The CulturePulp Q&A: Shane Black


As promised to readers of The Sunday Oregonian: Here's the extra-long "director's cut" of my interview with "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" writer-director Shane Black:



Shane Black isn't a household name, exactly -- but he's more or less responsible for the action-movie boom of the late '80s and early '90s.

At age 22, the writer and actor (whom you might remember as the bespectacled commando in "Predator") sold a spec script to Warner Bros. for $250,000. It was titled "Lethal Weapon." And it launched a four-film franchise -- not to mention a thousand buddy-cop imitators -- and helped make Black the highest-paid screenwriter of his day.

Black revealed a talent for writing nasty, sharp, hilarious dialogue. And he subsequently made record-setting millions writing "The Last Boy Scout" and "The Long Kiss Goodnight" -- box-office disappointments that later found cult audiences on home video.

And then, other that putting on his legendary Halloween parties, Black sort of disappeared.

For ten years.

He reportedly struggled with depression, his own perfectionist tendencies and a serious ambivalence about the Hollywood system that made him rich. But now he's back -- and better than ever -- with his debut as a writer-director, "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang."

As I gushed in my review of the film: This fantastic, low-budget romantic crime comedy retains everything that was great about Black's earlier work -- namely, his jet-black one-liners, subversion of action-movie clichés and deliciously cynical worldview. It throws a stupid thief (Robert Downey, Jr.), a gay detective (Val Kilmer) and a failed actress (Michelle Monaghan) into an L.A. murder mystery as convoluted as "The Big Sleep."

I talked with Black about "Kiss Kiss," his guardian angels Brooks and Silver, those noted eccentrics Downey and Kilmer, his cult action masterpieces, tough directorial lessons, lame modern blockbusters, how to keep your spirits up in L.A., and much, much more. An edited transcript follows the jump. (Warning: occasional strong talk.)

Click here to read the interview!

_______________




SHANE BLACK'S GUARDIAN ANGELS: JOEL SILVER and JAMES BROOKS

Q. I love that "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" starts out feeling like a setup for a premise comedy -- and then almost entirely abandons that premise.

A. Right.

Q. When Robert Downey Jr.'s character successfully auditions for a movie part while running from the cops, it's just an excuse to get Downey and Val Kilmer together. They never even set foot on a film set.

A. Well, I wanted to do something that felt slightly "off." I wanted to avoid the cliché private-eye story, with smoke-filled rooms and bleak neon and guys with cigarettes. I wanted to make a sort of weird character comedy that was also a private-eye movie. That was the trick -- to combine the two.
Right around the time of 9/11, I'd been trying for a year or two to write a romantic comedy -- and it wasn't happening.

Q. Is this the thing you were working on in James L. Brooks' office?

A. Yeah. And he suggested that I not leap quite so far away from the action genre; I was almost overcompensating. So I decided that a murder mystery would make it more palatable to do the funny things I'd do in a relationship comedy -- but have the same sort of edge you'd expect from a suspense movie. It was a combination that, in fact, made it easy to write.
What you're responding to is that I'm trying to do a mishmash of stuff that feels like it might happen in real life, it's so peculiar -- combined with a darker private-eye aspect .

Q. I read that great interview with you in Creative Screenwriting, and I have to say: I was surprised to learn that James L. Brooks has been there for you over the past few years. What do you two discuss?

A. We just talk mostly about the process of writing. He, in his own way, is just as tormented and perfectionistic as anyone. Without sounding pretentious, that's a quality I share. We've gotta get it right.
He said something to me once that I remember very well: "If you're going to torture yourself so much, why not torture yourself over writing? At least that's something that seems sort of noble, you know?" Be tortured over something worthwhile -- with a result at the end. He and I both go through a process that's very hard on our selves, and perfectionist to the nth degree.
Now, the surprise -- to a lot of readers, probably -- is that Joel Silver's the same way. They seem like such disparate men, James Brooks and Joel Silver, but you'd be surprised at how similar they are. Not just in their desire to make a product that's as good as it can be, but also in that Joel has an insane amount of knowledge about film and film craft. And his timing -- in the editing room, the way he'd tweak a scene to make a joke play -- was the same way I'd seen Brooks do it.

