Over the course of the last 38 years, Shane Black has written and/or directed some of the smartest, funniest crime movies to come out of the major studios, from the highly influential “Lethal Weapon” to cult favorites like “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” and “The Nice Guys.” All of these films have been heavily influenced by 20th century pulp fiction writers, but for his latest movie, Black goes directly to the source, adapting one of the genre’s key figures for an action-comedy as offbeat, idiosyncratic, and entertaining as any Black has made.
“Play Dirty” isn’t a direct adaptation of any one of Donald Westlake’s “Parker” novels, but an original story that absorbs elements from several of the books — and adds a few from Westlake’s more comic “Dortmunder” series. The Parker books, which Westlake wrote under the pseudonym Richard Stark, have already been translated to the screen several times by directors like John Boorman (“Point Blank”) and Brian Helgeland (“Payback”), but Black’s interpretation emphasizes the humor — without losing sight of the stripped-down ruthlessness that has always made Parker a favorite of crime enthusiasts.
“Obviously the tone of the Parker books is dark,” Black told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “That said, there’s some character work that could be viewed as very quirky and potentially funny. And I thought, there have been so many iterations in the past few years of this sort of tough guy who is played mainly for for mood and sweat and noir, and I like that — but those movies have been done. Is there a version of ‘Parker’ where we don’t compromise the character, we don’t pull punches, but maybe we allow ourselves to be a little livelier?”
Making Parker livelier meant a few things, starting with casting Mark Wahlberg as the brutal thief. Black felt that Wahlberg had an innate likability on screen that meant Black didn’t have to force identification with the character by making him overly eccentric. “In the ‘70s, there used to be detective movies that would try to juice up the likability all the time,” Black said. “The character would have a parrot, and the parrot’s name was Cat, and then he’d wake up and there’s a woman’s shoe in his refrigerator. It was all an attempt to make the detective into this weird quirk fest.”
For “Play Dirty,” Black wanted to go back to basics and honor the spirit of Westlake, who he says remains the gold standard for writers who are truly obsessed with crime fiction. “He’s the guy that other mystery writers turn to,” Black said. “If you said to a bartender, ‘Hey, give me the good stuff behind the bar,’ he’d say, ‘I got some Westlake for you.’ I was drawn to the Parker books because they’re full of twists and turns and feel authentic without being dry. That love of Westlake informed me every step of the way.”
Another way that Black wanted to separate his movie from previous cinematic versions of Parker was to create a story with a sense of scale. “I love all the other iterations of Parker, but they’re very small,” he said. “Most of them are about a contained heist: stealing an armored truck, stealing diamonds, whatever.” Black wanted to “turn up the volume” by creating multiple stages to Parker’s heist, filling them with double-crosses that continually move the plot in different directions and force the characters to recalibrate their plans and expectations.
Black also stacks “Play Dirty” with ambitious and original set pieces, starting with a jaw-dropping chase on a race track that involves cars, horses and their jockeys, and a gun-toting Parker on foot. The sequence is hilarious in its outrageousness and occasionally shocking in its violence, and that tonal trickiness is something that’s been a hallmark of Black’s work ever since the suicidal Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) alternated between crying while aiming a gun at himself and reenacting Three Stooges routines on a drug bust. For Black, finding the right balance is always an ongoing process of trial and error, a battle that is largely won in the editing room.
“When you wrap filming — meaning you stop shooting, you’ve got all your shots, everyone shakes hands and goes home — you’re now at ten percent,” Black said. “Editing is where you make it. You consult friends and people you consider to be experts who know you and know what you’re looking for. They share a common mission statement with you. You say, ‘Did we get it? Are we on track?’ And they’ll say, ‘I like this joke here, but then you keep it going and it becomes a little silly.’ Sometimes, even when I like it I give it the weekend before I lock because I may not like it on Monday. When it comes to tonal shifts, I’m as in the dark as anybody.”
In addition to the cocktail of humor and violence, one of the things that stands out about the action set pieces in “Play Dirty” is the clarity of the spatial relationships; Black is a master of staging even the most quickly paced chases and shoot-outs so that the audience always has a clear sense of where everyone is in relation to each other and how perilous the stakes are. “Geography’s important,” Black said. “On the set you know where everything is and you’re assuming the audience will, but they won’t.”
Black meticulously storyboards his action scenes and, when possible, uses animatics — in fact, filmmakers interested in seeing how fully animatics can render an action scene would be advised to check out the animatic for Black’s “Iron Man 3” mansion attack sequence posted on YouTube. “You can watch it almost like it’s the movie and it was done before we shot a frame,” Black said. “ You’ll see the sophistication of the tools available to have an idea, draw it, animate, change it, and scrub it until you’ve got a directed sequence that now you can recreate, with a little leeway for some fun.”
Leaving that leeway is always a key part of Black’s process. “No matter how good the text on the page is, I see it too many times and I go, ‘Could it be better?’ Could we add something? Because what you’re looking for on screen, no matter what the genre is, is a little spark that says, ‘Oh, that was kind of like life — that was a moment I don’t expect in a movie.’ So you want to give room for an actor to suddenly give in to a little impulse that strikes you as odd.”
“Play Dirty” leaves the actors plenty of space for moments like that, particularly in its quieter moments — as in a late scene where Parker realizes his code requires him to do something he really wishes he didn’t have to. Contradictions like the one we see expressed in Wahlberg’s face when he’s about to pull the trigger are a core part of the appeal of the Parker character — as is his consummate professional skill, something Black mirrors with the craftsmanship of the filmmaking in “Play Dirty.”
“Parker books are competence porn,” Black said. “This guy just knows what to do, takes care of it, and handles it in a blue collar way. He’s not flashy. You won’t see someone descending on a wire in a black suit with laser goggles. This is the kind of guy who kicks down a door and busts somebody’s kidney with a crowbar. He has his brains, his wits, and an old school sense of street justice. The formula is never not fresh because it’s about characters thinking their way out of things. On the other hand it’s so ancient in terms of the type of pulp fiction that I cut my teeth on.”
Given that there are dozens of Parker novels with material Black can mine and that he’s such a Westlake disciple, the obvious question is whether or not he has plans for more movies with the character. “Who knows? Amazon has to be satisfied that they’ve gotten their money’s worth,” Black said. “I’m not ruling it out, but I wouldn’t speak for them. All I can do is offer a movie that hopefully is lively and fun enough that it makes people lose themselves for a couple of hours.”
“Play Dirty” is currently streaming on Prime Video. To hear the entire conversation with Shane Black about “Play Dirty” and make sure you don’t miss a single episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.