Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with Capone who had a little chat with BRICK director Rian Johnson way back in October when the flick was running around the film festivals. It's about to pop and I couldn't be more excited to see people's reactions to it. It was one of my favorite movies from last year and I think Rian Johnson is very much one of the top 2 or 3 most interesting rising writer/directors today. Here's Capone's chit-chat with the man. Enjoy!
Last October, I saw a film that will easily go on my Top Films Released in 2006 list (it’s already on my Top Films Seen in 2005 list, although the official release date is this week). The movie in question is BRICK, a staggeringly great work of writing and directing by one Mr. Rian Johnson, a young whipper-snapper of a lad whom I had the pleasure of speaking with last October during the Chicago International Film Festival.
I held the interview until now because releasing it last year would have done nothing to encourage people to see this fine work of new noir set in a California high school. I know, the setup sounds like a comedy, but don’t be fooled. Now the film is upon us, and you must see it of suffer months of ridicule.
I found Rian to be many cool things, including intelligent, well-spoken, and above all, a true fan of film. He also seemed so young that it made me feel old, but that’s my hang up. Let me hit Rian with my first dynamic question…
Capone: You live in California, right?
Rian Johnson: Pretty much, yeah. I was in Colorado after grade school, but Southern California for high school and college.
Capone: I guess the obvious first question, then, is, Does a place like the high school in BRICK really exist?
RJ: I hope not. I really hope not.
Capone: If it does, I’m going to kill myself on behalf of the next generation.
RJ: That would mean you wouldn’t survive your first question. No, I don’t think it does exist. Although we shot the movie at the high school I went to. It’s probably saved me years of therapy. That was a cool experienceand also, practically, it was really cool, because I knew if we got kicked out of one location, we could go around the corner over here and pick up the scene. It worked out in a lot of ways.
Capone: Kicked out of one location in the high school?
RJ: In my home town, San Clemente, this little beach town on the south end of Orange County. So, the whole town was kind of like our back lot for the movie. And also, it’s just a beautiful little beach town. It’s a really pleasant place to spend a month with some cool people and make a flick.
Capone: You’re not a complete film novice, however. You edited MAY, which had a premier at Butt-Numb-A-Thon a couple of years ago. And, you had [MAY director] Lucky McKee in your short film, too.
RJ: Lucky has been one of my best friends since college. And actually, Angie Bettis...I was just working with them on...have you heard of this thing ROMAN that they’re doing? This is kind of like the companion script to MAY that Lucky wrote years ago. They just made it. Angie directed it, and Lucky starred in it, so they flipped roles. I was just doing some editing with her back in L.A. on it. It’s a really cool little thing. I don’t know how it’s eventually going to surface. They shot it on DV, so it’s a smaller type thing. It’s really cool, though.
Capone: How did you pull BRICK together?
RJ: It took a while.
Capone: You’ve got fairly high-profile young talent in this.
RJ: We’re really lucky with the cast. I wrote the script right out of film school, and I graduated in ’96. I wrote the script in like ’97. So, it took a long while. Like any small, first-time movie, it took a long while to come together. And also, when I graduated school, I didn’t have any connections in the industry. I’m really bad at, you know, hustling and getting myself out there and selling myself. So, it was a long process of just trying to get the script to whoever would read it. That was kind of compounded by the fact that it’s a really weird script. As weird a movie as it is, if you just read the script and don’t know exactly how it’s going to be executed, there are so many ways it could be a train wreck.
Capone: The word that keeps popping into my head is ‘dense.’ It’s very dense, the language and the story. With the high school setting--with the young cast--you would never anticipate something like this.
RJ: Yeah, absolutely.
Capone: It’s definitely something that requires multiple viewings.
RJ: [Laughs] You can imagine...Visually, you’ve got some fun stuff to pull you through when you’re watching the movie. Imagine reading it as a script and sitting there trying to figure out if you’re going to give somebody money to make it, it becomes even more dense. Eventually, we ended just figuring out what the least amount was we could shoot on for 35mm, and then we passed the hat with friends and family, and just scraped together a little bit of money and really tightened our belts and shot it. All the cast and crew worked for next to nothing, were just really passionate about it--and, that’s kind of how we did it.
