By Jennifer Merin

Brick takes troubled teenagers and puts them in a hard-hitting detective thriller set in a suburban high school with an invented hip new vernacular—no worries, you won’t need a dictionary to get it. 

Rian Johnson acknowledges he “copped” inspiration from Dashiell Hammett’s novels, even more than from noir films.

“I’ve never figured out what about Hammett’s writing so punched me in the gut, but I love the world he created—its richness and that you take it seriously although it’s so elevated in style,” says Johnson. “I’m fascinated by Hammett’s main protagonist, the Continental Op, a thick, brutish guy whose main attribute is he can take a punch and get back up. I think somehow he embodies modern masculinity. This is who Brendan [Brick’s main character, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt] will be in 10 years—the events in the film are what ice over his heart. Although Brendan wins, he’s lost in a very big way.”

MERIN: So, will there be a sequel featuring Brendan, grownup and hardboiled?

JOHNSON: Why not? We’ll call it Part Two: Bricks.

“Brick” means “drugs” in the film’s vernacular. Drugs and death are at the heart of your movie and are widespread problems in high schools. What are you saying about life today? 

There wasn’t anything special. That’s why I’m so interested in people’s reactions because, like anything creative, the meaning comes as an after effect. I created Brick from an instinctual place. 

It wasn’t intellectualized for me. Personally I think that’s much more exciting than starting out to deliver a specific message.

I was amazed how you managed—using your invented language— to create distinctly subtle and nuanced characters. 

It stemmed from Hammett—a mishmash of several novels with a dense brew of complex characters, as opposed to more simple types from film noir. 

Did you steer the cast through this formal dialogue so they’d make it their own?

This film’s world is very elevated style-wise. We had to be honest in creating reality within that context. 

Brick is a detective movie—an established genre, where characters are familiar types. I isolated the cast from ideas about those types, so they could access personal creative choices for their roles. Nora [Zehetner] wasn’t playing the femme fatale the way she’d seen it played before, but was using the written page to make choices that meant something to her. 

Back to the language—one thing they, the experts…

Ah, yes, the royal “They.”

Yes, “They” say a screenplay’s language should be minimal. But here’s your first feature—uniquely identified by language. That’s pretty ballsy. How’d you get the…

Cajones?

Sí, cajones….to do that?

Well, in part, it was deciding early on that this script wouldn’t be for everybody—it would be something specific moviegoers are into. And, we made it for under $500,000—which we raised from family and friends—so we didn’t worry about appealing to the masses. Once I’d freed myself that way, I went 100 percent with the language.

What were your visual influences?

Sergio Leone Westerns. And the Coen Brothers. I fully expect the Coen Brothers to take legal action when they see Brick because I stole so much from them. But they stole from Leone, so we’re okay. The point is, their movie worlds have nothing to do with reality, but you believe them—once you’re inside them. It depends on whether they believe in the worlds they’re creating—because if they do, others will, too.

Well, your shooting locations certainly were real—your hometown of San Clemente, Calif., and high school.

Yes, it was a real head game. Where Brendan eats lunch behind school is where my friends and I ate lunch, and I really experienced a lot in that backstage area when I was a theater geek for several years. 

But shooting in there was practical because I knew the town so well that when we inevitably got kicked out of one location, I knew another place we could go. Actually, I wrote around San Clemente locations—like the drainage tunnel, which we couldn’t have created elsewhere. It had the production values I needed.

Any characters based on people you’d known?

I never knew anybody that cool. The characters were derived from the archetypes we’ve mentioned, but, in a weird way, noir archetypes reflect not just types that we see in high school movies, but distillations of types I actually knew: the insider girl, the connected guy, the source for information. 

Reading any popular authors to prepare for writing it? Proulx’s been an inspiration lately…

Oh, sure. That’s it! We’re making Brokeback Brick.

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