Brick

[Reinhold]

give it 45 minutes to figure out its own identity, and then it's a great neo-noir that'll have you by your balls.

i fucking loved it, and talked to rian johnson one on one for a few minutes after the show. cool guy... honest, relaxed, and grateful.

it's great, except for some forced-sounding music in the beginning, and the plot wabbling its way down the line between camp and intense drama.

heads up, if you aren't sucked into the genre enough to expect it, there are times when the characters are almost sound like they're speaking in pikey.

definitely recommended-- partially because it's a decent film, and mostly because it's a really intriguing first feature for the writer/director. i am almost certain it'll get wider distribution later this year. fuckall if it doesn't. netflix eventually... but see it. ... especially the lynchheads.

[Neil]

I can't wait to see it, I'm just pissed that i live in a shitty small town and i'm not sure it will play within an hour of any direction that i live...

[Reinhold]

I can't wait to see it, I'm just pissed that i live in a shitty small town and i'm not sure it will play within an hour of any direction that i live...

nah, you're pissed cause Rian Johnson doesn't have you as a facebook friend.

[modage]

i am almost certain it'll get wider distribution later this year.

it will get wider distribution starting in a week...

Just got a tentative schedule of the roll-out for Brick. This could still change, but right now this is the plan, with specific theaters:

3/31
New York City - The Angelika
Los Angeles - The Arclight

4/7
Boston - Kendall and Coolidge
Chicago - Century Center Evanston and Downtown
Dallas - Magnolia
Washington DC - E Street
Denver - The Esquire
Minneapolis - Lagoon
Seattle - The Metro
San Francisco - Embarcadero
Portland - The Fox Tower
San Diego - The Hillcrest
Atlanta - Midtown

4/14
We will expand into more theaters in the Bay area, New York, LA and DC.

4/21
Austin - The Arbor
Baltimore
Detroit - Main Art
St. Louis - Tivoli
Indianapolis - Keystone
Milwaukee - Oriental
Philadelphia - Ritzs
Phoenix - Camelview
Sacramento - Tower
Houston - Angelika

4/28
Albany - Spectrum
Charlotte - Ballantyne
Cleveland
Kansas City
Louisville - Baxter
Monterrey
Santa Cruz
Salt Lake City

[sheshothim]

I can't wait to see it, I'm just pissed that i live in a shitty small town and i'm not sure it will play within an hour of any direction that i live...

nah, you're pissed cause Rian Johnson doesn't have you as a facebook friend.

Me too.....me too.

[MacGuffin]

Brick is a rarity in really low budget independent film, it’s exciting and dynamic. To break it down it’s a film noir set in a southern California high school. Film noir is the most malleable genre out there. You can do comedy, romance, action and now a high school movie all within this shroud of violence, sexy women and drugs.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Brendan Frye a smart fast talking high school student who isn’t above breaking a jock’s nose in order to find his missing ex-girlfriend. I got a chance to talk with Brick writer/director, Rian Johnson, who rightfully won the Sundance Film Festival’s Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision.

Daniel Robert Epstein: One of the things that’s interesting about Brick is that they don’t make film noirs without humor anymore. The only humor in Brick comes from the fact that they are high school students. Did you want to make something that was so nihilistic?

Rian Johnson: Not particularly. I hope there’s actually some degree of humor in there.

DRE: But the humor doesn’t come out of the noir aspect.

Rian: Exactly. The origin of this whole thing was the novels of Dashiell Hammett. That’s where it all started for me and if you go back and look at his novels it’s got that same humor that you see in a lot of darker stuff like the Coen Brothers, where it’s funny but in the context of the world. The biggest example would be in The Maltese Falcon. The scenes with Sydney Greenstreet, who is the heavy, are hilarious. They’re like comedy scenes really. But at the same time it’s not hilarious in the way that steps you out of the world, because it’s completely at peace with what’s going on in the story.

DRE: But did you have the beats set up such as when the head of the crime family is being served milk and cookies by his mom. You knew that was going to get a laugh.

Rian: Yeah, definitely.

DRE: But you don’t play it for laughs.

Rian: It was very important not to. A big part of what my goal with this was to do a straight up detective movie. I knew that we were playing a very dangerous game by setting it in this high school world because that inherently lends itself to parody and humor like Bugsy Malone. If anything I probably did overcompensate by wanting to play it completely safe. The humor seeps in when you play it totally straight.

