Rocky beginning

At just 23 years old, Shane Black wrote the first draft of what would become ‘Lethal Weapon’, but was not happy with his work and threw it out, labelling it “dreadful”.

The writer explained that he wanted to mix the feel of an “urban western” with that of ‘Frankenstein’, and used ‘Dirty Harry’ as a template for what would become the action-crime flick.

He recalled: “What I was looking to do at that time was write a urban western.

“That’s what I was thinking about for that character, sort of the Frankenstein who everybody reviles for what he did, for what he’s capable of, for the things he still believes in.

“Because we think that we’re all placid and tame, but in fact violence intrudes in a horrible way and then they have to knock on Frankenstein’s cage and say, ‘Well we kind of need what you do even though we hate and revile you. Please come out and kill these people for us’, and it’s the old gun slinger.”