Q. I'd love to see those two guys in the same room, talking.

A. [laughs] I don't know when that's gonna happen.
_______________




THOSE 'VIVID PERSONALITIES,' DOWNEY and KILMER

Q. How'd you get Joel Silver involved in producing something this tiny?

A. I think it was sort of a bait-and-switch at first. I sort of came shuffling into his office with my tail between my legs -- after having been turned down all over town. And he looked at the script, and I knew he'd like it, because we share a sensibility. And Joel championed it to the studio; he kept telling them, "If you want to put a big actor in it, then do it. Go and get Jack Nicholson; go and get Harrison Ford."
And so at first, I think the studio thought, "Maybe this is a big movie." As you say, Warner Brothers doesn't really need to make a $15-million picture. But Joel and I were having such a good time with this script that finally he just looked at me and said, "You know, let’s not wait any longer. Get two really good actors." I said, "Yes. Please. Thank you. Let's make the $15-million version of this."
We had Downey lined up, and the studio was scouring for a bigger, bigger, bigger actor to play against him -- and by bigger, I mean $20-million salary. I don't mean to imply that Val Kilmer's not a movie star; I just mean that he wasn't the $20-million box-office draw you'd expect from Harrison Ford.

Q. Right. Sure.

A. Well, you know, that pressure went away -- the studio just said, "Joel, do what you want to do. Call us when the picture's locked. We trust you."
And at that point, Val Kilmer became available. Now, as you can imagine, we looked at each other and said, "Are we really up for Val Kilmer and Robert Downey Jr. in the same picture together, given their … illustrious pasts?" And I think there might have been some doubt on the part of the powers-that-be about my abilities, as a first-time director, to deal with two such … vivid personalities.
But I had a sense from Robert that that wouldn't be a problem. In fact, Mel Gibson -- who's Downey's good friend, and has been ever since "Air America" -- called and told Joel at one point, "Look, the kid's clean." I'm telling you this because Mel had some substance-abuse problems in his past, as well. And he said, "There's a talent that we can't afford to squander. I'm vouching for the kid, because his act is together. He's too good to waste."




Q. And this is the best work Downey's done in years. I loved the way he delivered the voice-over narration.

A. He can take lines that would potentially sound smug or bratty in someone else's mouth, and he's so endearing -- he has such a disarming personality.
Since making the film, every time I meet a girl, and she offhandedly asks, "Who's in it?" and I say, "Val Kilmer," she goes, "Oh, he's a great actor!" And then I say, "And Robert Downey" -- and they just melt into a puddle.

Q. [laughs] The Brat Pack mystique comes right back to the fore.

A. Something about this guy and women. They just look in his eyes and they fall apart. Now of course he's married.
But anyway -- he was an angel. And Kilmer came aboard and behaved faultlessly. His acting, his behavior, was unimpeachable.

Q. There was no strip of blue cloth that he insisted on wearing around his arm [as Kilmer infamously did on the set of "The Island of Dr. Moreau"]?

A. No. The strangeness that's normally associated with him is all about his focus on character. He'd been playing a bunch of dark characters -- and it probably made him seem so intense that it may have been seen as frightening by some people. But here's a comedy -- which he'd wanted to do for years.




Q. People forget he was in "Top Secret!" and "Real Genius."

A. Yup. He called me up and said, "Thank God. I've been trying to find someone who'd say, 'We remember that you're funny.'" I think he was kind of perceiving the need to re-invent and have more fun.
You know, he loves doing the heavy stuff, because he's a pure actor. He can handle highly charged emotional roles. But he's also a kid inside, and I think he hadn't had a chance to play in a while.

Q. I would have loved to see how he was on the set of "Spartan" -- because he's so Method-y, and Mamet's so whatever the opposite of that is.
Did he approach his role in a Method-y way on your set? You didn't have to address him as "Gay Perry," did you?

A. No, no. There was nothing like that. He was just a normal Joe, an everyday guy. In fact, he let us in on his acting process. We'd be sitting in a trailer while he was trying out different vocal ranges for the character, because he didn't want to do a gay stereotype -- the lispy voice or the really feminine carriage. He wanted to be subtle. So he'd dial it up -- he'd say, "Is that too much?" -- and he'd dial it back.
One night, he called me as the character. He didn't tell me -- he was talking weird, in this really low, sarcastic vocal register. And finally I said, "Whoa -- I don't mean to be rude or anything, but are you the character now?" And he says, [adopts low voice] "Yeah, I'm trying out my voice." He was fascinating.

