Hammett Meets Hughes
Writer-director Rian Johnson on high school noir and Austin Film Festival highlight 'Brick'
By Marc Savlov, Fri., Oct. 21, 2005
There's more to life than high school. Except, of course, when you're in high school. Then, it's a matter of life and death, and worse. Rian Johnson's debut feature, Brick, is set in that universe, where bad girls mix it up with brains, jocks and heshers assail all comers, and Sydney Greenstreet droops lazily in the corner, chuckling to himself while pulling the strings. Well, maybe not that last part. But Johnson's self-assured, smart film – which stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lukas Hass – is a 90-minute nod to classic Hollywood film noir, relocated to be sure, but still very much in the Sam Spade jugular vein. The Chronicle spoke with Johnson by phone in the week leading up to the film's Austin premiere.
Austin Chronicle: High school noir seems like such an obvious idea, but I think you're really the first to do it. How'd that come about?
Rian Johnson: It all came from this obsession I developed with Dashiell Hammett's books which came, oddly enough, from having seen Miller's Crossing. I read an interview with the Coen brothers where they referenced Hammett, and so I just blew through all his books in a few weeks. I was really taken with the world Hammett created in those books, and having been a fan of film noir my whole life there was something about those books that really struck me. Eventually I decided I wanted to do this sort of classic American detective movie but set it in high school to make it slightly less familiar. Those visual cues are so universally recognized that it would take a much better filmmaker than me to make a straight detective movie that didn't seem completely derivative today. That'd be tricky.
AC: How much of the film's high school grind was influenced by your own teenage years?
RJ: Once I started writing the script it was kind of eerie how well the archetypes from the detective story slid on top of the all these archetypal high school characters. And the other thing was the way that Hammett's worlds feel in those novels is kind of dark and vibrant and dangerous, which is exactly the way I recall high school being. I think a lot of how we perceive high school comes from an adult perspective, and so high school is shown as not being quite as serious a world as the adult world. And that's not the way you feel in high school. Brick is not how high school is, Brick is how high school feels.
AC: I walked out of the theatre thinking I'd just seen the archetypal anti-John Hughes film, in the sense of Brick being the dark underbelly of, say, The Breakfast Club.
RJ: Yeah, exactly! I love John Hughes. Brick is very much trying the capture the same feeling Hughes was after. He takes that world very seriously, and, to me, that's kind of the key to any good high school movie, whether it's Rumble Fish, Heathers, or what have you. You've got to take it seriously.
