Breaking & Entering: Shane Black’s ‘Play Dirty’ Spins the Classic Heist Movie to New Heights

It’s time to rob the robbers! An expert thief, double-crossed and left for dead, finds his hunt for revenge leads him to a shot at the biggest score of his life in Play Dirty, an action-packed thriller from director Shane Black. Parker (Mark Wahlberg), a thief with a no-nonsense work ethic will do whatever it takes to get the money and get away clean. With the help of his partner Grofield (LaKeith Stanfield), Zen (Rosa Salazar) and a ragtag crew, he must outsmart the head of the New York mob (Tony Shalhoub), a South American dictator, and the world’s richest man if he hopes nab the treasure and stay alive in this endlessly twisting caper.

Written by Shane Black & Charles Mondry & Anthony Bagarozzi, the film is based on the Parker book series by Donald E. Westlake, under the pen name Richard Stark. Play Dirty showcases Black’s distinctive banter and noir sensibility, and relentlessly escalating character-driven plot twists.  

Shane Black’s career skyrocketed with a string of record-setting spec sales beginning with Lethal Weapon, a genre-defining film. He went on to have record-breaking spec sales throughout the 1990s, including The Last Boy Scout.  Five years later, he sold The Long Kiss Goodnight for another record shattering sum, among the top all-time spec sales. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang marked his directorial debut in addition to writing chores the dark comedy crime thriller pairing Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer. Known for combining action and comedy, notably using violence in ways that are humorous, unexpected, and reveal character, and sometimes, all at once. Black understands audience expectations and genre tropes, endlessly spinning them to our surprise and delight. Play Dirty doesn’t disappoint, delivering distinctive characters, wry dialogue, plus huge, inventive action and more twists than you can count, managing to pack.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Barri Evins: I really enjoyed Parker. I won’t create spoilers because I hate them, but I love that you understand our expectations as an audience and then deftly spin the tropes. There’s huge, inventive action, twists upon twists, and endless escalation. I was also tickled that I caught the subtle homage to author Donald Westlake, writing the Parker series under the pseudonym, Richard Stark. Viewers will have to find that for themselves. It's well known you're a huge fan of pulp, noir, crime, and detective stories, but with a plethora of Westlake material, why choose Parker? What drew you to this character?

Shane Black: Parker wasn't my first introduction to that author. The first ones that I read, were Westlake’s comedy caper-crime novels about a thief named Dortmunder and they were hilarious. Westlake could make me laugh out loud. But then I discovered Parker. This character was antithetically different in his approach. There's still a lot of wry humor and satire, but the Parker character is unflinching. An entrepreneur, a pragmatist, a workaday thief. Sort of a blue-collar plotter, but entirely uncompromising. His code about crime is: “It’s just a job,” like a plumber who simply goes in and gets the job done. But there are rules and Parker doesn't tolerate fools who don't get those rules. He hires people who may be complete screw ups in almost every aspect of their lives, but about one thing in particular they’re great.

I've grown a bit tired just by repetition of the techno thriller heist. Parker is a guy who finds clever ways to do something, but they're minimalistic. If they can't figure out how to divert the police, their solution would be, “Why don't we hit the guy over the head and turn off all the stoplights?” Something basic, and then they have to figure out the clever way to do it. These are tacticians. They're problem solvers, not posers, not charmers. They’re kind of dysfunctional.

The advantage we had with Play Dirty was for the first time we had access to all the books. So instead of choosing something limited in scope - because in the books each heist is not sizeable - it's knocking over a bank truck, or robbing a diner, or going up against a hit man - we wanted to generate something that was more cinematic in scale. We had to come up with our own sort of heist.

Barri: You certainly succeeded. I love the rush of the twist that I didn't see coming. As a jaded reader, it always impresses me when someone can continue to escalate the conflict and truly surprise me.

Shane: That's the fun of it! With each failed attempt, you go, "What are they going to do now?" And you just keep having him go at it and at it and at it. He won't give up. It's an example of “It ain’t over till it's over” kind of storytelling.