Q. I think my favorite line in "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" is one of his: "This isn't good cop/bad cop; this is fag and New Yorker." Was there any fretting in any quarters about making his character gay?

A. Mm -- no. Honestly, maybe if it had been an $80-million movie. But for $15 million? "Will & Grace" has done a lot in that regard -- making accessible the idea that a person can be gay and still be a nice person.
The reason I like this movie so much in that regard is that very seldom do you have the gay character be the one who, when the chips are down, kicks down the door, kills everybody and saves the day. I don't think that character's ever been gay before that I can think of.

Q. Well, you know, 20 years ago there was that incredibly offensive movie [ "Partners" ] where John Hurt was Ryan O'Neal's gay police partner. You know, the one where Hurt's on the poster with the hair dryer?

A. Yeah -- and he was ironing clothes?

Q. [laughs] Yeah. We've come a long way.

_______________




MISSING THE '60s

Q. William Goldman relates a story in which you told him you're jealous of him because he got to write movies in the '60s. What did you miss?

A. What I missed was the ability to tell stories that felt more like novels -- that had more edge to them, and more risk.
There are a lot of obscure movies in the '60s that are thrillers that don't have happy endings. Odd movies like "Vanishing Point," or even "Point Blank" or "Night Moves," that had this sort of bittersweetness about them -- this melancholy where the ending was, you know, "Wow, that's great … I guess." And you didn't know whether the hero had been scarred for life. I think there was just a weight, a gravity, to movies that were made back then -- where you could take a left turn and the studio wouldn't go, "Whoa whoa whoa whoa! This doesn't fit our demographic!"
And today -- not with Warner's, because I had a great experience with them, but in general -- I think there's a pressure to sort of sanitize things. Especially today, with the prevalence of the Moral Majority, it's almost like you can't get away with giving someone a harsh look without some citizen's group coming down on you.

Q. And I think studios weren't as worried about profit then. Clearing a couple million dollars' profit on a film was just fine in the '60s, if I'm not mistaken.

A. They could even make a movie that made a big profit and then say, "There. What's next?" without saying "Oops, where's the sequel?" I love that you didn't have to make a sequel just because your movie did well. Although I end up always setting them up for sequels anyway. [laughs]
_______________




ELVIS and ABRAHAM

Q. Another thing I liked about "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" was the over-the-top way you made fun of action-film tropes. During the screening, we were cracking up when (without spoiling anything) Elvis and Abraham Lincoln walked into the room. How did you judge how far to go with that sort of thing?

A. It's sort of a tightrope-walk -- because you want people to feel kind of stirred or moved by the serious things that are happening to Harry. How much comedy can you get away with and still have that?
My feeling was, once again, in the '60s -- movies like "Slaughterhouse-Five," Kubrick's stuff (I'm not equating myself to those, by the way) -- you could do incredibly weird stuff that was just out there and still keep people watching the movie and having an emotional reaction.
I didn't know how far to push it. I just knew that I'd been off the scene for a few years. I wanted to come back and do something, throw the kitchen sink into that stew -- and I didn't want to go halfway on anything. So when the joke would occur to me, if I thought it was funny, it went in the movie, and if it's too much, we can back it out later. But I just had a sense that this movie had to be boisterous, brawling, loud … constantly stuffing new ideas in there.
There were a couple of people who said, "Hey! I keep getting jerked out of the movie!" But that's a couple -- as opposed to the other 200 in the audience who seem to be laughing. I think we hit a balance between being odd and self-referential and still being accessible enough that you could follow the story on an emotional level, and be moved by it at points.

Q. Now, that scene with Elvis and Lincoln -- which I won't discuss in detail because, again, I don't want to spoil anything -- that wasn't in response to any studio edict, was it?

A. No, no. That's just a gag I thought of while I was developing the script.

Q. It's sort of the ultimate eff-you to studio interference. It's funny and satisfying -- but it does have a certain … middle-digit quality.

A. Yeah. I think there's a way to poke fun. Have you ever gone to one of those roasts? Some of the people, the guy they're roasting is laughing with them. Other times, you look at the guy, and you realize, "Uh-oh -- the guy who's roasting him just went a little too far."
The pokes I take at studios and Hollywood and L.A. -- in general, my feeling is that they're good-natured. I mean, they're certainly not vicious. I think they're things people will smile at. And if they don't, to hell with 'em.

