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October 30, 2005
meet shane black
Went to my first ever London Film Festival event with Dug on Friday evening, a screening of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, the first film directed by Shane Black. He’s a very significant Hollywood writer, having written films like Lethal Weapon and The Long Kiss Goodnight. He was Hollywood’s (i.e. everywhere’s) highest-paid screenwriter at one point and is credited with having changed the way studios deal with writers when he accepted gazillions of dollars for one of his scripts. He was there to introduce it and there was a Q&A with him at the end. We were right at the back but we didn’t mind so much when the people next to us were asked to swap for seats nearer the front as the director didn’t want to disturb people at the front when he slipped off to get ready for the Q&A. He must have enjoyed sitting there surrounded by people who were laughing very loudly at the film he made (yes, they were meant to be laughing).
The film was really good and full of jokes about grammaticality, ambiguity, etc. I can’t really use examples from the film, though, until I can count on a fair number of people having seen it.
To make sure we got enough of him, we also went to a screen talk with him yesterday. He was a really good conversationalist with some good insights into the writing process and a bit less insight into directing which, he says, is ‘a snap’. The best thing was the sense that he was relaxed about telling you what he really thought. If he thought a certain director’s films should all be ritually burned and never mentioned again, he was happy to say so.
Just to complete the story of my weekend, I went from the screen talk to a couple of computer stores and a guitar shop before having my pedal fall apart on the way home. I had to head back to Camden to get the bike fixed today and will have to head back to the computer shop again soon as the memory I bought turns out not to be the right kind. Meanwhile, my watch has fallen apart and the catflap has been smashed by some desperate creature breaking out at speed. And something bad happened to my front thigh muscle (I know there’s a technical name but anyway) during football warmup on Friday. Thank goodness Ohna, Apoa and Kiloh have come back so they can share in all of this kind of thing again.
B-)
Posted by Billy at October 30, 2005 8:53 PM
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