Q: When you were trying to raise the money to get this movie made, independently, how did you describe Brick to people?
Rian Johnson: Just saying, “It’s a detective movie but it’s set in high school” wouldn’t communicate what makes the film tick. So, when I described it to people I would reference the type of material that I was drawing from; I would talk to people about Dashiell Hammett, and about the tradition of detective novels and movies in the U.S., and stress that we were trying to do a faithful, straight-up detective movie as opposed to a gimmicky high school movie.
Q: You probably faced more than one person saying, “Oh, I get it – Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys.”
RJ: Exactly. The other thing was, I wrote the script just out of college – seven years ago – right when I was first starting to get it out there was when this big boom of high school movies was happening. So people would hear that this was “a high school script with a twist,” and they’d read it all excited, thinking it was going to be American Pie or something…and it’s obviously not that.
Q: Now that the film is finished and is winning awards and screening at film festivals, now how do you describe it to people?
RJ: I have the luxury of not really having to verbally explain it to them. [Laughs] At its essence, we set out to make an American detective movie. When I’m saying it very quickly, it’s “Oh, it’s a strange little detective movie.” The reason it’s set in high school is, we did that to get away from the imagery of men in hats and what we typically think of for detectives. That’s all been done so well so many times over the years that the instant you see the imagery, it becomes pastiche when you’re doing a detective movie. I love film noir, but the thought of imitating it was not appealing. Brick is not set in high school for any postmodern twist or to make a comment on the genre; it was meant to free us up to take a more straightforward approach to the genre. We wrestled with the question of “How do you ‘do’ the genre today?” This was the weird approach that we decided on. [Laughs]
Q: When you say “detective,” we all think of Bogart, trenchcoats...
RJ: There’s kind of a layer of lacquer that’s been built up over the genre over the years. But, sure, some of my favorite movies ever made are detective films.
Q: What are some of your favorite movies?
RJ: It’s a broad range…I went to film school, so there are a number of “film school classics” – all the great directors, like Hitchcock and Fellini…In terms of detective films, I’m actually not as well-steeped in film noir as a lot of people assume from the fact that I made a detective movie. The ones I’m familiar with are mostly the classics; The Maltese Falcon, I would count among my favorite movies of all time. The Big Sleep, adapting Raymond Chandler, is a great film. James Cain has had some great screen adaptations, like The Postman Always Rings Twice.
What originally got me into the idea of doing a detective movie, and introduced me to Hammett, is a film the Coen Brothers did called Miller’s Crossing. That film is very much inspired by two of Hammett’s novels, Red Harvest and The Glass Key. I was introduced to that film in film school, and I just fell in love with it. I found out about their inspirations, read all of Hammett’s novels in a month. They connected with me in a way I wasn’t expecting, and I was spurred to write Brick, to bring my interpretation of their world to life.
Another of the Coen Brothers’ – one of their best – movies, The Man Who Wasn’t There, draws from Cain in the way that Miller’s Crossing drew from Hammett; unique takes on a classic genre.
Q: At what point did it all come together for you; the inspiration to tell this story, in this style, as your first feature film? You’d been to film school; you were already writing scripts…
RJ: Getting out of film school, I had no contacts in the industry; I didn’t have any connections. I’m not the type of person who’s good at going out there and hustling, going out there and selling myself. But I knew that I wanted to make a feature, it’s all I’ve wanted to do – I was one of those geeky kids who’s been making short films since they were 12. I figured the best way to make a feature was to write a script that I really wanted to do that could be done for a modest budget level, and then show it around to everybody that I possibly could until I found someone who wanted to help me do it.
It was a long, long process; it took six years. People were found, and then went away; money was found, and then went away; different actors were in and out. You talk to any independent filmmaker who’s gotten a film made, and it’s the same story. It’s not easy. It was a long path. Eventually, everything worked out for the best, and when it did come together, it was the best possible combination of people and the best possible way the money could have been there – the right way to make the movie.
Q: How did the financing finally come together – and, until it did, did you think of doing it in arguably an easier way, like shooting on HD or even doing a different script?
