Rian Johnson defied genre and budget constraints to make his unique debut film, Brick, writes Donald Clarke.
It takes a special kind of skill to merge two familiar entities in such a fashion that they form something pleasingly novel. Rian Johnson, a calm, somewhat shy young film-maker from southern California, seems to have managed just that with his debut feature.
Brick (brilliantly named) takes the language, tone and subject matter of the film noir and blends them with the setting and personal dynamics of the high-school movie to form a singularly original thriller.
A wry loner walks down mean streets while searching for his missing girlfriend. A lame villain in a cloak dispatches brutal heavies to secure his authority. Femmes fatale purr in smoky dressing rooms.
Then Mom comes in to ask if anybody might like some cereal.
"Yes, that scene with the mom was quite important," Johnson laughs. "Watching that with an audience was a crucial moment to see if we had pulled off what we were trying to do. Have we honestly created a world that draws people in? If you can enjoy that moment, laugh at it, yet still stay with the story then you must be in that world."
It seems as if audiences are indeed prepared to engage with the world of Brick. The film, made for under half a million dollars, was a word-of-mouth success at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to secure a special prize for "originality of vision". It was subsequently picked up for distribution by Focus Pictures and has been doing very nicely on its limited release in the US.
"You can imagine what that very first screening at Sundance was like," Johnson says. "The movie is such a weird creature. It is this strange hybrid. We made it independently with all the money coming from friends and family and it felt a little like we were these kids out playing without adult supervision. We were surprised it played so well with people of all ages."
Johnson, who grew up in an ordinary middle-class family with no connections to the movie business, had been trying to get Brick made ever since he left the University of Southern California's film school in the late 1990s. But those rare studio executives who liked the script couldn't get past a single, nagging worry.
"Yeah, even the script's few fans had this fear: if it all went wrong it could turn into a bunch of kids doing Edward G Robinson impersonations. It simply proved impossible to get the money the regular way. Eventually, when five years had passed, we decided to work out the smallest amount of money we would need to shoot it ourselves on 35mm. That turned out to be about $450,000 [ €360,000]."
LUCKILY JOHNSON WAS blessed with a supportive family. His dad, something in the construction business, had, when Rian was a boy, bought one of the earliest video cameras - those huge things that required you to lug around a VCR player - thus allowing the future film-maker to develop his skills in the living-room. "I used to reproduce the attack on the Death Star in Star Wars by moving the camera along the gap between the sofa and the coffee table." When Rian eventually decided to forge ahead with Brick, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and buddies all reached into their pockets. Every penny of the finance for the film came from somebody known personally to Johnson. To his delight and surprise it looks as if all those generous folk will get their money back.
"Actually they will get it back with a substantial return," he says. "I did have to say to them: now, you got away with a profit here, but I wouldn't advise doing it again. It's a mean thing to say, but I did have to explain that this is not usually a good way of investing your money."
Brick does not look like a film financed with a handful of nickels donated by the director's intimates. Profiting from the decision to shoot on 35mm film rather than digital video, the picture offers broad, cleanly focused vistas of the director's home town of San Clemente. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, formerly the youngest cast member of the television show 3rd Rock from the Sun, puts in a confident performance as the accidental sleuth. Richard Roundtree, Shaft himself, appears as an inquisitive vice-principal. Only the underpopulated streets and echoing school corridors betray the film's micro-budget.
That lack of hubbub does slightly undermine Johnson's attempts to capture some of the spirit of the classic high-school movie. In truth, the characters are a bit too articulate and a bit too serious to be believable as teenagers. There is a lot of The Big Sleep here. But there is very little of Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
"It started with the idea of film noir or, more specifically, with the source material: the novels of Dashiell Hammett," he explains. "But I was inspired to do a detective movie in a surprising environment, somewhere you couldn't just lean back on your preconceptions about men wearing hats. It occurred to me that the criminal underworld is a microcosm unto itself, where everything is about the social caste system. Well, that describes high school exactly."
AMONG THE FILM'S notable achievements is the way it imagines a faintly fantastic universe without ever drifting into absurdity.
There are amusing situations and the characters' heightened argot is studded with witty asides, but the film is very definitely not a comedy. In less secure hands, Brick might easily have turned into a teenage version of Bugsy Malone.
"That was the big danger. That was the big elephant in the room," he agrees. "The central conceit does have elements of humour in it and I didn't want to shy away from that. At the same time it was important not to react too strongly against that and turn it into a dull dirge of a film. The way I approached that was to create an environment with the entire cast where we just averted our eyes from the history of film noir. Actually, I banned them from watching crime films. We had to focus on making this particular script real, rather than worrying about commenting on or avoiding versions of film noir. Then we could let some comedy in."
Johnson sounds like a confident young man, but, given any opportunity, he will repeat how paralysed with fear he was when the film first screened at Sundance. This is hardly surprising. Brick, frames of which perfectly match storyboards he drew six years ago, has been the centre of his life for quite some time. Thankfully, both the public and his new studio partners seem to appreciate his vision.
He will shortly begin work on a new thriller, a conman drama, for Focus. Until then he is getting used to the fact that his long-term obsession has become public property.
"Yes, I am still coming to terms with the idea that people outside my immediate family are aware of the film. When I meet somebody who has heard of the film I am still slightly astonished. Throughout my 20s I was trying to get this thing out there and now there it is. It feels very peculiar."
Brick is showing at the IFI, The Vue and Cineworld, Dublin