DRE: What made you decide to set it in high school?

Rian: The decision to set it in that weird high school world came from wanting to give it a different set of visual cues because everyone is so familiar with film noir. The instant you see images of men in hats in shadowy alleyways, it’s very easy to turn your brain off to a certain extent and just chalk it up to being a homage to older better films. I’m always a little bit nervous when I tell people the central conceit of the film because I’m afraid that they’re going to think that the high school twist is some sort of post-modern deconstruction of the genre, when it’s not that way at all. It’s actually a way of being able to take a much more straightforward approach.

DRE: Brick feels like a student film, in a good and very pure way.

Rian: I take that as a big compliment. It was shot at my hometown high school which is very freaky. That’s years and years of therapy right there. I grew up making movies. That’s what I’ve been doing since I was 12 and throughout high school I was running around with a video camera. That’s what I did to avoid social situations so there was something about the experience of making Brick that very much pulled me back to that world. I was back in my high school making movies with a group of friends.

DRE: Does all the anger in the movie come from high school too?

Rian: Of course. Everyone wants to break the jock’s nose. Those two worlds of detective movie plus high school slid very easily on top of each other in a lot of different ways such as the nihilistic anger you mentioned. That’s something that’s very present and very rooted in the archetypal detective protagonist of detective fiction. That seen it all, disconnected from the world in doing his job type of thing. That connects to the loner archetype that you have in high school and the way a lot of us envisioned ourselves in high school. Everyone likes to think of themselves as outside of that stratified social world.

DRE: What made you decide to start off Brick with a scene from the middle of the movie? I assumed it was a scene from the end.

Rian: I’d be interested in knowing how you reacted to that.

DRE: You didn’t have to do that but since it is a noir, you could do it just as easily. It was good because walking to the theater I didn’t know if this was the kind of movie where people would die.

Rian: It served a couple purposes and it is a Sunset Boulevard type thing.

DRE: I wasn’t sure who the girl was supposed to be.

Rian: You’re supposed to be confused. Also I think the fact he’s sitting there looking at a dead girl on a creek established from the very start that this isn’t a high school movie. As opposed to jumping into something where all of a sudden you’re in high school with locker cages and corridors but now you’re ramped up to see murders and violence. I felt it was better to lay the cards on the table.

DRE: Was it difficult or expensive to get Velvet Underground's Sister Ray to play over the credits?

Rian: Our budget was just under 500 grand and for Sister Ray they wanted $60,000 and we talked them down to $30,000. I got to the point where I got so passionate about having that song at the end, I wrote a letter to John Cale and Lou Reed begging them to let me put it in which I’m sure their assistants read and had pity on me. Since there were hardly any songs in the whole movie, I wanted to punch it home with that at the end.

DRE: I liked the jazzy score.

Rian: Yeah. It’s like a junkyard jazz score.

DRE: You obviously had a very strong vision for this movie. How happy were you with the final cut?

Rian: I was thrilled. I can say that and not feel like an asshole because the reason I was thrilled with it is because of how different it was from how I originally envisioned it. I had a very clear idea going into it and to a large degree it did come out matching that but the things that excite me at the end of the day is the stuff that still surprises me. That’s why after seeing it 500 times I can still sit down and watch it.

DRE: What movie did you see Joseph in that made you want to cast him?

Rian: The only movie I’d seen him in was Manic with Don Cheadle. I’d never seen his TV show and he’d just finished shooting Mysterious Skin but it wasn’t cut yet.

DRE: Have you seen Mysterious Skin yet?

Rian: Yeah it’s amazing. I think Joe is really going to surprise a lot of people in the coming years. His trajectory is going to be a really intelligent one. He’s such a smart guy and he’s so level headed and he knows his taste in projects. One benefit of him working since he was young is that he is only in his mid-20’s but yet he has such a highly developed sense of where he wants to go and how he wants to get there.

DRE: He’s gone beyond working with edgy directors. He works with amazing people.

Rian: The nice thing about him is he isn’t like “Fuck the mainstream, I’m doing edgy stuff.” He’s just interested in picking good projects. I’m not afraid to hear if he’s going to do a 50 million dollar movie because I know it’ll be something interesting.