_______________




REDISCOVERING 'THE LAST BOY SCOUT' and 'THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT'

Q. I've been dying to ask you this for years: Please confirm or deny my suspicion that "The Last Boy Scout" was designed to be not only a decent action movie, but also a wonderful satire of the form.
Each character has three or four personal tragedies when one would have sufficed. There's that hilariously evil and polite gay henchman, and the satire of the entertainment industry through sports. Were you and Tony Scott purposeful when you went that far over the top?

A. A lot of that is probably not conscious -- not to say it's not there, because I'm such a strong believer in the subconscious. But Tony and I never talked about it.

Q. Interesting.

A. We just wanted to do a private-eye movie that starts small, like a typical '70s private-eye movie, and by the end has expanded into this fast, hard, and loose kind of caper that is much bigger -- where the detective is in so far over his head.
There were changes to make it less like an action movie -- with the helicopters and the stadium and the horse -- because they already feel like parody for me. And I didn't want that, actually.

Q. You didn't? Interesting. Because I think it's hilarious as parody. And I'm certainly not trying to insult you -- but I loved that a guy opens a briefcase and explodes, and we cut to everyone in the stadium laughing.

A. Yes. Well, there's that. I always do that. Like at the end of "Long Kiss Goodnight," originally there's an explosion and Santa's sleigh is thrown 100 feet through the air and the guy inside dies -- and the kids run over and grab his toys. But you know, sometimes those little comic touches don't fit.

Q. I just had a sort of "Last Boy Scout" day -- I watched your movie in the afternoon and "Domino" in the evening. And it was interesting to see how you two had gone different ways -- Scott has gone off in a very stylistic direction, and you've gone in a more character-driven, dialogue-driven direction.

A. Well, I think my playwriting background came to the fore because I had $15 million to spend -- and Tony had [laughs] a lot more than that.

Q. Several of my film-geek friends tell me they discovered "The Long Kiss Goodnight" on home video. Have you been approached by people who've re-discovered your films that were maybe regarded as "disappointments" by the mainstream press at the time?

A. It seems to me that "Long Kiss Goodnight" and "Last Boy Scout" have become cult films.

Q. Oh, definitely.

A. I hear people talk about them. In fact, there was a rapper at one point named "Charli Baltimore" [named after Geena Davis' "Long Kiss" character]. One night, while she was sitting with Biggie Smalls -- the East Coast rapper who was subsequently murdered -- they watched "Long Kiss Goodnight" and looked at each other, apparently, and said, "What the hell kind of movie is that?" [laughs] Subsequently, she took the name for her rap act.
So it appeals to the most interesting people. In the oddest places, it'll pop up and slap me in the face -- whether it's an old woman or a little kid or a businessman telling me, "Yeah -- my wife loves that movie."

_______________




HARMONY LANE, HOLLYWOOD NEVER-BEEN

Q. "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" is pretty satirical of L.A. without being obvious about it. Every character is ambivalent about the Hollywood system, wanted to succeed in it, and is now just a little too old for it. How much of that reflects your own worldview?

A. I think very much.
These characters are trying desperately, still, to see through the eyes of a child -- [to see] a horizon with an infinity of possibilities. But it didn’t quite work out the way they'd planned. And they have trouble re-capturing that point of view.
I struggled with that for quite a while -- trying to see like a child again, and realizing why I'd started in the movies. To get that excitement back, and lose some of the more unsavory lessons I'd been forced to swallow.
So yes. "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang"'s definitely a reflection of my attempt to find something magical -- even if it's for five seconds, like Harry does in the movie -- in a kind of corrupt and somewhat sterile town. L.A.'s not a great environment for keeping your spirits up. But I've managed. And I hope to continue.




Q. Both Harry and Harmony are fans of this fictional pulp detective, Jonny Gossamer. And there's a great scene where Downey and Monaghan are ripping on the author of the Gossamer books for disowning his pulp work. How personal a statement was that for you, having written a few pulp entertainments yourself?

A. Not so much. You know, the movie is sort of about believing in nonsense -- when you're 5 years old, believing you're gonna be an actress, that sort of thing.
Michelle Monaghan's character, she believes -- she's 34, but she does. Harry aspires to find love in L.A. It's about believing in romantic nonsense -- which is, essentially, what those books are.
And I think that the fact that the writer himself has said, "Ech! They're trash!" -- that makes it better. It makes it better that they've chosen to believe in something that they find pure, even though the creator of that has publicly said, "This is bullshit!" They say, "We're not gonna listen to you! We don't think it's bullshit; in fact, we're gonna make it an article of faith that will save our lives by the end of this movie."
That's what's interesting to me -- the belief in frivolity. It's being able to be moved by fiction and fantasy.

