Shane Black is adamant that ‘The Exorcist’ is film noir: “My favourite movie”
One of the most entertaining movie genres has always been the action-buddy one; two usually quite disparate characters thrown together in some kind of chaotic situation, one of whom is usually more sensible than the other, and often involving a huge car jump in which one of the two says something along the lines of “You’re not seriously going to…” (clue: he is).
There have been many, many examples of this kind of film over the years, and a lot of that is down to one man, Shane Black.
He was the man who in the late 1980s came up with the idea for Lethal Weapon, featuring the unhinged Mel Gibson and Danny (“I’m too old for this”) Glover, writing it in six weeks and setting himself on the road to writing and directing some of the most thrill-packed movies in history, including The Last Boy Scout, Predator and the absolutely fantastic The Long Kiss Goodnight from 1996 with Samuel L Jackson.
Black also wrote the follow-up Lethal Weapon 2, which was originally titled Play Dirty and was rejected by Warner Bros for being too dark and gritty. This month sees the release of Black’s latest movie, also titled Play Dirty and starring Mark Wahlberg and LaKeith Stanfield. While it is an action-buddy thriller, it’s not actually anything to do with Lethal Weapon – it is, in fact, a Parker story, the lead character of which you may remember was originally played by Jason Statham back in 2013.
Based on the books by Donald E Westlake, the film hit Amazon Prime Video this week and has attracted some decent reviews that praise it as being a successful throwback to those ‘80s popcorn movies so many of us still love. Black is no stranger to movie adaptations of classic books, and in picking out his favourite Noir movies to Empire he outlined a few that were exceptional.
One was Three Days of the Condor, the little-known but superb 1975 New Hollywood thriller that captures the paranoia of the time and stars the sadly missed Robert Redford. Black calls it “Quirky, awkward, real”. Another on his list is the Coen brothers’ classic No Country for Old Men from 2009, adapted from the Cormac McCarthy novel, of which Black says: “Crime as literature, pure and simple. Violence that is clumsy, erratic, shocking – even comical. Look and learn.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Black also goes for the seminal 1973 horror The Exorcist on his noir shortlist too, saying: “My favorite movie. Noir? Yup. From the compromised ex-boxer priest to the plodding, sardonic detective, the budding evil gives purpose to their wearying lives of quiet desperation. Also, it’s got banter. As in wisecracks. Yes, The Exorcist.”
That movie was a spectacular, controversial and hugely influential success when it came out in the first part of the ‘70s, banned in many parts of America, causing extreme audience reactions and enormous queues outside cinemas. Again, it was based on a novel written two years earlier by William Peter Blatty, who adapted it for the screenplay and earned an Oscar in the process.
Due to the nature of the film’s content, it is made even more powerful by the fact that the production seemed to be affected by almost curse-like conditions; there were injuries sustained to both cast and crew, and some even died. Throughout the filming, close family members of the crew also died; however, many believed the ‘curse’ was exaggerated by both the writers and the studio to help publicity.
Black, meanwhile, is believed to be working on a treatment for Lethal Weapon 5 (not the one done by Mac, Dennis and Charlie in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) that will aim to reunite Glover and Gibson some 28 years after the last instalment.
