As the writer of movies like Lethal Weapon, The Nice Guys, The Long Kiss Goodnight and Iron Man 3, Shane Black is a true screenwriting auteur, known for his scripts' pulse-racing action, quippy dialogue and genre-skewing surprises. At the heart of his stories are usually two odd-couple characters, who must overcome their differences to solve a problem or often a police case. And did we mention all of this is often happening against a Christmassy backdrop? 

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – Shane’s 2005 festive film noir – ticked all the above boxes, and plenty more. As Christmas movies go, it's a cult classic renowned for its sharp satire and creative meta commentary on Tinseltown past and present. Robert Downey plays Harry – a petty thief who lands a Hollywood screen test after accidentally crashing an acting audition while running from cops after a botched toy story burglary. Adrift in LA over the holiday season, a string of strange events finds him reunited with his old childhood crush, Harmony (Michelle Monoghan) and entangled in a murder mystery with a gay private investigator named Perry (Val Kilmer).

Shane wrote the movie after a nine-year layover between projects. His previous film, spy thriller The Long Kiss Goodnight, has a huge cult following now but struggled at the box office on release, sparking a period of soul-searching for the screenwriter. In the conversation you’re about to hear, Shane explains how Kiss Kiss Bang Bang revitalised his love for movie-making. We discuss what is about Christmas that he can’t stop himself coming back to as a storyteller, to what degree this movie provided a comic template for Iron Man and the MCU, and how his first draft of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was a romcom with intoxicating characters but no real plot. That is, until he planted a murder at the centre of it…

Script Apart is a podcast about the first-draft secrets behind great movies. Each episode, the screenwriter behind a beloved film shares with us their initial screenplay for that movie. We then talk through what changed, what didn’t and why on its journey to the big screen.Subscribe to our new spin-off show How I Write here.Support for this episode comes from Screencraft and WeScreenplay.

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