ow does someone go from selling scripts for $3-4 million to disappearing for six years only to come back and make a tiny $15 million movie? Well, that is the story of Shane Black, the screenwriter behind the Lethal Weapon series and such films as The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight and he is now back, but it wasn't exactly a pretty road.

In the early '90s Black sold his script for The Last Boy Scout for over $1 million and then followed that up in '95 by selling his script for The Long Kiss Goodnight for over $3 million. There was a perceived competition between him and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas (Basic Instinct, Showgirls), which ultimately became the reason he faded from the Hollywood scene.

"Everyone talking about the money," Black said. "I would get stopped and someone would say, 'Hey, nice to meet you. Yeah, you're really something.' I would say thank you and they would say, 'Man, the money you make!?!' I would say, 'Well, did you see the movie?'

"'No, I didn't see the movie, but you and Joe Eszterhas are really duking it out for the cash!'

"They didn't even know anything about the movie, is all they knew about was how much money I made. It's like showing your dirty laundry to the public and not only that, the public gets their friends and pretty soon you've got the whole town marching single file past your laundry pointing at all the brown spots. I thought this was not quite the way I want to do things. I want to do a small film; I want to direct; I want to get away from action. Also over that money thing, goddamn that money! I lost a couple friends over it, it was just a bad scene."

Shane's thoughts on the money are simple, "These are money records! This is my agent, this is how good my agent is, it has nothing to do with me. The truth was, I was someone that just wanted to write stories, someone that just wanted to become a better writer than the one I was. I wanted to keep going and keep advancing. I was about done with action pictures, what I tried to do was to write a romantic comedy."

Romantic comedy? To all of you cringing out there just now, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is not your typical film, it is not a romantic comedy just as much as it is not a crime thriller. This film takes everything those genres have to offer and flips them on their head.

So Shane set out to write his "romantic comedy" under the advisement and guidance of writer/director James L. Brooks (As Good as It Gets, Spanglish).

"I basically wrote this romantic comedy trying to be Jim Brooks. I was really into As Good as It Gets and I thought, 'Wow, something more like that. Less actiony,' and I wrote this really dark romantic comedy, but it was really dark, and I was like 50 pages in when Brooks read some of the pages. Although initially enthusiastic when I was 20 pages in, but by the time I was 50 pages in he said, 'You know, I gotta tell yah, this is pretty damn dark. It seems like you are kind of at sea here, floundering a little bit. It's like you're trying to be me here or something.' I was like, 'Well, Jesus Christ he knows, he caught on.'

"He goes, 'What about Chinatown for instance? Here is a movie that is character driven, it's a suspense story, a lot of mystery, it's got a bitter ending, twists and turns – it's a genre picture, but it's not an action picture.'"

Shane said, "So instead of taking the huge step of writing something utterly antithetical to the action pictures to which I had been associated, I just said, 'What if I took my romantic comedy and made it this sort of cross between a romantic comedy, kids in the big city kind of film, and a murder mystery also, but kind of dark as well, very edgy.' What you get is this edgy sort of romantic thriller that's sort of the bastard child of two fathers really. On the one hand James L. Brooks and the other Joel Silver, who shepherded the thing and guided me and practically sat on my shoulders during the editing process until we got it just they way we wanted."

With a finished script in hand Shane began shopping his project, the only difference this time – he attached himself as the director and there was nothing that was going to change that, "That's probably why it was so hard to get it made, because I had attached myself as director. I couldn't stand doing all the hard work of screenwriting anymore and then giving it all away, just wasn't working for me. It takes too much effort to sit down and write a screenplay that works, and then to send it off and then see it on the screen in one form or another that I may not like even is the equivalent of giving away the fun and just doing the work."

So after getting turned down everywhere he went he head back to old reliable, Mr. Joel Silver whom had produced the Lethal Weapon films and The Last Boy Scout and a match was made, "This movie would have never happened, but Joel liked it," Black said. "I had the advantage of coming back after some years, no one gave a shit about me anymore, and the script was very unusual and no one really liked it, except I happened to know the biggest producer in Hollywood who was willing to make a $15 million movie because he found it to be interesting."

Then it came time to cast the roles of Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) and Perry van Shrike (Val Kilmer), better known as Gay Perry, but before we get into that, where did these two polar opposite characters come from?

Shane tells us, "The movie itself echoes my own feelings having read books when I was a kid and thinking that's what men were like – James Bond or the like. They're not, you can't be that tough. So when I would attempt to be tough and reality would slap me back down I realized, 'Shit, in real life you can't be that.' So this movie sort of reflects these schleps, normal people who can sense the call of that presence, calling to them to be heroic like in fiction except they're not up to the task, in real life they're getting slapped down. So Downey's character is basically the anti-tough guy hero that is molded from my own experience, a guy who is desperately trying to fill shoes that he can't.

