Pivoting back to Play Dirty, the Parker character and Donald Westlake’s books: Dortmunder. Can you do a Dortmunder movie?
Those were some of my favorite books, too. As a bonus, as part of the rights package, which included the Parker titles, there were four books about Grofield, which were a lot more whimsical except for the last one. The last one was pretty dark, but the first three are these Quixotic quest novels about him just stumbling into situations where his panache and his actor’s instinct often get him through. Westlake was most well-known for his comic capers. I remember the jacket on one of his books saying, “The mad jester of the mystery world.” Parker was the dark side of that, which is probably why he’d used a pseudonym because it was so antithetical in a way to what he was known for. I always loved The Hot Rock.
In the interest of experimenting, we wanted to do a couple things with this Parker movie. We wanted to increase the scale. The other movies, even as faithful as they can be, even as much as I love Point Blank, the template has always been a small movie. Where it’s just one guy who’s trying to kill him, or there’s a bank heist, or just the one robbery from the one book, and we wanted to make up our own story that took the Parker character and placed him in an arena that took advantage of the money Amazon was so generous to give us. So we also, as part of that experiment, said, the Parker books aren’t devoid of humor. The characters, they’re always quirky, they’re always weird.
Sometimes Parker’s point of view is so oddball and the reactions of the people around him are kind of funny, and I wanted to do it, maybe a tip of the hat to Dortmunder with some of the crew. In the sense the crew has more of a quirky quality. Parker and Grofield are who they are, but it’s an odd mix. I don’t know that the Parker purists, or if you’re a member of the Parker fan club that’s read every book seven times, you might find Play Dirty to be too lively or something. And I don’t discount that, honestly. I love all the previous iterations of Parker. If anything, we look for a way to maybe just increase the scale, combine things, and not just do a single book.