Capone: One question I had, This story clearly is not one you would anticipate being set in a high school. Why did you choose that setting?
RJ: Well, it kind of started with the movie MILLER’S CROSSING, one of my favorite films. I read an interview with the Coens where they say that Dashall Hammet is their source material. So, I picked up one of his books, and I read it, then I read another one, and then I just blew through everything that he ever wrote--he didn’t write that many, I think he wrote five novels or something. I read them all in two weeks. I just became obsessed with him, basically. And, I realized I want to do a detective movie like this. There was something about it that just hit me in the gut that was so beautiful about, you know, the worlds that he created. At that point, when I made that decision to make a film noir--a genre that I love, it became my greatest obstacle, because how do you make a straightforward detective movie today without having it come off as just a postmodern take on film noir, an homage to film noir?
So, that was kind of where the whole high school thing came from. I said, let’s give it a different set of visual cues, let’s just have it be someplace where we’re not going to have guys in hats in shady alleyways. But, the motivation behind that wasn’t to put some wacky twist on the genre. I don’t think the genre needs a twist, I think it’s powerful enough as it is. The real motivation was so that we could take a much more straightforward approach to it and not have to worry about people’s connections with these older movies as much. So, it’s kind of weird: it’s a twist in order to hopefully be able to come at it in a more straightforward way.
Capone: I noticed you have a real distinction between the quieter, brooding characters and the outwardly violent characters. Even visually, they were presented differently--they even dress differently.
RJ: Absolutely, yeah.
Capone: The one thing that popped into my head the first time I saw BRICK was that it reminded me of Alan Rudolph, certain Alan Rudolph films, minus the glossy look and slow-jazz score. I suspect you’re going to hear that a lot over the next few months.
RJ: This is only the second time that I’ve heard that.
Capone: It’s come up before among my fellow critics. It came up after the most recent screening here, and as much as I hate to repeat, or agree with other people, it’s undeniable. Is that even someone you were familiar with?
RJ: Not at all. I’ve got to Netflix all his movies now, ‘cause this is so...
Capone: Just a couple. I mean, CHOOSE ME is the most obvious one, but the music. The only difference is that, maybe, he’s a little more lush looking, but that would not have been as appropriate here, I think.
RJ: I remember way back in film school, I’m sure I saw a few of his films, but I’m going to have to refamiliarize myself with them. It’s the second time today that I’ve heard that comparison.
Capone: As in any great noir movie or detective novel, the film is populated with despicable characters, and really, the heroes are the ones who are least despicable. They’re all pretty shady...
RJ: Shades of black
Capone: Precisely. Why does the character Brendan even care about finding this girl’s killer? They clearly had a rocky past from the start.
RJ: What we’ve set out to do from the start is make it kind of a misbegotten quest for him, to make it, like you said, kind of the shades of black--these are all kind of dubious characters, and the hero is just kind of the least dubious of all of them. One element of the storytelling we wanted to play with was showing the truth of his relationship with Emily, the doomed girl, as kind of something that was stormy, kind of on the rocks, and he’s a bit possessive. At the same time, for him, that’s kind of all he’s got. That’s his only emotional connection in this entire world. And so, in the midst of that, he still has her kind of up on this pedestal. And, when she goes away, when she vanishes, that’s not only the sole connection to another person he has, but this is the only way he knows how to address that loss, by kind of sticking his fist into this world and trying to solve this mystery. Whether or not he actually does any good in the end is highly questionable.
Capone: That’s what I wondered. As with a lot of film noir films, the whodunit isn’t necessarily the most interesting thing in the film. Often, it’s inconsequential to what’s really important about the film.
RJ: Yeah, exactly. There was a great story about when they were making THE BIG SLEEP, and they called up Chandler about a plot point, and he’s like, “Hell, I don’t know.” That’s kind of true. In a way, it’s all about plot, and in a way, plot is irrelevant. That was something that working with the actors brought out, actually, where we really started to try and find out, okay, what are the emotional through lines of this, what are the keystones of each of these characters? Because, I think at the end of the day, that’s what ends up pulling you through the movie. Afterwards, you can rewatch it, and you can start to untwist all of the plot things, but if you’re not...
