Gibson's not going to play a gay guy, that's ridiculous! 
The prodigiously successful screenwriter of Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight is back after an eight-year career break with a razor-sharp comedy thriller inspired by hard-boiled detective fiction and classic film noir. In Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Robert Downey Jr plays a luckless thief who gets whisked away to Hollywood for a screen test, only to find himself embroiled in a convoluted mystery involving a gay private eye (Val Kilmer) and more than one dead body. It's been a huge hit on the festival circuit, but as Shane Black reveals it was hardly an easy sell...
You made a conscious decision to take a break from the movie game. Why?
I think I just had an aversive reaction to Hollywood. Writing scripts is a laborious job that can be a real pain. And then when you finish them you give them away, which was very unsatisfying because it put me right back where I started. It was a gruelling process, coupled with the fact that I wasn't getting attention as a writer - I was solely being treated as if I was a businessman. The writing was difficult, I lost a few friends over the money and it didn't feel like fun anymore.
But you're back now, and directing as well. How did that come about?
I had this notion that I wanted to change everything - to have a bit more control over the material and have more fun - so it seemed like the thing to do. For a long time I'd assumed it was a lofty enterprise to which I could never aspire, when in fact it's very learnable and I knew a good deal more than I thought I did. I began to suspect I could do it, and then I became certain I wanted to.
How did you come up with the idea for Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang?
Because of my aversion to action movies, I started this piece as a romantic comedy. But it wasn't very good; it was very dark. A friend of mine, James L Brooks, read the pages and said he felt I was at sea - he didn't know where I was going with it. "You're trying too hard to be me!" he said, and I admitted that was most likely true. He said I should stop taking this giant continental leap away from the action movie and do a movie like Chinatown: a genre piece, but not an action film. My footing seemed a bit surer in that direction; I could do a slightly more interesting, obscure piece without throwing out the concept of mystery and suspense altogether. And it was precisely that - taking a romantic comedy and turning it into a mystery suspense piece - that got me going, and all the ideas that had been circling had permission to land at that point.
Robert Downey Jr has had his share of personal problems. Did you come up against any opposition when you decided to cast him?
The studios were quite reticent; there was the sense that Robert in a starring role was not a sufficient draw. So when we cast him there was lots of pressure to bring in a big name - a Harrison Ford, or a Mel Gibson. I mean, lots of luck! Gibson's not going to play a gay guy, that's ridiculous! Finally Joel [Silver] and I looked at each other and said, "Let's just get two good actors and make the $15m version of this movie we set out to make." Val Kilmer was fortuitously available at that time so we went that way.
They may not be huge stars these days but they work brilliantly together...
The guys have a unique chemistry together, so it feels like the bargain of the century to me. They cut their price out of passion for the work and the desire to do something different - Kilmer I know was particularly keen to do a comedy. It was the first time they'd ever been in a movie together too. In a way that's the real draw of this movie, more than either of them individually.
So have you finally turned your back on the action genre?
It's ironic that I'm the one who's often equated with action films, because the movies I based everything on were thrillers - Dirty Harry, Point Black, Bullitt and The French Connection, movies which had action sequences but didn't revolve around them. The character-driven thrillers started to disappear as people wrongly copied things. They'd see a movie like Die Hard which was making a lot of money and make them with just the explosions, and without the characters and the suspense. Without pointing fingers there are too many, especially this year, that are just not compelling or interestingly written. If anything, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is a commercial for that old-style kind of filmmaking.
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is released in UK cinemas on Friday 11th November 2005.
