Illustration by Gustavo Gonzalez

Two decades ago, Shane Black's whip-smart script for Lethal Weapon ushered in a glorious age of buddy-cop action films. Two decades later, director Edgar Wright took the piss out of the genre Black created with the movie Hot Fuzz.

With Fuzz well on its way to entering the pantheon of guy-approved cult classics (just a week after its limited release in the U.S., the film is already #210 on IMDB's list of best movies of all-time, higher than Weapon) we had the old master, Black, sit down with the young upstart, Wright, at the Chateau Marmont, the epicenter of Hollywood schmooziness. They talked for 90 minutes, with nothing more than a tape recorder and an endless supply of coffee.

Here are the topics they covered:

Part One:

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The Naming of Sequels

Wright: When I left the Hot Fuzz screening they put a rack out with DVDs of Bad Boys 2 and Point Break. All the Point Breaks were gone and all the Bad Boys 2 were still there. I thought, Man, they can't even give them away! I took one even though I already had it, becuase I felt so bad.

Black: There are some movies they can trick you into seeing en masse for the first two weeks of theatrical release, but after about six months everyone wises up. A friend of mine used to say these movies have an expiration date, because they date themselves so quickly. It's like Tomb Raider 2 -- you can put out as many of those as you want, but eventually people are serving hors d'ouevres on the DVD box, cutting coke, doing anything but watching them.

Wright: Tomb Raider 2 has the most uninspiring subtitle of any film ever -- "Let's go see 'The Cradle of Life'!" Couldn't it be "Cradle of Fear?"

Black: Sounds like a really boring thriller.

Wright: Or a spa! (Soothing voice) "Come relax at the cradle of life."

Black: Truth is, I'm talking out my ass because I haven't seen the film.

Wright: Which one?

Black: Tomb Raider 2.

Wright: Oh, neither have I. [Uproarious laughter] I saw the first one. I'd rather play the video game.

Black: At least do a subtitle, like Commando 2: The Summoning, you know, something like that.

Wright: Highlander 2: The Quickening is one of the worst ones -- The Quickening? What?! I love the idea that the subtitle is the extra hook. It's like the U.K. version of Juggs, which is called Big Ones International. Now, if you were a fan of busty ladies Big Ones would be enough, but they sat around in a meeting and said, "Just plain Big Ones? I don't care. Big Ones International -- I'm in!

The Greatest Police Novels Ever Written

Wright: What cop films shaped you as a kid?

Black: Dirty Harry, obviously. I never saw the real-life ones like Serpico or Prince of the City.

Wright: You've seen Serpico now, though.

Black: Yeah, it's great. But I think Prince of the City is too long and pretentious. I'm ashamed to say this, but I watched every episode of Starsky and Hutch as a kid. I loved that show, but now I think it's stupid -- they'd have a car chase for no reason, then Paul Michael Glaser would shoot the car and it would blow up. I read cop stories more than I watched them. Like, Ed McBain's 87th Precinct.

Wright: The 87th Precinct is pretty much the template for Hill Street Blues, right?

Black: Yes. There's even a scene in the 87th Precinct books where the characters discuss Hill Street Blues: "Isn't it funny that Carella sounds kind of like Furillo?"

Wright: Did they sue?

Black: No, but at the end of that conversation a character gets up and says, "Don't worry, we'll be dancing on their fucking graves."

Wright: How long did those novels run for?

Black: 1954 though 2006.

Wright: Oh my God!

Black: Ed McBain says in interviews that it was intended partly as cop stories but also a study of American crime over 50 years, to see how society changed, and how the cops responded over time. I think he did a marvelous thing. McBain wrote probably 60 of those.

Wright: Was he an ex-cop?

Black: I don't think so -- he was just a journalist who took a serious interest in criminology to the point where he kept up with the technology used by the police. In the early books, they're dusting for fingerprints. In the later books, they're using DNA technology -- and it's the same characters. The characters get older, too -- but they only age twenty years even though fifty years have passed.

Why Unforgiven Is the Most Influential Movie Ever

Black: There's this movie called Hero at Large with John Ritter. It's not well directed, but it's brilliant in its own way -- I cried when I saw it. When they introduce him, Ritter puts on this superhero costume and you go, Wow, he's this big marquee character! He's on movie posters and everything...and then he gets on this bus with 50 other guys in the same costume and you realize he's just some schmuck handing things out at the movie theater. But [Ritter] decides to really become a hero, and he picks something up on the police scanner and he chases them in his car. So he's in a cape and he gets out of the car and they immediately shoot him. And he goes "Auugh" and he just sits there in a mud puddle, bleeding. And you realize: That's what happens.