DRE: I was given a glossary of terms for the movie Brick. Of course you can figure out most of them from the context they are used in the movie. How did you come up with the language?

Rian: The slang in the movie is really dense but it’s just mish mash. There’s a lot of it from Hammett, the 50’s, modern day stuff and a bunch I just made up. The only thing in my mind was, does it sound cool. If I couldn’t think of something that sounded cool enough I would make something up.

DRE: When you came to certain beats while writing Brick would you have to think of what would happen next in a noir or did it come naturally?

Rian: I really tried to avoid thinking what would happen next in a noir because then it would start to feel like a homage. When working with the cast and crew I felt I could make fresh creative choices and not play archetypes. It was important for each of them that they found something about the character that let them bring it to life.

DRE: What made you think of Lukas Haas for the crime boss?

Rian: We found him very close to the end of the shoot. Joe and I drove up to his place up in the hills. We had to go up this twisty dark road and then go into this house much like a kingpin’s house. I hope he does more character roles like this. It’s really fun to see him have something where he can be a bit more bizarre and cunning.

DRE: Who was Gary Trueman [played by Richard Roundtree] in the film noir canon?

Rian: He was the chief of police that the detective’s got to go in and deal with eventually. That scene is basically verbatim straight out of The Big Sleep. That’s a scene that is the closest we get to very directly tipping our hat to our origins.

DRE: After I see a film noir I really want to punch someone in the face. I want to just sneak up on someone and clock them.

Rian: Yeah, clock them in the kisser. There’s something cathartic about that.

DRE: Seeing that world just makes you want to do something bad to somebody else.

Rian: My goal as a filmmaker is to make people do bad things to other people in life. If I can accomplish that one thing, I’m all good.

DRE: A lot of independent filmmakers get offered the most bizarre things after having success. I know Eli Roth got offered Dukes of Hazzard after Cabin Fever. How about you?

Rian: It’s bizarre to see what people toss us based on this movie. It’s nice for me in a way because I actually like the career path I want to take. I want to just keep writing and making my own movies. I’m not looking to be a working director so it’s easier and very nice that I don’t have to read scripts and deal with that world.

DRE: So you have no desire to even read scripts.

Rian: Not at this point. I’ve written my next movie, called The Brothers Bloom, and I know what the next one is after that. The career trajectories that I want to try to emulate are like the Coen Bros.

DRE: The Coen Bros went and tried to do a big picture movie with The Hudsucker Proxy.

Rian: There are some things about Hudsucker that I still enjoy.

DRE: I saw on your website that you’re taking pictures across the country for the movie.

Rian: It’s weird, I have this little personal site of mine and I’ve been just tossing stuff out there for my friends over the years. Now people are starting to find it, which is strange. The Brothers Bloom is a globetrotting con man adventure movie about two brothers who are con men and their last job is on this one woman. I’m really excited about it.

DRE: How old are the characters?

Rian: Like mid-30’s.

DRE: So no part for Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

Rian: No, I wish I could put Joe in the time machine and zap him forward ten years. I would be in heaven. But as proud as I am of Brick and just 100 percent overjoyed with the process of making it, it was something I wrote in my early 20’s. I’m 32 now and it is really invigorating to be working on something I wrote a year ago. It’s really where my heart’s at right now.

DRE: After working on Brick so long was it daunting at all to sit down and write that second movie?

Rian: Not at all. Movies are all I’ve really done my whole life so if I get a chance to keep on making them, I will.

DRE: Why do you think Michael Bay’s website is the funniest site on the net?

Rian: Have you read the recently asked questions? People ask him what kind of car he drives. There’s something hilarious about that.

DRE: It’s easy because he’s such a target [laughs].

Rian: It’s probably a little too easy. I probably should take that down but I won’t.

DRE: Where are you from originally?

Rian: I went to junior high and high school in San Clemente [California] but Colorado for grade school.

DRE: Was your family in the movie business?

Rian: No, not at all. I was the first one in the family to veer into that. But the way we funded the movie was scraping money together from friends and family. They’re all really big movie fans and really supportive.

DRE: What movies made you want to pick up a camera?

Rian: It was the same cloud of movies that everyone about our age likes. It’s Raiders [of the Lost Ark], Star Wars, The Dark Crystal. But some of my best memories are watching La Strada with my grandfather and my dad showing me Raging Bull when I was in high school.

