By Christina Radish
Taking its cues and its verbal style from the vintage crime novels of Dashiell Hammett, Brick is the dynamic debut feature from writer-director Rian Johnson. Having won the Sundance Film Festival’s Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision, the film honors the rich cinematic tradition of the hard-boiled noir mystery, while still being wittingly and bracingly immersed in fresh territory. Set in a modern-day
Southern California
neighborhood and high school, Brick follows student Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and his desperate plight to find his missing ex-girlfriend, Emily (played by Lost’s Emilie de Ravin).
Due to the unique nature and style of the film, it has taken Johnson nearly a decade to finally bring the project to theaters. “It was a long process,” he says. “I wrote the script right out of film school, in ‘97, and we shot in the winter of 2003. It was especially difficult to get made because the central conceit of it was so weird. It’s the type of thing where, in the script form, you can read it and imagine how it could be absolutely horrible. It could have been unbearably bad film noir set in high school, with a bunch of teenagers doing Bogart impressions.”
“Especially because I was a first-time director, it was an inherently difficult thing to get people to sign checks to make this movie. It was just a long process of sticking around and getting some day jobs to be able to eat, and just not going away. At the end of the day, it actually proved an impossible task to find traditional money for it. We ended up passing the hat and funding it through friends and family for a very low budget. It was a long process, but that ended up being the best way to make it because we had total creative freedom.”
{quote_top}Once the money was together and the production date was set, the next hurdle came with finding the perfect young actor to take on the leading role. Johnson found that actor in 25-year-old former 3rd Rock from the Sun star Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
“It was actually really late in the game,” says Johnson. “We had finally been able to get the producers and the money together, and we had a shooting date in four months, but we hadn’t found the actor for that part yet. It was just thought, ‘We’re not going to be able to make the film.’ And then, I met Joe. I had never really watched 3rd Rock from the Sun, so I didn’t know his work from that. And, Mysterious Skin was still being edited. So, I had really only seen him in this movie called Manic, with Don Cheadle, where he gave a really good performance. But, it was really just sitting down and talking to the guy that made me instantly feel like, ‘Okay, we can do this. We can make this work.’ We instantly bonded about how we were going to approach this, and also the pitfalls we had to watch out for with this. I think the fact that he instantly took the enterprise very seriously, and instantly said, ‘Okay, we’re creating a world here, from the ground up,’ enabled him to become much more of a creative partner on the film than just an actor.”
Having already distinguished himself as an actor with a wide range of performances in both television and film, Gordon-Levitt reveals that he definitely had his doubts about the project, initially. “I remember thinking, ‘If we don’t nail this just right, it’s going to look really silly.’ But, I wanted to give it a try. I knew that the script was there, from the very first time I read it. I had no doubts that the words were right. It was just a question of, ‘Can we figure out how to get this up on its feet?’”
One thing that Gordon-Levitt wanted to be sure of was his exactness of the dialogue. “I actually pride myself on how exact it is. Most dialogue you learn, it’s not about precision, it’s about being realistic. But, Brick is not realistic, from the very start. It’s much larger, it’s much smarter and it’s much faster than reality. So, I decided, from the beginning, that I wanted to say the script, word for word. The film got edited, but I think everything I say is in the script.”
{quote_middle}Because much of the vocabulary in the film is unlike anything audiences have ever heard before, Gordon-Levitt felt that it was imperative to make it seem natural. “I practiced so much, and did so much repetition, and focused so much on the technical aspects of it, leading up to the shooting, so that when I got to the set and actually had to shoot the scenes, I didn’t have to think about it anymore. It was so drilled into my head that I could just say that stuff and concentrate on what it felt like because, even though the language is very stylized and larger than life, the emotions aren’t. The emotions are very genuine. I think that’s what makes the movie more than just a gimmick.”
Since he is in every scene in Brick, Johnson felt it was pertinent for him to work closely with Gordon-Levitt and involve him in every aspect of the process, in order to make the unusual project work. “I really felt it was important to get Joe involved in every single level of the movie, and to get him really jazzed and excited about it,” says Johnson. “He’s a really smart, creative guy and, from the very beginning, he really keyed into what he felt could make this thing work. It was important, for me, that he was involved on a level that actors usually aren’t in movies.”
{quote_bottom}Gordon-Levitt feels that all of his involvement prior to filming helped him in being precise while they were on set, since there was a limited budget and shooting schedule. “There wasn’t room for embellishment, but I didn’t want any room for embellishment. I wanted to know exactly what I had to do, and I wanted to do it right. Rian and I spent a few days sitting on the floor in his apartment, going over the script, shot for shot. Literally, he went over every beat of the movie with me. A lot of directors would just be like, ‘You don’t need to worry about that. You do your job, and I’ll do mine.’ But, the whole thing was very precisely planned, which is why we were able to do it. We didn’t have the money to show up to work and figure out what to do.”
Although he will probably always be remembered for his performance in the much-loved teen comedy 10 Things I Hate About You, which co-starred Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles, after his run on the highly successful 3rd Rock from the Sun ended, Gordon-Levitt made it a point not to fall into the generic teen comedy trap that so many other young actors get caught up in.
“To me, the most important thing is whether it’s good,” he says, about his criteria for choosing projects. “I don’t think intentions are generally that much better in the indie world than they are in the studio world. Just like in any walk of life that I’ve ever experienced, there are certain people that are trying to figure out how to climb the hierarchy and how to please their superiors, and then there are other people who have their eye on the ball. What matters is the reason you’re doing it.”
“If I had run into some good scripts in the studio world, and they would have hired me, then I would have done those jobs, but that didn’t happen. There’s very few good scripts, in either the indie or studio worlds. All I was looking for was a good script. I wanted to do stuff that I believed in and that I loved because I’ve always loved acting.”
For someone who has worked nearly a decade to get his first film made, Johnson understands that he’s more of an acquired taste filmmaker, and he’s perfectly fine with that. “All my favorite movies are somebody else’s least favorite movie. I like stuff that doesn’t try and appeal to everyone. I’ve written my next movie, and I’m going to try and make it. I’m in the very embryonic stages of it, but the career paths that I see and want to emulate are filmmakers like the Cohen brothers or Kubrick, who just made their movies. At this point, I don’t really have ambition to be a working director and take meetings and read scripts. Hopefully, we’ll be able to make the next one quicker than we made this one.”
“It’s a con-man movie. I’ve been planning it for the last two years, and just wrote the script over the past eight months. There’s part of me that wishes I had 10 years to plan this next one, but there’s part of me that’s really glad that I don’t.”
