Rian Johnson, the award-winning writer/director/editor whose debut cult film Brick (2005) won a Sundance award gave an inspiring Masterclass talk to NFTS students with his cousin the Composer Nathan Johnson.
Rian said he wrote Brick straight out of film school at the age of 23 and started shooting the film the day before his 30th birthday as “…a labour of love.”
He struggled to raise the finance for the film and kept the roof over his head by editing promos: “… it’s the hardest thing in the world to get someone to write a cheque to make a movie. But I had all those years to figure out how to be a human being,” said Rian who was in conversation with Dr Jonathan Wardle, the NFTS’ Director of Curriculum and Registrar.
Eventually his own family stumped up the initial $200k investment in Brick, which cost a total $450k to make and his cousin Nathan composed the music for the film in which every character had his own musical theme, like Prokofiev’s Peter & The Wolf.
Rian revealed that he wasn’t able to film coverage, which led to an unintentional jump-cut style of editing. “Coverage? I didn’t have any! A lot of times it looks like it’s a stylistic choice, but in fact I just didn’t have a choice. Making that film was a real learning curve.”
The film was critically acclaimed as being "…a smart, original neo-noir that works as an ingenious mind-game as well as a slick Hollywood calling card." It won him the 2005 Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision and opened doors to help make his next major film The Brothers Bloom (2009) - a con-man story starring Mark Ruffalo, Adrien Brody, Rachel Weisz and Rinko Kikuchi and Robbie Coltrane.
“It was a cult indie film so Hollywood didn’t come knocking on my door after Sundance” but it did mean that for The Brothers Bloom he was able to attract bigger name actors and work with a professional editor for the first time. “I was used to writing, directing and editing so it was a new experience for me working with an editor. I learned a lot but I think the editor deserves an apology; I found it difficult to hold back!”
A character-based con-man film with an emotional payoff, Rian told NFTS students, “I find it much more interesting for the punch at the end of the movie to be emotional rather than plot driven. It’s more important that it’s your heart driving it than your head.”
One critic said of the film: “If Wes Anderson and Terry Gilliam ever had a child, science would be amazed and appalled. But also, it would probably end up making a film like this."
Five years after his first film, Rian got to make the Sci-Fi blockbuster Looper (2012) that gave him the chance to work with A list stars such as Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano and Joseph Gordon-Levitt who he’d first worked before on Brick.
Looper was a huge hit praised as, "Intelligent, extremely imaginative, visually stunning and constantly surprising, this is filmmaking of the highest order from Rian Johnson." Rian explained how he’d written the treatment for Looper as a short film back when he was waiting to make Brick. “The opening of the feature and most of the ending is almost verbatim from that treatment,” he disclosed.
While film critics and fans debated the value of time-travel and whether they would ‘…go back in time to kill Hitler” or not, for Rian the film was, “…about the feeling of reacting to something you’re angry about, the primeval instinct to inflict violence as a response & the fact that’s not really healthy. The film is about violence vs. nurturing.”
His cousin Nathan Johnson has composed the music for all of Rian’s films and revealed that he often spends time on set getting to know the characters beforehand. His creative partnership with Rian started when the two were children and has continued throughout their professional lives.
Beginning with the critically acclaimed score for their first feature collaboration, Brick, Nathan said he used and abused a variety of household implements including dinner settings, filing cabinets, cheese graters, and radiators. Real instruments such as pianos were bolted and tacked, double basses were beaten with mallets, and tuned wine glasses were re-purposed in place of a string section.
Rian has recently directed two episodes of the cult American TV series Breaking Bad, the first time he directed something he hadn’t written. With only one week to prep and one week to shoot, he said, “There’s no time for any bullshit, you just have to do it. It’s really fun.”
Asked whether he’d direct any other TV shows, Rian - self-confessed Sci Fi fan – admitted he’s, “…a big Game of Thrones fan & would love to do an episode of Dr Who.”