DRE: What film school did you go to?

Rian: I went to USC.

DRE: So many people come out of there, how was it?

Rian: I had a lot of fun there and I met all my best friends there. To a large degree the reason you see so many people coming out of it is just because it’s in Los Angeles and the people who come out of it stick around in LA and work eventually.

DRE: Did you grow up with Lucky McKee?

Rian: No, we met in the dorms at film school.

DRE: Did Lucky give you notes on Brick at all?

Rian: I showed it to him when we were in the cutting stage. It’s a fun thing. I met a group of friends in film school, Lucky was among them and my cinematographer Steve Yedlin is as well. We’ve all stuck together.

DRE: He shot May as well.

Rian: Yeah. May was the first movie that our group of friends all got together and did. Lucky’s a talented dude and he’s cool. So I hope we keep that going for future movies. It’s a cool little crew that we’ve got.

DRE: What do you know about SuicideGirls?

Rian: I go to the site completely for your interviews.

[modage]

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: RIAN JOHNSON (BRICK)
Source: CHUD 03.29.06

Rian Johnson knew who I was when we sat down for a one on one interview about his debut film, Brick. Whenever someone knows who I am I always flash through my mind trying to think what I have written about them, and whether the revelation that they know me is about to be followed with a fist to the face. The one thing I had written about Brick was that its concept – a noir set in a high school – sounded like Veronica Mars to me. Turns out I was wrong, since Brick is infinitely more accomplished than any TV show. it's a stunning debut, and it really marks Johnson as a major talent right out the gate. And I'm not saying that because he reads CHUD.

Brick was a long time in the making; Johnson and his friends (who became his crew) spent six years trying to get it made. They would go out and take location photos long before they had secured a dime of funding. When it finally did get made, Brick got accepted to Sundance where it won a special jury prize for Originality of Vision, and I can't think of a more fitting award. Brick is a film that takes some very familiar concepts and elements and synthesizes them into something that's exhilaratingly fresh. I spent most of the running time of Brick with a grin on my face – not because the film's funny but because Johnson had the audacity to try what he did, and the talent and skill to succeed so completely.

Brick hits this Friday in the lucky cities. If you want to find out when this excellent film is coming to a theater near you, check out the Brick forums at Rian's website.


Q: This has been a long process for you – this played at Sundance last year.

Johnson: A long process. And even longer than that – I wrote the script right out of film school.

Q: The movie you worked on forever, but this part, where the movie's done but people can't see it, has been going on for over a year and change.

Johnson: We made the thing totally independently and Focus bought it at Sundance and then immediately slotted it into their schedule a year later. At first, personally being impatient I was frustrated with it, but eventually I realized it's a good thing, because they have been very good at putting it out there in terms of screenings and showing it at festivals. Particularly for this film I think word of mouth is really the only advertising that means anything. I know people have been responding well to the trailer, which is encouraging, but at the same time the central conceit of the movie is so weird you really need someone to sell it.

Q: I walked in and didn't know what the film was about, and took me a couple of minutes to get my bearings. At first it seems kind of funny – they're talking funny – and then you realize it really works.

Johnson: At the same time it's really tricky because if you just tell people that this is a hard-boiled detective movie set in a high school, that doesn't communicate that it works. And if it doesn't work, it could be the worst concept ever.

Q: That's the thing – I kept expecting it to be a comedy, that the concept of them being hard boiled would be played for laughs, but it never is.

Johnson: Absolutely not. It's real important that we stuck very true to the detective roots of it. The origin of it, where it came from, is my love of Dashiell Hammett's novels, and just wanting to make a straight up American detective movie. The whole twist of setting it in this high school world for me had nothing to do with being post-modern or meta or deconstructive or any of that bullshit, it was really just because the visual cues of film noir are so ingrained in our culture now that it's hard to see them without turning a piece of your brain off and filing it as film noir. That was really the origin of putting it in this high school world, giving it a different set of visual cues, so we could do a much more straightforward take on a genre movie.

Q: How hard was it to get your cast to get that patter, that rapid fire dialogue?

Johnson: We worked a lot on it. With Joseph in particular we had a three month period where we got together constantly and watched movies, talked about movies and worked out exactly how we would make this weird language work. The first thing we tried was to forget about this formalized dialogue and do it completely naturally. That didn't work, it fell flat, and we realized if you're going to have this kind of language you have to take the bull by the horns. We went back and watched a bunch of Billy Wilder movies. We watched Treasure of the Sierra Madre and we had to kind of study that style of performance, which isn't done today.