RJ: The financing was, friends and family. We tightened our belts and figured out the very lowest amount of money that we could get this shot for on 35MM film, and then passed the hat to friends and family – some of whom became executive producers of the movie. We pulled off making this movie on such a low budget because, first of all, we got an amazing crew and a great set of actors. And I’d essentially had six years of pre-planning time to know exactly and precisely how every shot of the movie was going to look and how it was going to fit together. My director of photography, Steve Yedlin, is one of my best friends. He’s known me since college, and we’ve had all that time to talk about it and pre-plan. That’s a big factor in how we were able to get it shot for the budget we had and in the time that we did.
It was a very blessed shoot. The shooting schedule was 20 days, which is typical at this budget level; but, as anyone who works at that pace will tell you, it was not easy – it was hard work and long hours. At the same time, there was this great feeling; everybody got along and got a sense very quickly of what the movie was, and the clear direction in which we were going.
We shot the film down in San Clemente, which is a beautiful little beach town, about an hour south of L.A., on the southern tip of Orange County – it’s my hometown. We filmed at the school I actually went to. It was like we had our own backlot, because I knew the town inside and out. If we lost a location or suddenly needed something, I could say, “OK, we can just go to this spot over here.” I knew the lay of the land, and the script had been written around some of the locations.
The high school has a very specific look to it, with great wide-open flat spaces, airy breezeways, and an almost institutional feel. We built all of this into the style of Brick, as a detective movie that took more of its visual cues from Chinatown than from the dark alleyways of noir. We set it out in the open, in a setting that will catch you off guard and that you wouldn’t normally associate with menace.
When I was in the last stages of visually planning Brick, I was watching a lot of Sergio Leone’s movies. In that respect, the movie probably owes more to Westerns than to film noir, actually. The school and the locations in San Clemente all lent themselves to shooting in that style.
Q: You’re also taking advantage of the frame, like with the foot chase and how that ends…
RJ: Sure. And the parking-lot sequence is a showdown, between Brendan and a car.
Q: The character of Brendan is interesting, because he registers on-screen as almost physically slight, yet it’s clear from early on that he will not hesitate to mix it up. This recalls Bogart in that he may not have been conventionally tough, but when he reacted to something you realized that there was a lot going on below the surface.
RJ: The casting of Brendan was difficult; it might have been the most crucial part of making the entire film. It was imperative to find someone who you would not expect certain things from; he needed to be able to blend into a crowd at a party, he needed to look like he couldn’t take you in a fight – and then surprise you and put you down in half a minute.
He did need to have that feel that Bogart had; this was the one area where we were trying to replicate Bogart movies. In general, I forbade Joseph [Gordon-Levitt] and the rest of the cast from watching Bogart movies, or any other classic detective movies. We all knew that those elements were going to be in ours inherently, just because of the type of movie we were doing; putting any more weight in that direction at all, you could go very wrong very quickly – say, kids doing impressions of old movies…
We got lucky, finding Joe to play Brendan. He completely got the material instantly. The language in the movie is highly specific and even peculiar, and I think that he approached it in a unique and effective manner. He is also a musician, and he approached the dialogue as if it were lyrics. Which made a lot of sense to me, because the words in the lines that he’s saying are often cryptic. It’s definitely not the way that people speak today. So, the way of making it communicable and getting the lines to hit home was to find what was beautiful about them; the musicality, the rhythm, the flow.
Joe also had another revelation; that he had training doing this kind of old-school dialogue and snappy back-and-forth – on his television show, 3rd Rock from the Sun. Obviously, the character and material are very different, but once he tapped into that particular aspect he was able to draw from his years on the show and it helped inform his performance here.
He was physically right for the part, and he is a spectacular actor who takes his work seriously. He worked his butt off for the movie, and in many ways set the bar – even for me – in terms of the amount of dedication and work that he poured into making Brick.
Q: If not watching movies, did you have the cast do other kinds of research, like reading Hammett’s books?