Q. You certainly gave a great, juicy character to Michelle Monaghan. Harmony Faith Lane is the sort of L.A. women we don't see in the movies much -- a pretty, smart, slightly crazy, relatively young has-been.

A. Yeah. They're just a little bit past it, and they've been there and done it -- they know so much about L.A. They just never got the part out of it that they wished or wanted. But in the pursuit of it, they got run through the mill so hard that can tell you anything about anything.

Q. They become wise at a ridiculously young age.

A. Exactly. Old beyond their years. But the thing that's essential for her is that the spark that prompted her to be there in the first place is not yet extinguished -- it's still in there somewhere, waiting to be re-kindled. But there's a hard shell around it.
And Michelle has that quality of being a little girl, but at the same time she can mask it…. In fact, she played a 19-year-old in "North Country" and a 34-year-old in this.

Q. That's some range, yeah. How'd you come to cast her?

A. She was just another audition at first -- and by the time she finished reading these scenes, I called Joel and said, "Would you mind stepping over here for a second? I'd like you to see something." It's the first time I'd ever called him to come over and watch an audition.
All the other girls were playing it tough, and they'd get away with all the toughness -- but you didn't get to see the fun inside that also was there, the playfulness.

Q. That's what I loved about her character. There was a sense that she sort of "got the joke"; Hollywood hadn't curdled her just yet.

A. Yeah, there's something about being jaded but laughing at yourself -- as opposed to being jaded and bitter. She wasn't one of the bitter ones.

Q. You have a lot of fun abusing your jaded characters. There's that scene where Downey tells a guy about to molest Harmony, "Don't touch her!" -- and in the next scene, that guy's just kicking the crap out of Downey on the lawn.

A. Yeah. That's our anti-tough-guy movie where the tough guy's gay and the hero gets beat up, and they're all trying to be something much rougher and more heroic than they are -- and they're slapped down by reality.

_______________




LEARNING HOW TO DIRECT (i.e., LEARNING HOW TO SPRINT)

Q. As someone who's worked with Renny Harlin and Tony Scott on big-budget projects, what was the first thing you noticed was missing on the set of a $15-million movie?

A. Most conspicuously, what's missing is, very simply, time. You don't have time to get fancy or shoot 17 different angles. You've got to do it down and dirty and say, "Okay -- whadda we got time for? Well, it won't look like crap if we put the camera here, and I think we've got time to do it." It's so desperate. To make your day, you have to run so fast. In fact, I would catch myself actually running on the set.

Q. Wow.

A. You don't want to lose your dignity, obviously -- you don't want to feel like an idiot -- but I would be running back and forth to check on one shot below, on the grass, and run back up onto the freeway, and I was sprinting and getting winded. I mean, shit! No one told me this was a fucking endurance test! I was gonna pass out from exercise being the director, you know?

Q. I just interviewed Joss Whedon, and he also milked a lot of movie out of a low budget. He talked about putting all his television training into it.

A. Yeah. I had a DP [Michael Barrett] who came from television, from "CSI." He did three seasons. We used a digital intermediate, which means we never really had a print until we finished the movie. All the shots, the entire cut, was on a computer. Then you output that finished product onto a piece of film.
So we'd be shooting, and Michael would light minimally -- just enough so he could come to me and say, "All right -- this is going to look like shit in dailies. But once we get to post, we can start to dial up colors and make it look good."
So we ended up looking at these shots in post, and dialing in the colors and punching up the things we wanted -- a process that, if we’d done it photochemically, would have taken weeks. Now we can do it in hours. And the projectors that were showing us these colors cost a million dollars apiece -- and they're video projectors.
I'm surprised more people don't use it, because it's so powerful a tool if you're trying to save time and money. You can light things with much less effort, get it done down and dirty -- with the knowledge that it can always be fixed later, when money and time aren't so at risk.




Q. What was the first hard lesson you learned as a director?

A. When I got overzealous one night -- I did too many camera angles on something -- and then, by the end of the night, we didn’t get a scene finished. The sun came up.