Q: That style died out when Marlon Brando showed up, but do you think that such stylized dialogue could come back?

Johnson: I don't know. If so it would be a sea change that would happen a century from now. People get used to a certain thing. But then again, you look at the modern day sitcom –

Q: Which has a lot of those elements.

Johnson: Absolutely. Two centuries from now people will look at our sitcoms from today and think it's the weirdest, most alien thing in the world. It's kind of the frog in the pot of water having the heat turned up – there are a bunch of conventions of the genre that we've gotten used to since the 50s.

Q: As a writer is it fun to write like that?

Johnson: It's a blast. It's a blast because you never get to do it. For the actors I think that's one of the things they responded to, what other opportunity are they going to have to try this kind of thing?

Q: When you spend so long working on a film, planning it out for months and years before the first frame is shot, how does that effect the editing?

Johnson: That's interesting. The editing is always a process, I think, of in a way being able to let go of the conceptions you had at the beginning. So the fact that I had so long to conceive of this at the beginning made it inherently more difficult. The fact that I had the luxury to take so long on the editing, mostly because we financed it independently and because I was cutting it on a Mac in my bedroom, I had all the time in the world to play with it. When I was planning the film out I was watching a lot of Sergio Leone westerns, and I shot it in that style – which works for the framings, but I shot it in these long single takes. Then I got to the editing phase of it and I kind of realized that I shot it in this particular way, but the Hammett, the stuff that it's based on, is very percussive. It's very short and it's very abrupt, it's all about saying the most in the least amount of words possible. When I put the first cut together I realized the pace was off and it was way too long, but because we had shot so quickly I didn't have coverage. So what I did was I just went into the shots and cut out the boring parts of the shots. Now there are these jump cuts that happen throughout the movie, that's where those came from.

Q: Necessity is the mother of invention.

Johnson: Absolutely. But it ended up creating this other cool kind of little style thing that works with it.

Q: What's next for you? I assume that the time between Sundance and now has given you the chance to think about it.

Johnson: I have had a con man movie percolating for the last couple of years and I wrote it this summer. We're in the thick of trying to get it made now, and as proud as I am of Brick and the work everyone did and what a great experience it was, I did write this when I was in my early 20s. It feels really good to be working on something I wrote this year and is about stuff that I'm about now in my life.

Q: Is the con man film going to be a genre mash up as well?

Johnson: A bit. I think it's more straight ahead, but at the same time it's very much in its own world. It's a con man movie, a very character based con man movie about two brothers. It's kind of the same thing as Brick in that it's character based and I hope the main relationship is what takes you through it, but it was important to me not to sublimate the con man elements of it, to make it work with the characters.

Q: I would imagine that after your first film wins a special jury prize for originality of vision at Sundance it would be easier to get your second film off the ground.

Johnson: Your lips to God's ears. So far. But again those six years of trying to get funding taught me that you're not making a movie until the film is rolling through the camera.

Q: Do you have people coming to you and saying they want to be in your next film?

Johnson: Yeah, and that's nice. It's nice to have something that does a bit of the talking for you, because I'm bad at selling myself. Now I just show them the movie.

Q: How much of a difference does it make having a couple of names in your film versus having nobody at all?

Johnson: You mean in terms of getting into Sundance?

Q: Actually in and then getting noticed at the festival. Because it seems like every year there are more and more movies filled with names we recognize and with budgets over 10 million dollars that are not necessarily what we think of as Sundance films. You're on the lower end of the budget, but you still have names in your film.

Johnson: In terms of how Sundance works, I couldn't say. But I do have to hold on to the idealistic hope that if you do have somebody or nobody in it, if you make a good and interesting movie, people are dying for that. Especially up at Sundance – everybody's just incredibly thirsty for something interesting to see and get excited about. When it happens, again maybe it's naïve, but I like to believe it isn't about who's in the movie.

Q: It's about the film itself.

So what are you watching these days?

Johnson: I just discovered Bergman, which sounds really weird because I went to film school. In film school I watched The Seventh Seal and I kind of idiotically felt I had Bergman pegged but then I recently watched Fanny and Alexander for the first time and it blew my mind. So now I'm going through and rewatching Scenes from a Marriage – it's all a revelation to me.