RJ: Yeah, I told them all to read Hammett. We did watch some movies, just not The Maltese Falcon and the noirs. In Brick, we do reference some of those, just because this type of language was handled so well back then; dialogue was said in a way it’s not said today. For performance touchstones, we had to reference back before realism came into vogue, because there’s nothing realistic about the dialogue. One of the first things we discovered was that if you take this dialogue and try to perform it in a realistic fashion, it doesn’t work. It’s like trying to put a tomato into a matchbox; it’s not meant to fit. The dialogue in Brick is in a style that’s not used today, so the actors mostly hadn’t done it before. To see how actors used to handle dialogue, we watched Billy Wilder films; His Girl Friday;
Singin’ in the Rain – movies you wouldn’t expect to go along with the feel of Brick.
Q: If not Bogart as an icon, was there any other detective icon or male screen persona that you gravitated towards?
RJ: Not in the rehearsal process, no. We did have a lot of rehearsal time – 2 or 3 months from the time we cast Joe – in which to find the voice of the character. Literally – what kind of regional accent he would have. Joe would call me up all excited and say, “I found out how to do his ‘r’s; Brendan does his ‘r’s like Tom Waits! Listen – “ We had the time to refine it and get it just right.
We referenced older movies for the style of performance. The character archetypes are inherently owed to previous examples of the genre. But I didn’t want to throw that it into the mix for the actors; I wanted them to approach their roles as they would in any other movie – “Who is this person?”
Q: Since there’s no caricaturing in the movie, the teenaged characters are very suitable for the elements of crime and passion. There’s an emotional intensity; so much seems to be at stake for them.
RJ: You know, Hammett was once asked if Sam Spade [, the character he created,] was based on any particular detective. He answered no, it’s based on what every real detective would like to imagine himself to be. That’s sort of analogous to our movie’s relationship to real high school; it’s not the way high school is, but it’s the way high school feels.
When you’re in high school, things don’t feel – they didn’t, for me – flippant and silly. A lot of high school shows and movies seem to me to have a very adult perspective on high school, the perspective of someone who is out of that world and is now seeing it in a slightly condescending manner. Once you get beyond it, it’s easy to forget how you once were completely encased in its logic. Whereas when you’re actually in it, and your head is completely encased in this microcosm, it’s your world and it’s a world you have to survive. And things seem, if not life-or-death, very important and mythical. The people you know and the dynamics of your relationships seem hyper-real. We tried to summon that here. The level of intensity that’s in Brick equates to the level of intensity that I think a lot of us felt in high school.
Q: You knew you were always going to make this movie with Steve Yedlin. How hard was it to pull the rest of the crew together?
RJ: Again, we got lucky with all of ‘em. Some of the people that Steve brought with him, I had also known, and there were a couple of other friends that worked on the movie. It was important to me that the movie be a good experience for everybody, and when you’re shooting at this budget level, there are many opportunities for it not to be a good experience. [Laughs] So in interviewing people and in picking them for the crew, as much as you’re looking for someone you creatively connect with, you’re also looking for someone who brings a good energy to the entire operation. We found that in every respect.
Jodie Tillen, our production designer, had done costume design for years and years on big projects. She had done [the original TV series] Miami Vice, so we have her to thank for those fashions…She had just switched to doing production design when I met with her for Brick, and we immediately connected. Jodie’s a real artist, and she brought such a wealth of experience to the set.
Michele Posch, our costume designer and one of the coolest people on the planet, I had worked with before on some promos and commercials. I had very specific ideas for the looks and costumes for all the characters. She executed those and also came up with more ideas of her own, and was able to solicit some pieces from smaller designers.
Q: Did you give the crew books to read or movies to watch?
RJ: Yes. Well, Jodie already knew her stuff in terms of what we were referencing, but it was important that every single member of the crew knew and understood what our movie was and what we were doing, and that they felt a part of it.
Q: Over the years, did you shoot any test-run footage or do a sample scene?
RJ: We considered it, because there were years of us thinking, “When is this thing going to come together? Maybe we should shoot a trailer…” But whenever we would get really frustrated, we would go to San Clemente for the day and take pictures of locations. My little brother would come down with me and be a stand-in in the shots, so you can see him growing up over the years in these photos, standing in front of the drainage tunnel…Steve and I would talk about the movie at length; a lot of hours sitting in coffee shops…
Q: How did the cast come together so well? Many of these actors – like your lead actor – have, already, had years of experience and grown up on-screen.
