Rian Johnson Q&A

Ben Walters catches up with the writer-director of the coolest film of the year, 'Brick'.

May 11 2006

A native of San Clemente, California, Rian Johnson wrote the screenplay for 'Brick' – a high school-set noir starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt – when he finished film school in 1998. After he finally shot it last year as his debut feature, it netted a Special Jury Prize at Sundance.

'Brick' has polarised audiences..

It's comforting to see people who react to it the way I hoped they would, but it's also fascinating to see people who have a violent reaction against it. But the people who hate it cite the exact same things as the people who love it: 'the language was so dense, and the plot was too twisty, and the kids don't act like regular high schoolers'. I love movies that you have to take on their own terms and 'Brick' is definitely one of those.

The script is an unabashed homage to Dashiell Hammett – are you a real noir aficionado?

Yeah, absolutely, but I always end up being embarrassed when I get into a conversation with anyone who really knows their noir – a real noir aficionado will know hundreds of movies from that period and I really only know the classics. The inspiration for this movie was much more the books. I actually forbade the cast from watching noirs, specifically Bogart films, because I didn't want there to be any subliminal imitation going on. The big danger was that this would end up being a ridiculous little gimmick of a movie, a hollow imitation of film noir, and in my mind the way to avoid that was to come at it with the most honesty possible, averting our eyes from the history of film noir and just looking at the script and saying 'what are the creative choices we’re going to make to make this world real?'

The setting helps with that. It's not a very movie-like California.

I grew up in the town where we shot the movie, San Clemente – we shot it in my high school. Memories from high school tend to be very sharp and mythic so I wrote a lot of the locations around that school and that town: the spot where Brendan [played by Gordon-Levitt] eats lunch is where my friends and I ate lunch. That definitely helped get some of that emotional resonance of high school into the piece.

Yet the dialogue is very obviously mannered, very rat-a-tat-tat.

That language called for such a unique performance style and something that is not done today. We've become very much into naturalism; for young actors, it's the only kind of acting they've experienced. So we watched 'The Apartment', we watched 'His Girl Friday' – mostly comedies from that period to get that rhythm.

The film generates a lot of tension through sound – the footsteps in the chase sequence, for instance.

The very first step in the writing process was that I wrote a 100-page novella imitating Dashiell Hammett's style – very sharp, percussive – and when I go back and look at that, the chase sequence is based around the sound effects of the footsteps.

Being able to edit at home now must make that even easier.

I cut the whole thing on a Mac in my bedroom. It was great because it made the editing analogous to the writing process: I would get up in the morning, get my coffee and start tapping away. It took away the scariness of having some big, professional, £100,000 institutional setting.

And now you're working on a con movie?

Yeah, I'm hoping to shoot it this year. It's a big globetrotting con-men adventure. It's gonna be a blast. I wrote every location I've ever wanted to visit into the script.

A little bit further afield than the dumpster behind your high school?

A little bit.

'Brick' opens on tomorrow.

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