Q: You mentioned you were watching Leone films and they affected how you approached Brick; does that often happen to you? Do you find that what you're watching works its way into your stuff?

Johnson: Absolutely. Not that it has necessarily had much to do with how the final product comes out. It's kind of like the music you're listening to when you write a script; it's important that you personally apply that directly to the script because it's what you're excited about and passionate about in the moment, and it's going to feed what you're working on at the moment. Then inevitably a year later when you're cutting the movie together you try putting that music in and it doesn't fit. But no, I think that's what feeds you, whatever you're excited about in the moment.

Q: Bergman's what made Woody Allen stop being funny, so we'll see what happens with you. Is the next film going to be really dour?

Johnson: I'm making Interiors 2, actually.

Q: How does that happen that you get back into Bergman? It doesn't seem like you would go to Blockbuster on the weekend and not find anything else to rent.

Johnson: Netflix. I hate to be an adman here, and I'm not getting a free subscription, but I am such a Netflix addict. I've got something that most people don't even have – I have the eight discs at once option.

Q: Holy shit.

Johnson: But I don't have cable, that's how I justify it! That's all I do. I'm hooked on it. I burn through them, I try to watch as movie as I can.

Q: My problem with Netflix is that I'll set up my queue months in advance and then whatever I felt like watching months ago, when it comes to my mailbox, I am just not in the mood to watch it anymore. But you're able to just power through?

Johnson: You know what the trick is to Netflix? And I tell this to all new Netflix people, the trick is that if it's sitting on your coffee table for a couple of days and it's a chore, send it back. Don't think twice, just send it back.

Q: You can always get it again.

Johnson: Exactly. It doesn't matter if it's something you think you should see, just ship it back.

Q: So what are the guilty pleasures on your queue right now?

Johnson: A friend of mine, Noah Segan who plays Dode in the movie, is a huge fan of 60s cinema, so I got that movie Candy, and I haven't watched it yet.

Q: That movie is a little bit awesome.

Johnson: Is it weird?

Q: It's really weird.

Johnson: And I watched that Peter O'Toole movie, The Ruling Class. Which I guess isn't a guilty pleasure, but it's out of nowhere. That whole freaked out 60s cinema.

They have a weird thing on Netflix – not to make the whole interview about Netflix – where you can have your friends see your list. I got excited about it, and then I signed my mom up for it. And now I realize –

Q: If you want to put something really creepy on the queue, your mom can see it.

Johnson: Yeah. So I'm censoring myself.

Q: Who are the current working directors that you consider the best? The ones you look up to.

Johnson: I'm a huge fan of a couple. Wes Anderson, I love him. Paul Thomas Anderson, I'm really excited about the new one that he's working on.

Q: There was just a script review for that.

Johnson: I read it. The guy was ecstatic but he didn't give much information.

Q: The guy was psyched, but he didn't know it was based on a book already.

Johnson: I know! He suggested they novelize it! [laughs] That's a little curious. Although that reminds me of one of the funniest things I've seen in a bookstore, which was the novelization of the Gwyneth version of Great Expectations. It was a novelization of that movie.

Q: What about a novelization of Brick?

Johnson: You know what's funky is that during the writing process my first step was that I wrote it as a novella. I imitated Hammett's writing style, which is very distinct. When people think of detective fiction they think of Chandler, with those long flowing metaphors about the city at night. But Hammett is much more like Hemingway.

Q: It's punchy and snappy.

Johnson: So I wrote it in prose and imitated his style and that helped shape the story and the dialogue. I took those hundred pages and transcribed them into screenplay form. So I've got a novel version. We might publish it.

Q: That's cool. But why screenwriting and filmmaking? Why not novels?

Johnson: The most exciting stuff about it for me is the stuff that doesn't come from me. It's the stuff that's accidental, or that the actors bring. As meticulously planned out as Brick was, and I planned every single shot in the movie and knew how it was going to cut, but at the same time the reason I can still sit down and watch it after having seen it 500 times, is the stuff the actors bring, that I had nothing to do with.

Q: The common perception of directors is that they have these big egos, but a part of being a good director is letting go of that ego and letting people add to your vision.

