Rian Johnson is the director of the innovative modern-day film noir Brick, which premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, and The Brothers Bloom is his impressive followup. While Brick is certainly set in a world of its own, with everyone in a contemporary high school speaking in 30s and 40s detective-speak, The Brothers Bloom takes place in a fantasy world chock full of steamships, fancy cars, and mysterious settings. He gets impressive performances out of Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo, Rachel Weisz reinvents herself nicely, and Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi is terrific with an extremely tiny amount of dialogue. It’s well worth seeing when it comes out in January.

I sat down with Rian in Toronto and he told me about writing a part for Bob Dylan, his feelings about being compared to Wes Anderson, and his next project: a dark science fiction movie called Looper.

Well, I want to start off, I was a huge champion of Brick at Sundance.

Oh, cool. Thank you.

We actually had a big debate after the film when we were having lunch. Most of the people we were with were like, “At the very end she leans over and whispers a word in his ear. She didn’t say anything that we could hear, right?” And I’m like, “No, she said motherfucker.”

Right.

And we saw you afterward and I went up and asked you, and you said, “No, she says motherfucker.”

[laughs]

I was wondering. Do a lot of people have that reaction, or did you guys think about dialing that down on the soundtrack?

Yeah. I wanted it to be up on there so that you could hear it but you couldn’t. It’s probably more accurately represented on DVD actually in terms of the exact balance. But of course at screenings, I had like told myself, if people ask, I won’t tell. But of course I’m such a pussy when people come up and ask.

Well, I was glad to know, because it was one of those things that would eat away at you.

Yeah, yeah. If you crank it up on the DVD, you can hear it pretty clearly. I think, yeah. And I always thought that people would be able to hear it. But there you go.

OK, good to know.

Well, there you go. Mystery solved.

[Editor’s note: In both the screenplay and the novella of the film, that moment reads like this –

She brings her head to his, puts her lips to his ear,
breathes warm breath, and says two words. The first is

Mother-

the second is low, guttural and lost to the whistling wind.

She turns and walks briskly away.

So maybe that was his original intention. At any rate, you know what it is in the movie now.]

What inspired you to make The Brothers Bloom? I read the short poem you had written. That sort of was the beginning genesis of the film?

Yeah, I wrote that before I wrote most of the rest of the script. I wrote that and then it was a while before I came back to it and wrote the rest of it. I guess it started with con man movies. That’s one of my favorite genres and the idea of doing something in that world appealed to me.

But then what got me really going on it was the challenge of doing a character-based con man movie, or specifically a con man movie with a love story in it. Just because as a fan of con man movies and as an audience member, you come into them with such a specific expectation.

The thing that kind of defines success in the con man movie, typically, is whether you get fooled at the end, which is typically a question of who fucks over who in the end. And you may be surprised by that, but it’s a surprise that you expect to have.

So for me, the challenge or the marching orders, the thing that kind of got me excited, was can you do a con man movie where the audience knows coming in that they can’t trust anyone and thus can’t emotionally invest in them? Can you make that the actual issue at stake? Can you make that the main character’s main problem, have the audience identify with him, and then have some emotional stakes in it? And have the end twist misdirect a little, so you think the end twist is about the plot, but actually have the real twist in the end be an emotional payoff.

That was kind of the thing that got me rolling on it, kind of the emphasis. And then for me, it very much also became about story telling, and how story telling works for good and for ill in our lives I guess.

I subscribe to that Criterion newsletter. They came to you last year I think and asked what are some of your top films?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I think House of Games, was that on your list?

It was mentioned in the same email. Yeah, I think they were just about to put out the House of Games thing, which is a great disc. Did you get that?

Yeah I bought that, you bet.

The commentary is actually really fun.

It’s fantastic.

Yeah, it’s great.

Is that that how you got Ricky Jay involved?

No, I had been a fan of Ricky’s for years and years and years actually. Kind of an embarrassingly big fan actually. And just as like a little geeky hobby, I mess around with card stuff, mostly because of being a Ricky Jay fan.

And actually it’s weird; one of my very best friends from college was Ricky’s assistant for years. And so there was always this strange thing when I hung out with my friend, because he knew I was a big fan of Ricky’s. And so there was that strange neither of us brought it up thing for years.