RJ: Yeah, most of them have been on sets since they were very young. They’re veterans, which made for a great working environment because they were mature and professional. It scared me to death, because, as a first-time feature director, I had never worked with professional actors before. That was the big unknown; I was confident in my visual and filmmaking abilities. It turned out to be the element that I think I drew the most joy from – the creative process of working through this with them, and my constant amazement at what they do. It was something I had not experienced before.
We had a great casting director, Shannon Makhanian. She sunk her teeth into this project, way before we had the money for it. She decided that she loved the script, and worked on the project for nearly two years before the final funding was in place, doggedly pursuing exactly the right people for every part. It was easy to find people who were physically right for a role, but it’s a lot harder to find intelligent and talented actors who get the material and the language. Actors either understood it or didn’t.
Q: How did you cultivate the chemistry between Joseph Gordon-Levitt and, respectively, Nora Zehetner and Emilie de Ravin?
RJ: The rehearsal time allowed them to spend time together and get to know each other. Joe and I spent a lot of time together working out how we were going to handle the language and Brendan’s voice. One we felt we had a line on that, we started bringing in – one by one – the other actors to work with him, and they were able to cue in and get up to speed with our approach.
The other aspect was, approaching the characters as their own people, as opposed to, “Here’s the femme fatale. Here’s the little girl gone wrong.” The material is its own world.
Q: Is any of this material remotely autobiographical?
RJ: Oh, not at all; I was never this cool in high school. [Laughs]
Q: You didn’t get into this many fistfights?
RJ: Not quite, and if I did, I sure wouldn’t have won them.
Q: You must have wanted to trip somebody –
RJ: I wanted to many many times, and I finally got to when we shot the movie.
Q: Is it your foot in that scene?
RJ: No, no. I got to vicariously experience it.
Q: How did things come together in the editing room? After having prepared and visualized the movie for so long, was the editing easy?
RJ: It was interesting, because the editing process was very intimate; I edited Brick myself. I cut it using Final Cut Pro on a Mac, in my bedroom. I didn’t have an assistant, or an office that I would go to. It was like a writing process; I could get up whenever and work on the film, since it was just there on my computer.
The first cut of the movie snapped together very quickly, but there was a lot of refining. I had to find the rhythm of each individual scene, and there were clarity issues that we had to deal with. That’s probably what we spent the majority of our time on for the initial and subsequent cuts; doing it, then showing it to people and saying, “Okay, where are you lost?” [Laughs] We did have to figure out creative ways to clarify different points. Stories like those in The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep are complicated and twisty, and part of the excitement is having periods where the audience is intrigued and doesn’t know exactly what’s going on, but all the pieces are there and they do and will fit together. It’s walking a line; withholding information, yet keeping the audience staying with the movie and actively engaged in following the story and figuring out some of the mystery.
Q: Was your first cut substantially longer?
RJ: By about 10-13 minutes, and I’ve done some more trimming since we showed it at Sundance. But that’s the nature of this material; Hammett’s writing is very sharp and clean and gets right to the point. I’d have scenes that played and worked fine, and then I’d go in and take out a line or two that might be good but also superfluous, and the scene would work that much better.
Q: Were you confident about getting into Sundance?
RJ: [Laughs] Ohhh, I wasn’t confident about a thing! I didn’t know whether anyone was going to like it…I was blown away and completely surprised when it got into Sundance, and I was even more shocked when it played there and got such a strong response – whether people loved it or hated it…It struck people as unique, and that’s my favorite kind of movie – one that tries to do something a little different.
Q: What was the Sundance experience like for you?
RJ: Unreal, man; a blur. The whole cast was up there, and a lot of the crew came up, and my family and friends who had financed the movie…I have a very large family; we had like 30 Johnsons there. It felt good to be able to do right by them.
Q: Post-Sundance, you’re headed to other film festivals around the world. But after that, what’s next, now that you’ve finally gotten this project made, which took years?
RJ: It’s time to make another one! [Laughs] I have a con man movie which I just finished writing the script for. Hopefully that will be the next film that I make, and hopefully I will work with a lot of the same people that I worked with on Brick. Whatever the next project is, a lot of my energy will go into making sure that it’s as good an experience as Brick – for everybody involved.
Interview take from BRICK film production notes, courtesy of Optimum Realising.