No one does a quick and fun crime comedy like director Shane Black. The man who brought us movies like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is back in action with his new film, Play Dirty. Based on the Parker novels by Richard Stark, the film is a fun new look at the character.
As someone who loves Black movies very much, it was an honor to speak with Black and producer Jules Daly about their work together and bringing the character back to audiences. And, in a lot of ways, Play Dirty did remind me of what I loved about Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and I said as much to Black. When asked about his unique style of snappy dialogue and chaotic action sequences, Black shared how that came into play with Play Dirty.
“I mean, just vast and loose kind of old school crime has short of a universal appeal,” Black said. “You can always go back and mine the pulp world, the pulp genre. And these particular novels that it is based on, by Richard Stark aka Donald Westlake, they’re classics. I mean they’ve been here since the 60s and went all the way through the mid 2000s and this guy wrote these over this period of time. Robert Duvall played Parker. Lee Marvin in Point Blank famously played Parker. Mel Gibson, they all played this generation thing where each generation had their Parker.”
Black went on to talk about why bringing a new generation Parker with Mark Wahlberg works. “They also had in these early books, no cellphones, no technologies. We wanted to bring it into the 21st century. And we kind of did, I think. We kept the spirit of it and modernized it but kept the feel of the old school Parker novels.”
You can see our full interview here:
Play Dirty is now streaming on Prime Video.
(featured image: Prime Video)
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