But then actually at some point, I forget when it happened, but I was able to meet Ricky through him. We got to know each other a little bit. I actually wrote a part in this movie, originally the Robbie Coltrane part in for Ricky. But he couldn’t come out there for it, and we were lucky enough to get Robbie for it.

Yeah, he was great in that role.

Yeah. Yeah, he did a good job. Our initial idea was to try and get Bob Dylan to do the opening narration actually.

Wow, what happened?

I realized there’s no way I could have directed that, you know what I mean? Who knows what we would have gotten.

Sure.

So, I was really happy. I was initially a little reticent just because of the whole Magnolia thing. But at the end of the day, it’s such a different thing. It’s such a different movie. And it just made so much sense to have Ricky’s fingerprint on this movie somehow.

He’s got such a great voice too.

Yeah, totally.

The role of Bang Bang, I’ve never seen an actress do so much with so little. She has maybe one full line of dialogue if you add it all together.

Right, right, right.

How much of that was her look and what the actress brought to the role?

Well, that was exactly what I was kind of terrified with in going to actresses, is the fact that on the page it looks like there’s nothing there, you know? Whereas in my mind it was always actually a really substantial character in the movie. It was just a nonverbal character, which for me, that’s one of the things I was specifically really excited about with the movie is creating a nonverbal performance, finding someone who was into that.

Besides Harpo Marx and being a big Marx Brothers movie fan, I had been going to see… there’s a show called “Snowshow” in New York that was put on by this troupe of clowns led by Slava who was very famous over in Russia. Actually Joseph Gordon Levitt was the one who got me into it. He’s friends with all those guys.

Nonverbal performance in terms of clowning is really respected as an art form over there. And there’s so much that can be done with it. When I met Rinko, she was genuinely excited about creating a character without words, not seeing it as well I guess I’ll do the best I can with this, or not seeing it as why aren’t I in this script? Where are all my lines? But having the same perspective I did on it, which is that it’s an opportunity to do something truly unique.

And the fact that there’s so much talking in there, and there’s so many words in there, I think actually makes her pop out more, because I think her silence is much louder than another line would be. You know?

As a writer also, it was a good exercise, because the temptation and one of the things I think I’m trying to learn as a writer is you immediately want to put everything into words. You immediately want to say everything.

So what was written, like a lot of stage directions for her?

Not even a ton, because it would have ended up being like a 160 page script if I had written all of that. So I kind of had to sit Rinko down and explain to her how present she was going to be, how whenever the audience was unsure about how to feel about a scene, I wanted their eyes to go straight to Bang Bang. You know? She was the all knowing, all seeing eye.

Yeah, and someone delivered one of the funniest lines in the film to her. The guy was like, “I’m really into anime.”

Yeah, that’s our producer, Ram Bergman.

That was very funny. So the look of the film is so amazing. A lot of  times when we were discussing it afterward, we kept saying, and this is not meant to be a sleight at all, it feels like a Wes Anderson sort of film. I’m sure you must have heard that comparison.

Yeah. Yeah.

How do you feel about that comparison? It’s not bad company to be in, but at the same time, you also want to have your own movie.

Well, I think it’s…Yeah I’m a big Wes Anderson fan, and I’m very flattered by the comparison. At the same time, I think if you take a good look at the movie and a good look at his movies, they’re obviously very different.

And I know that the creation of it, for me, wasn’t from any sort of place of imitation of him. I wasn’t looking at his movies and trying to do that.

I think it’s coming right out of a movie, it’s always the quickest and easiest way to describe it is comparing it to another movie, I think. But the quickest way of doing something is not always the most accurate, and I think. I don’t know. The comparison is very flattering I guess.

So what’s next? What are you going to be doing?

A science fiction movie I’m actually writing right now.

Really?

Yeah, it’s a really dark, very different than Bloom, very dark, very violent, actually, science fiction movie called Looper. It’s a completely different world and I’m really excited about chewing on it.

Great, well I can’t wait to see that eventually. Good luck with all of it.

Thanks, thank you very much.