Johnson: Absolutely, and taking it as a collaboration. But at the same time on the side I write stuff just for myself, I goof around with recording musical things I never play for anyone. It's important to have both things, but those specific things about filmmaking are what excite me.

Q: Also I imagine hotter girls in filmmaking than in literature.

Johnson: This is what I read.

Q: Literary groupies are not as hot.

Johnson: I have yet to...

Q: But you got a prize at Sundance!

Johnson: You know something, man, I don't know where this myth about getting all these hot chicks comes from. Maybe it's just me, maybe not a "playa." I'm not dating Rachel Weisz yet.

Q: When they write the sequel to Raging Bulls, Easy Riders for this generation, you have to have something good in there.

Johnson: I have to work on it. Either that or make a lot of shit up and have pay people to agree with it.

Q: When you're working on this film for years and years, going out and taking location photos long before you get the funding, what is it that convinces you that all this work will one day culminate in a movie?

Johnson: You just have to go on blind faith. You have to set it in your head like a rock that you're not going to go away until you've made this movie. I used to get very frustrated during that time hearing from filmmakers who had made films and wanting to hear details about how did you do this – how did you go from a script to the movie, how do you get movies made. They would always be infuriatingly vague, they would be like, "I met this person and it came together." But now I realize that the answer is really you have to be vague. The details are different for every single film. The common thread is that somebody stuck to their guns and didn't go away until they made their movie. That sounds very general and vague, but it's true. If you write something you care about and want to make and you don't go away until it's made... it'll get made.

[Pubrick]

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: RIAN JOHNSON (BRICK)
Q: Who are the current working directors that you consider the best? The ones you look up to.

Johnson: I'm a huge fan of a couple. Wes Anderson, I love him. Paul Thomas Anderson, I'm really excited about the new one that he's working on.

yeah but the best part comes after:

Q: There was just a script review for that.

Johnson: I read it. The guy was ecstatic but he didn't give much information.

Q: The guy was psyched, but he didn't know it was based on a book already.

Johnson: I know! He suggested they novelize it! [laughs] That's a little curious. Although that reminds me of one of the funniest things I've seen in a bookstore, which was the novelization of the Gwyneth version of Great Expectations. It was a novelization of that movie.

[pete]

he's never played Street Fighter: the Movie: The Game.

[SiliasRuby]

Saw it again today at the arclight. Yippeee! It was so awesome.

[modage]

yeah so if you couldn't tell, i saw this on Friday and...

I've got to say, it's my favorite film of 2006 so far. If you love Film Noir you'll really embrace this.

Great film.  I think it's the most original Ive seen in some time.

the music, which i thought was quite good, reminded me of the soundtrack to punch drunk love at times. in the end, i'm left with the thought of twin peaks, without the lynch weirdness.

give it 45 minutes to figure out its own identity, and then it's a great neo-noir that'll have you by your balls. i fucking loved it.
it's great, except for some forced-sounding music in the beginning, and the plot wabbling its way down the line between camp and intense drama.  heads up, if you aren't sucked into the genre enough to expect it, there are times when the characters are almost sound like they're speaking in pikey.

definitely recommended-- partially because it's a decent film, and mostly because it's a really intriguing first feature for the writer/director.  but see it. ... especially the lynchheads.

and i thought lucas haas was AWESOME in this.  even moreso than JGL, i was like 'where has he been?'      and the Laura character was a dead ringer for the chick on the OC.  probably more later...

[modage]

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.

http://www.aintitcoolnews.com/display.cgi?id=22941

[hedwig]

it will get wider distribution starting in a week...

Just got a tentative schedule of the roll-out for Brick. This could still change, but right now this is the plan, with specific theaters:

this is the only movie out right now that i want to see but Brick showed Miami the back of its hand.

at least i still have Phat Girlz, She's the Man, and The Shaggy Dog to choose from! 

[Ghostboy]

Yeah, this was really damn good. At first I was worried that it might be a little on the cute side, but it really packed all the right punches in all the right places.

[RegularKarate]

Yeah, this was really damn good. At first I was worried that it might be a little on the cute side, but it really packed all the right punches in all the right places.

Exactly.  I wrestled with whether I would like it or not for the first twenty minutes or so, but once I got used to the whole highschool noir thing, I was with it 100%.

I think it's safe for me to say this is the first great movie of the year.  Can't stop thinking about it.