I come to you from the commentary track on the special edition release of The Nice Guys that came out last year. This was recorded I think in 2025 and it was Shane Black and Anthony Bagarozzi with Priscilla Page moderating. Here are some things I noted because I thought they were particularly interesting.
They hired an actual retired Playboy centrefold photographer to take the Misty centrefold photo
Folding the money into a shirt was Ryan Gosling’s idea, in the script he just hands him the money
Putting his cap on the nun who wheels him out of the hospital was also Gosling
He did so many things in the first table read of the script that they liked that they took time after on rewrites just to incorporate the things he added into the script
Russell Crowe added the curl in Healy’s hair because of a character background detail he came up with that Healy loved Superman as a kid. I LOVE this so much.
Priscilla Page describes Healy and March’s first scene together as a ‘meet cute’ and Shane Black and Anthony Bagarozzi are just like ‘Yeah.’ ❤️
In the scene where March and Healy talk in the booth at the bowling alley, Ryan Gosling kept accidentally blocking the shot but Russell Crowe was so perpetually aware of where the camera was that he always knew and he would just reach out and move his head back into the right place 😭 honestly such a funny thing for them to remember after so long. They talk a lot about what a pro Russell Crowe is generally
Russell Crowe picked Healy’s blue jacket (possibly from March’s wardrobe! but they weren’t sure about that) last minute before shooting started and it made noise constantly and annoyed the sound people a lot.
Priscilla Page asks a couple of times about colour use in the film and they just have almost nothing at all to say about it, it’s so funny. Particularly about blue as a colour for Healy, she points out that his jacket almost matches his car and Shane Black is just like ‘oh.’ ?? I guess it was a long time ago lol but maybe these were just decisions that other people were more involved in (also since the jacket was just Russell Crowe’s choice maybe the blue was pumped up later in the process?)
The Earth Wind and Fire situation happened because Joel Silver really wanted to use that song and insisted they get a cover band to portray the actual band at the party, but in the commentary they say it makes absolutely no sense that the actual band in 1978 would be playing at a house party ‘for a porn guy’ lol
Something they describe as ‘a catch phrase people don’t notice’ is that Healy always calls people ‘Buddy’ when he’s about to kill them/considering killing them 👀
March immediately falling in love with Tally was another thing Ryan Gosling came up with that they rewrote later scenes to work with
There are no deleted scenes and no outtakes 😭 Shane Black says in the commentary he hasn’t had access to anything since the time of filming, but would like to go back in ‘the vault’ at some point to see what there is. But there’s nothing on the disc from last year. It’s so crazy to me that this was already not a thing for a film that came out in 2016 but I guess streaming had largely taken over already
Someone they identify only as ‘our prop guy’ made the suggestion that March would miss and throw the gun through the window so they had to rework the scene from that point because they liked that so much
They talked about how Ryan Gosling did a lot of his own stunts in this including when he gets hit by the car near the end. And this is a secondhand retelling from elsewhere that the moderator brought up but she said that Ryan Gosling said he wanted to do more of his own stunts because his stunt double had also been a stunt double on Fury, and only 2 weeks earlier the stunt double had taken a bayonet to the chest??? ????? But he was there shooting this two weeks later? Jesus????
Ryan Gosling also ad libbed the fake German in the scene with Kim Bassinger at the end
They said they didn’t really have any ideas for a sequel but that Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe wanted it to be set in Mexico and Anthony Bagarozzi wanted to set it in the 80s. So it seems like that’s as far as they got in thinking about it or at least as much as they wanted to say but they were discussing that there was a lot of interest in a sequel ‘now’ (in 2025ish when this was recorded)
