Shane Black

Shane Black at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2018

Shane Black (born December 16, 1961 in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania ) is an American film director , screenwriter and actor.

life and career

As a child, Black had a thing for detective novels , dime novels , and detective stories . He studied film and theater at the University of California and began working as a typist after graduating in 1986 and writing screenplays in his spare time.

His breakthrough came with his first screenplay Lethal Weapon , which fell into the hands of producer Joel Silver . Richard Donner directed it , with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in the lead roles . In the tradition of buddy action films like Just 48 Hours (1982), the film tells of two dissimilar cops who have to pull each other together. Black kept coming back to this sub-genre throughout his career. Lethal Weapon became a huge box office hit.

Black was also involved in the 1989 script for Lethal Weapon 2 . This was followed by the scripts for Last Boy Scout (1991), the collaboration on Last Action Hero (1993) and the script for Deadly Christmas (1996). However, the latter two films flopped at the box office. In addition, Black was also active in smaller roles as an actor. You can see him in Predator (1987), RoboCop 3 (1993) and Better it couldn't be (1997).

After becoming one of Hollywood's highest paid screenwriters - a $ 4 million fee for Deadly Christmas and $ 1.75 million for Last Boy Scout - Black retired in the late 1990s.

In 2005 he came back with his directorial debut , the film Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang , for which he had also written the script. The action comedy pays homage to the dime novels that shaped him in his childhood. In 2013, the third part of the Iron Man series followed, in 2016 the buddy comedy The Nice Guys with Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling . In 2018 Black's film Predator - Upgrade came to the cinema, in which he and colleague Fred Dekker were also responsible for the script.