Q. Oh.

A. We were shooting it, and the DP just shook his head. He looked at me -- I remember, in the truck -- and I could see him go, "It's not gonna work. The sun's too bright. We're gonna have to scrap the scene." I was devastated -- because I thought, "We'll never get that back." We ended up having to do it down and dirty somewhere else later -- and we did get it done. But what a terrible feeling when you don't make your day because you tried to get fancy at one point and didn't budget your time correctly.

Q. And of course, you're learning that lesson in front of everybody, which kind of sucks.

A. [laughs] But I wasn't the only one guilty…. At any rate, we came back and we did what we had to do. I'm thrilled to go through the lesson process as unscathed and relatively unscarred as I managed to emerge.

Q. Are you going to keep making your films on the cheap?

A. I don't know. I mean, I'd like to have the luxury in future of not literally sprinting across the set, desperately hoping something's gonna work and not knowing. I'd love to have the time that additional money would buy us.
Now, how much is that money? Are we talking making $25-million movies or $80-million? I don't know. It depends on the script. Most of the ideas I seems to be fixated on -- at least currently -- don't require this huge budget. I'm not in the market any more to crash helicopters or blow up the Washington Monument. I'm certainly content to stick at -- if not the $15-million level -- then certainly below the level of blockbuster.

Q. What did you get to do with your writing that other directors maybe hadn't done with it?

A. I got to make sure that the rhythm of the exchanges in the comedy felt the way I would do it -- the way I would want it to play, the way I thought it was funny.
A lot of times, other directors would do the dialogue, and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. But the best compliment I got was from a friend of mine, Chuck, who said, "The one thing that I notice about this movie is that, for the first time, it feels like they're saying the lines the way you wrote them. I could feel the rhythm in the movie the same way I felt the rhythm when I read the dialogue on the page." And if that's the case -- and not just blowing smoke -- then that, to me, is the good part.

Q. I think there's something to that. This reminded me to a certain degree of Mamet crime thrillers like "Heist," where there's sort of a music to the dialogue. And I heard music in the way your dialogue was constructed.

A. Well, if not music, definitely some sweat.

_______________




FORGETTING THE ACTION MOVIE

Q. Speaking of crashing helicopters: It strikes me that this is a dark time for the unreconstructed action film. Who's making those films well these days? Where are the big unapologetic action stars, other than maybe The Rock?

A. You know, I'm the wrong person to ask, because I don't see them. I never saw "National Treasure," for instance. I understand that a lot of people thought that was a very good action movie. I didn't see "Batman Begins," but I hear it's pretty good. I didn't see "The Island."
So there's a lot of action movies that have sort of lost their luster for me. I'm just not really in the market any more, unless there's a hook or a premise that interests me. I actually went to see "Flightplan" because it looked like it was more of a suspense picture. And it was interesting -- I mean, ultimately, I thought the ending was sort of a cop-out. But it had its moments.

Q. So what films are you watching? What's exciting you?

A. A lot of foreign horror lately. A great film I saw recently -- "A Tale of Two Sisters." Brilliant. I also go back to my favorite films of last year -- something called "Pieces of April," and that cost less than a million dollars, but it's brilliant. These are the films that have provided me with genuine entertainment that a lot of these action films are no longer able to provide.

Q. Looking back on the spec-script boom -- in which you are a pivotal character, and which you are no doubt sick of talking -- do you have any favorite memories from that time, now that you have some distance from it?

A. The feeling of finishing the script, the first draft, was the high. Everything that followed -- though of interest, and sometimes slightly exhilarating -- could never match the idea of having just taken your story and wracked your brain, finally having it on paper in a version you're willing to tolerate and ready to try to sell.
I remember Joe Eszterhas calling me and saying, "Woo hoo! I just sold another one!" You know, there were fun times, but I didn't get into that whole money thing with Joe or the competition. It just seemed a little phony to me.
Because ultimately, I like making money, but it's not exclusively what I'm trying to do. It won't make my life fulfilled. Directing comes closer than anything I've found yet to providing me with a good reason to get up in the morning that goes beyond just getting some money. Because all the money does is buy the bed. Getting out of it is the problem.
_______________

Print version: Hollywood's 'Lethal' pen returns with a kiss and a bang
(The Sunday Oregonian, Nov. 13, 2005)

Posted: Sat - November 12, 2005 at 11:15 AM        

|

©