For the most part, the violence in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was intended to be totally awkward. I love awkward violence -- like this one scene in Unforgiven, where [Clint Eastwood] shoots the one kid who doesn't even really deserve it, and the kid says, "I'm dyin' boys. Jesus, I'm so thirsty." And Eastwood says, "Give him a drink of water, goddamn it." And it's just not clean, it's messy, awkward violence. The movie completely debunks the myth of gunslingers, right up until the ending, when it finally reveals there really are guys like this.

Wright: I looked at Unforgiven, too. Both Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Hot Fuzz spend two thirds of the film saying that police work isn't like it is in the movies and then the last part saying it is.

Black: Exactly! I bow to Unforgiven.

Wright: One thing in Hot Fuzz that was inspired by Unforgiven is the idea that Simon was a policeman in London, had shot somebody, and then hadn't held a gun in two years. Simon keeps saying guns are not toys and that shooting somebody is not something he ever wants to do again. Then when he's at the fair, he's doing the shoot-the-target-for-the-stuffed bear thing and puts his hand on the gun it's like... It's like that scene in Unforgiven where Clint takes the drink for the first time, and he hasn't had anything to drink in years and he gets the flask and starts drinking and you think, Oh, shit...

Black: Unforgiven is seminal in so many ways. Whenever I write something, I'm always saying, "Oh, that's from Unforgiven." Or The Exorcist. The other one that I find myself referencing -- hopefully not copying, but certainly referencing -- is All That Jazz, which isn't even an action movie but it has such a power to it, such a melancholy. It's such a wild combination, a musical comedy about death.

Guilty Pleasures, Bad Movies, and the Death of Lee Marvin

Black: I have these guilty pleasures, these failed films that don't work at all, but I'll watch them if they're on. Like The Game.

Wright: I like that film, but it should have ended with Michael Douglas shooting Sean Penn -- but then there's the airbag and T-shirts and Deborah Unger. It's like, after two hours of paranoia, as soon as he gets a novelty T-shirt he's fine with it.

Black: The Game would have worked for me if the elements related to each other instead of being just random shit -- let's see, that chair will blow up, the clown will come in, the car will go by with people wearing carrot suits, and the moon will shift two degrees in the sky -- I mean, there's no rhyme or reason to anything that happens, unless I'm missing something.

Speaking of guilty pleasures, I would say I genuinely enjoyed Bad Boys 2 -- if you put that many tens of millions of dollars into smashing up cars there's going to be something fun to watch. You show ten seconds of footage from Bad Boys 2 in Hot Fuzz and it gets one of the biggest laughs in the whole film. "Shit just got real." Everyone explodes because in just ten seconds you see how laughably shitty that movie is and how dated it will become in one year.

Wright: That's why we picked that line. We looked at the whole film for the part that distilled the entire film's essence down.

Black: Bad Boys 2 is like The English Patient of action films, it just keeps going and going... You get all the way through, you're getting sleepy, and then they're like: "Now let's go kick some ass!" Now?!

Wright: It keeps going after the third act -- it's like Bad Boys 2 1/2. People have criticized Hot Fuzz for being too long, to which I respond: "It's half an hour shorter than Bad Boys 2!" (Laughter)

Black: People are so fucked up. They'll sit there watching deleted scenes from The Transporter 2...as if the first two hours weren't enough!

Wright: I love how they came up with excuses to get Jason Stratham to swim, because he's an excellent swimmer and diver in real life. "I'm going to swim you to death."

Black: He's a good actor.

Wright: Out of all those British tough guys he's the one I have a soft spot for. He has the potential to be like Charles Bronson. Actually, Quentin Tarantino brought this up to me -- and Christopher Lee said it, too -- that Hollywood is casting so young these days. Now if you were to cast The Dirty Dozen...

Black: They'd want Matt Damon and his contemporaries. It's not as bad as it was with Young Guns and the Brat Pack...

Wright: But you think of Lee Marvin...

Black: Who are the men? Besides Harrison Ford. He's white haired now. Who can fill in these roles for 35-year-old heroes? Who is Lee Marvin today?

Wright: Who's Charles Bronson?

Black: Matt Damon has the chops of an older actor. He's in no way right for the Bourne movies but he commits so fully he pulls it off.

Wright: Yeah, yeah, yeah! Bruce Willis is aging into quite a nice grizzled man. When he showed up in Planet Terror I thought I could happily watch him being a badass for the next twenty years. Having said that, the fact that you have bald Bruce for Die Hard 4 is just wrong. They should have CGIed his hair back!

Black: Well, I don't even know that Die Hard 4 isn't wrong.

Wright: In every other territory, it's not called Live Free Die Hard, it's Die Hard 4, because the phrase doesn't mean anything anywhere else.

Black: Actually, it doesn't mean anything here either.

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