Capone: I’m not questioned whether your plot holds together; I’m fairly certain it does.
RJ: It does! It does! And if you actually look up all the pieces, it all actually works at the end of the day, that’s one thing I’m proud of. But, at the same time, on the first viewing, it’s...it’s ... nebulous.
Capone: At several points during the film, the conflict is whether an audience should be paying more attention to the characters or the plot. The plot is an excuse to meet all these weird, dangerous people.
RJ: Exactly, yeah.
Capone: What about the music. Your cousin did the music, yes?
RJ: Yeah.
Capone: What were your instructions to him in terms of scoring?
RJ: I’ve been making movies with him since we were 12. We were hunched over a video camera hooked up to an old VCR back when we were 12, so we are really kind of inside each other’s heads in a really cool way. When we sat down, though, the first things I pointed him towards were the scores to Sergio Leone’s films, like [Ennio] Morricone, and I told him to look at THE THIRD MAN soundtrack and movies where the music was as much a character in the movie as anything else, when the music really kind of insinuated itself into it.
The other big thing was, because the plot was so twisty, we wanted to make very distinct cues with the music that would help to--even if it’s just in the back of the audience’s heads--sort of orient them and take them through it. So, we gave certain characters themes; we gave certain locations and kind of dynamics in the movie specific musical themes. Also, we tried to be very clear in terms of using the music as signposts. If something ominous happens, we’d do something distinctly ominous with the music that in another context would almost be hitting it right on the head, but because everything in the film, again, is so dense, I think it’s really necessary to do that. In terms of the instrumentation, one of the things we talked about was Tom Waits a lot and trying to create like a brokedown-orchestra feel. He created a lot of the instruments from scratch. He used beer bottles and cans as a lot of the percussion and banged-up filing cabinets and just got really creative in terms of the type of instruments he used.
Capone: In addition to borrowing from Tom Waits.
RJ: Hey, man, it’s stealing, stealing.
Capone: So, you talked about musical reference points and plot reference points. Any directors that you look to for visuals?
RJ: For this movie, most of the visual style, I think, is taken from Sergio Leone actually. Probably more just because I was going through a phase where I was really into him and...
Capone: We all do. We all go through that phase. For some of it, it lasts decades.
RJ: Exactly, yeah, yeah. That’s a phase you should never leave. Also, it worked because the town of San Clemente where we shot is very wide open, and that school is very horizontal. It almost feels like an institution the way that high school is set up--in the way that a lot of Southern California high schools are set up. It’s outdoors, and it’s all very flat. Having those kind of wide-open compositions really lends itself to the location. Again, talk about good people to steal from, you can’t go wrong.
Capone: Anyone else, or is that the main influence?
RJ: I’d say him and the other huge reference for the film for me was Kubrick. To a large degree because we kind of wanted it to--in planning out the way the camera would move--we wanted it to be shot the way the main character thinks, which is very clear, very clean cut. I don’t think there’s a single hand-held shot in the movie. And, we want it to be that kind of almost sterile, clean feel that would be the way Brendan would kind of think of everything. There’s very little shades of gray. He thinks in black and white the whole time.
Capone: It’s interesting you mention Kubrick, because in the notes I took while watching the film, I scribbled down a reference to the way you use and invent language. The kids have almost got their own dialect in a lot of ways. It reminded me of CLOCKWORK ORANGE. You’d almost need a glossary or multiple viewings just to get through the language and pick up on some of what they’re talking about. I’ll confess, I caught myself wondering “What are they saying? What is this?”
RJ: [Laughs] You run the risk of people disconnecting from it because of that, but at the same time, I know that that’s the type of movie I’m attracted to, something that you can really sink your hands into, and if you want to kind of do a little bit of work and figure it out, it will pay off.
Capone: It pays you to listen, too. You’re forced to listen so that you can at least pick up on some of the things that are understandable.
RJ: Exactly.
Capone: Talk a little bit about the cast, starting with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Particularly him and also Lukas Haas are the ones people are going to focus on, and the guy who played the really violent Tugger.
RJ: Noah Fleiss.