Barri: You’ve spoken about your passion for reading from a young age. What made you fall in love with movies?

Shane: The first movie I remember seeing in a theater was Battle Beyond the Sun, a fairly obscure low budget sci-fi movie, although I remember it being huge. And the poster looks like it's Star Wars 1, 2, and 3, all rolled together. It probably cost about a buck-fifty. As a kid, I loved the rush of James Bond. I couldn't get enough. A couple times they would release double features, Live and Let Die, and Thunderball, and then Dr. No and From Russia with Love. I would sit there all day watching, and later beg my mother, "Let me please read the books,” because they were considered a little adult in my family. I wasn't allowed to read them, but I could look at the cover, look at pages, and finally, finally, I was allowed to read them. That sparked me. It started with the films. When I was a kid, I was seeing some of the greatest movies of all time, like Jaws. How many films are being made today absolutely hold up like Jaws?

The Exorcist, which I wasn't allowed to see until I was a teenager, is my favorite film, and it's a timeless picture. There was a timelessness of the 70s films: The French Connection, Dirty Harry, Bullitt, The Deer Hunter, even movies like Kramer vs. Kramer. There was time when movies were events. And then you go back even further, to the 50s kaiju genre – Japanese monster films. And Frank Capra was doing remarkable films in the 30s and 40s that are timeless, like It's a Wonderful Life, which bombed at the time.

Barri: I read the novel, Jaws, perhaps when I was in my tweens. Finished it in the middle of the night because I couldn’t stop reading. It was scary enough that I was actually afraid to go into the bathroom! I grew up in a small community on the Gulf coast and saw the movie in a theater on the main road to the beach. Their marquee read: “GOING TO THE BEACH? SEEN JAWS YET?” The merchants on the beach banded together to get it taken down. At the moment when Richard Dreyfuss dives down to check the damage to the sunken boat, grabs the huge shark tooth and then severed head drops into view, people jumped backwards as if it was happening to them. They did it with such force that the row of bolted down seats rocked. My reaction was, “Yes! This is movies!” That’s how I want to feel every time.

Shane: You brought up a very interesting point because one of the things that struck me about The Exorcist, there's a photograph taken from the roof of the building across the street from the theater in New York where it premiered. It shows the parking lot, and there's hundreds of people standing around, and you quickly realize this is not people waiting in line to get in the movie. These are people who've come out of the movie, and they won't get in their cars yet and go home because they wanted to get with total strangers to talk about the movie they had just seen.

It's a shame that there aren't enough event movies that prompt that kind of zeitgeist. The water cooler talk was about the movie you saw over the weekend. And now how many movies actually have that sort of potential to inspire people to stand around and discuss? It used to be some movies were so powerful, you could find them one place only, and then they affected society.

Barri: Is there a project percolating that you’re excited about these days?

Shane: I was working on ideas for smaller, more interesting or personal, original material, when Parker came along. I've been obsessed with the Parker movie, and a lot of things I was planning faded, but they're still kicking. As soon as Play Dirty comes out, my hope is that I'll start to take long walks again. Stephen King says if you want to have an idea, or if you're stuck on something and don't know where to go next, just pick an area about a mile away. Walk there and back, so it's a two-mile walk, and say to yourself, “Somewhere along this walk, I'm going to have an idea.” You've got to just start walking and looking around. And if you put that suggestion firmly in your brain, I think you'll find as Stephen King has suggested, that by the end of that walk somewhere along the way, you go, "I just had an idea!" Or, you may have it until you get back and go, "Oh, wait, I did have an idea back around Wilshire and Third!"

Play Dirty streams exclusively on Prime Video beginning October 1.

Next Month: Shane Black gets brutally honest on why writing is so f*@king hard, how he got started, the one book you must read, and nitty-gritty tips to keep hitting the keys when you can’t get out of your own way.