an unmade script entitled The Shadow Company. His second screenplay, an action story he envisioned as an urban thriller in the Dirty Harry mould, was called Lethal Weapon and was so good that Warner Brothers paid him $250,000 to option it. By the time the script was turned into a seminal 1987 movie starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, its tone had altered slightly into a more comedic zone, but it still had a hard edge. Crucially, director Richard Donner also kept the script’s unusual quirk of setting the action during the holidays.
As his career developed, Black became the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood when he was paid $4 million for his 1994 script The Long Kiss Goodnight. His other produced scripts included Tony Scott’s The Last Boy Scout and John McTiernan’s Last Action Hero. He then branched out into directing with 2005’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe with 2013’s Iron Man 3, and travelled back to the ’70s for the hilarious The Nice Guys.
What did all these films have in common? You guessed it – Christmas. You may say, “Hey, there are no Christmas references in The Last Boy Scout,” and you’d be correct. However, that’s only because Scott removed them from the film’s final cut. Naturally, they were present in full force in Black’s script. The Nice Guys is also not set at Christmas for 95% of its runtime, which probably worried die-hard Black fans – but they breathed a sigh of relief when the final scene flashed forward to the holidays.
Why is Black so hellbent on including the most wonderful time of the year in all his movies, though? Some may find it odd, especially because his work always contains so much violence, swearing, and general evildoing. Well, the roots of Black’s appreciation for the setting of Christmas can be traced back to one particularly influential 1975 political thriller.
In 2016, Black told Entertainment Weekly: “Christmas represents a little stutter in the march of days, a hush in which we have a chance to assess and retrospect our lives. I tend to think also that it just informs as a backdrop. The first time I noticed it was Three Days of the Condor, the Sydney Pollack film, where Christmas in the background adds this really odd, chilling counterpoint to the espionage plot.”
Black elaborated on how Condor rewired his brain in a 2022 Empire magazine feature. He spoke of the wonderful juxtaposition between the snowy Christmas atmosphere, which is almost scientifically guaranteed to make most audiences feel warm and fuzzy, and the dark scene in which Max Von Sydow’s assassin reveals to Robert Redford’s CIA researcher that he is no longer contracted to kill him.
In this film, Christmastime seems to mask something darker and more troubling under the surface, and it’s a theme Black subsequently applied to many of his movies. Black mused, “It really felt appropriate to me that Christmas was the backdrop for that. It struck a spark – to take a holiday and make it not just a backdrop but a character itself.”
Ultimately, to Black, Christmas is a much more multi-purpose tool than it may initially appear, and he has wielded it in a variety of ways to great effect. He reasoned, “It can be used as this unifier, where you see the beauty of a city decked out in Christmas splendour, or you can use it as this bleak landscape against which those same festive decorations seem to belie something else.”