Capone: Those are the three guys I think people are going to come away from the theater thinking the most about.
RJ: We got so lucky with the cast. Not just in terms of their acting, but they were a really cool crew of people. I grew up making movies with my family, you know, and it was really important for me that this experience kind of mirror that, and that everyone kind of feel like a family. As proud as I am of everyone’s work on the movie and how it came out, I’m even more proud of what the experience was, which was just such a cool time making the flick.
When I first sat down with Joseph, I wanted to make sure I found the right actor for that part because that character is on every single page of the script. In a lot of ways, he’s the entire movie, and I had been searching for the perfect person for that for a long while. And, when I sat down to talk to him, we just connected on such a fundamental level, immediately, and I was just buzzing walking away from the meeting. To be looking for that guy for so long and all of a sudden to have him sitting right in front of you...
Capone: In the last couple of months, I’ve seen him in (including your movie) three films.
RJ: He’s blowing up, man. Yeah.
Capone: And, they’re all very dark films, including ones in this festival.
RJ: Have you seen HAVOC?
Capone: I have; HAVOC is here, too. And, MYSTERIOUS SKIN just blew me away.
RJ: That’s incredible, right. Did you see MANIC with Don Cheadle?
Capone: Yeah, that’s right, he was in that. That was really the first time after Joseph left television that he showed the world what he was capable of as an actor.
RJ: That was the only thing I’d seen him in when we met; I hadn’t even seen his TV show [“Third Rock from the Sun”] actually. He is so serious about his work. He just worked his ass off on this movie. We had three months of prep time essentially, and we used every single day of it. We sat down, we watched movies, we’d talk them out, we’d figure out exactly what this character’s voice was going to be, exactly how the inflections in his voice would be different, down to the last detail. We kind of played everything out. We took a lot of rehearsal time with him and the rest of the actors to really get every beat working. Also, because our budget was so low and the shooting schedule was so tight, there was very little room for figuring stuff out on the day of shooting. We had to know our shoot when we went out. Yeah, he’s a pretty amazing guy.
Capone: He’s about to break out. I expect huge things from him soon.
RJ: I think you’re right.
Capone: Seriously. Unless he’s sort of committed to doing the smaller films…
RJ: No, he isn’t. He’s about ready to rule the world.
Capone: Can I ask how old you are?
RJ: Yeah, I’m 31.
Capone: A film school graduate?
RJ: Yeah, I went to film school in L.A. All my best friends are people I met in film school actually. That movie MAY you mentioned before was kind of like the first one that little our family of friends all made together.
Capone: Did you and Lucky go to school together?
RJ: Yeah, that’s where we first met, and Steve Yedlin, who is the cinematographer on BRICK, also shot MAY. It’s all the same group of people who worked on it. We all have very different sensibilities, but we’re all supporting each other. That’s really essential, you know, just to have a crew of people who you can kind of lean on.
Capone: What’s the release schedule like for BRICK? I’m guessing a platform rollout. [Remember, this interview was conducted in October 2005.]
RJ: I’m sure they’re going to roll it out small, and then see how it does. I’m very interested to see how it plays. It’s cool for me, especially having something that’s been such a tiny, little homegrown project for so long literally something that feels like a home movie to me, just because it’s been this little family that’s been working on making it. Now, all of a sudden, to be coming out in festivals and showing it, and having it kind of take on the life with people seeing it; it’s kind of mindblowing.
Capone: You got picked up at [2005] Sundance, right? Focus bought you at Sundance. That’s where I first heard about the film--a regular Cinderella story.
RJ: None of this seems real to me. At the same time, it’s cool, because right now, I’m completely focused on trying to get the next one made.
Capone: What is the next one?
RJ: It’s a con man movie that I just finished writing that I’m really excited about. It’s different than BRICK, but it’s also kind of in its own world. It’s kind of a globetrotting, con-man adventure. I just finished the script, so now we’re going to see how we get it together. I hope it will come together quicker than BRICK did.
Capone: Do you think it will come together before BRICK comes out?
RJ: We’re going to keep trying to get it going as quickly as possible. I literally just finished the script, so we’ll see. But, I’m crossing my fingers.
Capone
capone@aintitcoolmail.com
