Seattlest Interview: Rian Johnson
What's better than a film noir? A stylized, old-timey, slang-heavy film noir that takes place at a modern-day high school. Seattlest recently spoke to Rian Johnson, writer and director of the highly acclaimed Brick, now playing at the Neptune Theatre.
About your melding of genres...while you do make use of light and shadows, which are always seen in noir, I have to say that Brick is the sunniest noir film I've ever seen. So why stage a detective story in a California high school?
For me, it was (weirdly enough) in order to take a more straight-up approach to the detective genre. It sounds paradoxical---doing a twist in order to kind of be more straight-forward with it---but my thinking was I knew I wanted to do a detective movie. I feel like at this point in our culture, everybody is so familiar with the traditional visual cues from detective movies, like the darker locations, shadows, venetian blinds, and guys in hats. There's a reason that a lot of times you see that today it's done in the context of parody, like on Saturday Night Live skits. We're so familiar with it, in some ways it's difficult to take seriously. Obviously, some of my favorite movies are film noirs, there's just so many good ones, and I think that's part of the reason it's so ingrained in our heads at this point. So for me, it was just a matter of doing a detective movie, but doing it in a setting where you couldn't lean on your preconceptions of detective movies. Not so much to give the genre a twist as to refresh our take on it so that we could just do the genre straight up.
Something that really struck me about the film is that it's an homage with a humorous streak to it. So it stayed true to noir while also making self-references, all without being campy---a very fine line to walk.
That was the key. I didn't want to be afraid of humor, even though we knew the danger was falling into camp and being goofy. That would've been the wrong way to go. But I didn't want to overreact to that by being humorless; I wanted it to be funny. If you go back and watch a lot of the noirs, if you watch The Maltese Falcon, there's an awful lot of humor in it actually, and that's something you don't typically remember from those films. They're genuinely funny, in very intentional ways. That's something I wanted to carry over.
Speaking of The Maltese Falcon, one of the major motifs of Brick seems to be, uh, birds. Birds reappear over and over again. So is that a reference to The Maltese Falcon, or is it something far more obtuse than that?
It definitely is a little nod to The Maltese Falcon, but it has more to do with shooting in San Clemente, a little beachtown in Orange County. It's my hometown actually, and we shot it at my high school. That town is full of birds, full of seagulls. I grew up surrounded by them and I knew that shooting there, we were going to be surrounded by them, so it kind of made sense to make that some sort of ongoing theme in the movie.
Well, in Brick there's two things all over the place: birds and feet.
Birds and Feet, exactly, that could be the alternate title. The feet thing, I just personally really like shoes as a design element for a character. They can give you a very instant snapshot of the essence of that character. Brendan [the protagonist, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt] with his good solid, no-nonsense weathered shoes, or Emily [the damsel in distress, played by Lost's Emilie de Ravin], with shoes that were these beautiful delicate little things that now are all beat-up.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is so good in the film. Another great role for him following Mysterious Skin.
He's an amazing guy, and I think he's going to keep surprising people more and more in the years to come. I always end up referencing Johnny Depp---I think he's going to end up having that type of career. He's got the leading man charisma, but he's so smart and he's just going to keep making interesting choices. He's all about pushing himself and refusing to do anything that isn't interesting to him. To his credit, that's what he's taken from growing up as an actor in the industry. He's gotten to the point where he really knows what he wants to do, and he's willing to do the work.
At the screening I was at, it was a very young audience, and the crowd was definitely on Brendan's side for the whole film, especially during fight scenes. He gets his ass handed to him A LOT. It seemed that what drew the audience in so well was the sound, because you're hearing bone on bone.
It's very exaggerated. Because the movie is so verbal and so twisty and has so many words in it, it was important to me to very deliberately put sequences in the movie that were completely non-verbal. They were little cartoon sequences actually, the way that they're shot. That was a really intentional choice on my part to give the language part of your brain a little rest and just let you have fun.
I'm glad that there was a young crowd enjoying it. One of the big happy revelations for me is just how well the movie seems to be playing with younger audiences. I think I expected that it would be more for older audiences, because they would be more familiar with film noir and detective movies. Maybe because younger audiences are less familiar with it, they're less likely to cross their arms and say, "What is this genre doing in high school?" They're more likely just to take it on its own terms and enjoy it.
As to the language of the film, I thought it was a smart move to have the Brick glossary [promotional materials] so you can go into it thinking "oh, 'bulls' are cops."
I've just been so incredibly pleased with the way Focus [Features] has marketed the movie overall, from the trailer that they cut to the posters to the glossary. They're really being smart about trying to let people know what the movie is so that they know what to expect going into it.
Of course we have to talk about what's next. I've read that you already have things lined up, and that it's another script of your own devising, The Brothers Bloom. I heard it described as a "globe-trotting con man story."
That's it exactly. Basically, I reached for the brass ring. I wrote every single location I ever wanted to visit into the script. It covers most of Europe in 120 pages. The con man movie is one of my favorite genres, and I'm hoping with this one to do a very character-based con man movie. At the same time, it's not a little movie; it's a big fun globe-trotting movie, but it's all about the characters, all about feeling for them. I'm excited to take a crack at it.
Is it hard for you to move on to something new, after Brick has been your baby for nine years?
No, I'm so anxious to do something new. The baby is now a college student still in my living room. I'm ready to kick the baby out of the nest. It's had its time. Obviously, I'm so proud of Brick and everybody's work on it, the cast and crew. It's such a joyful thing for me to see it go out in the wild and to see people react to it, to see how people bounce off of it. I'm having so much fun with that. At this point I wrote Brick nine years ago, in my early twenties, so it's really refreshing to be working on something I just wrote recently and is about where I'm at now in life. I'm really enjoying it.
