High point: Shane Black had a meeting with a young exec at Fox last week who passed on a script but told Shane, “You have a big future in this business.”
Shane Black and Brian Helgeland talked noir. Shane smoked an e cigarette, throwing his head all the way back to exhale. Brian is only rumored to be a surfer, but really looks like one.
As writers, they are diametrically opposed in personality and process, but both love the noir genre. Brian said “All my unsold specs are noir.” and Shane Black actually lives noir, which he revealed in the story of his rise and what he perceives to be his fall as a talented writer. So they know what they’re talking about.
What noir is:
- A redemptive, relentless pursuit of a revelation that might be better left hidden.
- A landscape that mirrors the interior path of the protagonist towards the truth.
- A last ditch effort to retrieve a lapsed conviction.
- An existential moral struggle in an imperfect world.
- A protagonist’s redress of a wrong that will right his moral compass.
- A knight’s quest gone astray.
- A metaphorical search for truth in a non-moral landscape.
- A protagonist’s opportunity to resist living by his base instincts instead of for a more illustrious purpose.
- Redemption despite an irredeemable act.
- The operatic and the melodramatic in the mundane.
Shane finally produced this idea to describe noir late in the panel, “It is establishing the realism in a raw, sad, dangerous world, and then finding the romance in that.”
Noir, both writers agreed, doesn’t sell much at studios anymore but it shows up more and more on television. Brian said that studios hear noir pitches and say “Take it to AMC.”
On the topic of writing sympathetic noir characters:
Brian: Show what they do that they aren’t proud of. In Harper (1966) when Paul Newman has to take yesterday’s coffee grounds out of the trash. You would follow him anywhere after that.
On the dreaded topic of outlining:
Brian: I outline everything. All outline.
Shane: It’s like hammering a nail through your toe. I hate it.
On “the Second Act Blues:
Shane: It’s so great to start with a character you really like, but they call it the Second Act Blues for a reason. Plot mechanics are all trial and error for me, it kills me. Trying to find what works. I don’t get how anyone can just sit down and bang out forty pages. No.
Brian: I have a problem with the middle. It’s an excuse to feel like an idiot every day.
On whether Tarantino is noir:
Brian: Tarantino makes his own thing.
Shane: It’s fusion. There’s a lot of joyousness. Jackie Brown is probably the closest he came to noir. I am a huge fan, but I can’t explain how it works.
On when to stop rewriting:
Brian: When it’s completely reduced. Shorter is better. When you can’t pare down anymore without hurting the characters or the story.
Shane: Tetris. Take all the little holes and swtich the pieces around and pack them in together so there are no more spaces.