"Then the movie is not about people who are necessarily traditionally heroic like my other movies, but people who find ways in which to be heroic." He continues, "As for the Kilmer character, right now we're already dealing with masculine archetypes and what tough is, what male is, things like that. So it seemed interesting to me in a movie where everyone is trying to measure up to some ideal of toughness to which they'll aspire, but they'll never attain it makes sense that the one guy that does measure up is gay – once again, real life versus fiction."

Shane draws comparisons to "Will & Grace" and America's growing acceptance of gay people, but he also realized one thing when writing the movie, "I've never seen a movie, that I can think of, when the chips are down there's a guy who kicks open the door and shoots everyone and saves your ass and that's the gay guy. That's the case here. You have the one that actually knows how to use a gun, who's the tough guy hero."

Like I said, flipping the genre right on its head, "It's a reversal of a lot of things that you are used to in the traditional mold of the tough guy story," he said. "There's a lot of images of masculinity and toughness throughout these action movies which seem to be so much about ejaculation anyway with all these cannons and guns and everything spurting and going off all the time. In this movie it's like, 'Well okay, why not make it literal? Let's have him shoot a guy with his penis at one point.'"

While that may sound a bit odd, it isn't completely literal. Shane's approach was to celebrate "masculinity in a way the '70s movies used to – tough guys of the '70s were so much more interesting and the '60s."

Obviously Downey and Kilmer found their way into the film. Downey as the wannabe tough guy that just can't measure up and Kilmer as the gay private eye that more than measures up, but there can also be concerns here. Both Kilmer and Downey are known as two actors that aren't necessarily the easiest to work with, but Shane didn't seem to be discouraged, "Of course Joel and I looked at each other and said, 'Val Kilmer and Robert Downey?' there was a little bit of apprehension. Frankly though, they both performed impeccably, all the hype is for nothing. All the stuff about their being difficult… not on this picture, maybe on someone else's movie."

It didn't even take much convincing to get the two guys into their parts, "Kilmer wanted to do a comedy, and it's Joel Silver, I don't even pretend it's me. Here's Joel Silver offering a movie to Robert Downey Jr. to star in, of course Downey's going to take that if the script is halfway decent. He needs a starring role, he hasn't had one in years. Now he's got a lot."

Shane continued, "Kilmer had just come available when we decided to cast that role, and we were doing it for $15 million and there was some pressure to do it for a lot more and the studio encouraged offers to Harrison Ford, people like that, but when we said let's just do it for fifteen that was the precise moment Val Kilmer had just come available and his agent had just been calling, it felt fortuitous."

So with no problems with these two and the two of them getting along so well, I wasn't convinced there was absolutely nothing juicy Shane could tell me from the set. If you have already checked out the Val and Robert feature [click here] you know what I am talking about, these two are wild men!

Shane tells us, "On the set Kilmer is sort of a goofball, he's a funny guy, not many people know that. He's desperate for people to know that, he's like, 'Didn't they see Real Genius?' but he admits that he's been playing all these heavy, heavy roles – he's like Mr. Intensity. I think he wanted a chance to expand people's awareness of what he is capable of doing.

"Downey's very intense, he stands close to you when he is talking, and he's looking in your eyes because he doesn't want your solicitude, he doesn't want your pity, he just wants you to be straight with him, no condescension. Treat him like a professional, he's there to do his job. As long as you're straight with him he's fine.

"They have a task, and part of that task is having fun and liking each other enough so that it appears spontaneous and natural, so that it comes off as a genuine relationship between two people who've become used to each other," Shane said, but there were some eccentricities.

"Val would ride his little bicycle around the set, and Downey would do Kung Fu, he studies Wing Chung, he had a trainer there. It's a little eccentric, one guy's doing Kung Fu and the other guy's going around on a bicycle he's three sizes too small for, but eccentricity to me does not signify 'difficult.' I'm happy with eccentricity. Please, give me more."

So, with Kiss Kiss in the bag and rave reviews pouring in from all corners of the world, where does Black go from here?

"My hope is that I can get into the horror genre and find something unusual there that intrigues me. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang conjures all the elements, all the things I love about private eye movies and the tough guys of the '60s, I'd like to do the same thing with a horror story, because I hate slasher movies. I wanna make an unusual horror movie, I'm not even sure what it would be yet, but it's an attempt, similarly, to conjure up all the elements I love about horror films and try to assemble something that represents my take on what I would like to see in a horror film. The Exorcist is my favorite film so it's surprising I haven't tried horror sooner."

On top of that it doesn't seem like Shane will be leaving his scripts for someone else to direct ever again, "Write the movie; it's hard, pull your hair out, but then you get to put it on its feet and it's a blast, so much fun. I'd like to say it was difficult, and I had a terrible time, but it was actually a snap. It was actually really fun and all I can do is hope to do it again."

Is it going to be another six years before we hear from Shane again?

"God I hope not. I really do."