Shane West on the Challenge of Making a “Timeless” Movie on The Dirty South

Shane West, best known to comic book fans for his roles in Gotham and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, stars alongside Arrow‘s Willa Holland in The Dirty South, a new film from Cinedigm and writer/director Matthew Yerby. The star heads up a cast that includes Dermot Mulroney, Gissette Valentin, and Marie Gibeault. West plays the kind of morally-gray character who defines movies like Walking Tall and The Unforgiven. In an interview with ComicBook.com, West said that part of the hope behind the movie was to make it feel timeless, so that it will play basically the same in ten years as  it does now.

In the film, Sue Parker (Willa Holland) finds herself in a desperate battle to save her family’s struggling bar, which is on the brink of collapse due to her father’s neglect. When a handsome drifter comes to town, she sees him as the only chance to prevent the business from falling into the hands of a ruthless tycoon. However, her seemingly simple plan soon leads to larceny and lawlessness, with deadly consequences.

“Those movies are the ones you want to see over and over again — the ones that you can go and put into your VCR or your DVD player, or stream it or whatever it is.”

“I remember when the reason we did certain things on A Walk to Remember back in the day, was to make it kind of have a timeless feel. We didn’t addcertain things that could connect it to a specific decade. I think we were trying to do that with The Dirty South.”

Of course, he admits that the nature of the movie — it’s a thriller, and there are a lot of moments where time is very much of the essence — doesn’t always play nice with that goal.

“It has a little bit of action where you’re like, ‘uh, might need to use a cell phone,’” West joked. “So, we might need to use certain things, and part of you is like, ‘Damn it, if we could only have just not used the cell phone,’ you know?”

West, who played Tom Sawyer in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and has movies like A Walk to Remember on his resume, might come off as a squeaky clean guy to many casual viewers, but he says that playing a character like the one he takes on in Dirty South, where there’s a little moral ambiguity there, is a lot more fun.

“Didn’t Christopher Walken always say something about always wanting to be the bad guy, because it’s a lot more fun?” West said. “I did do four years on Nikita, and kind of had that.We kind of had that thing where he was a bad guy, but not really. Salem was a little bit like that, but yes, generally more the hero. And so to be able to have this,these layers, I think, was, was a lot of fun.”

You can see The Dirty South now on streaming video on demand platforms.