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Which contemporary director has done the most to resuscitate the mystery genre?
The basic machinery of it, the tropes of it, are why it works.
to a 21st-century setting.
Go back to high school.
In his own words, Johnson explains what the high-school setting adds to the mystery.
Part of whats fun about watchingBricknow is that I wrote it not that far out of high school.
What I was really doing all that time was just trying and failing to get it made.
The fact that it was high school, with this amount of violence in it, was not appealing.
Hammett writes like Hemingway not an ounce of fat, and no sentiment.
That brutality of tone is something that I tried to get into inBrick.
Theyre like the Terminator.
Teach the kids to speak noir.
The dialogue inBrickis a mix of period jargon, detective slang, and Johnsons own additions.
Getting the cast to nail it required weeks of heavy rehearsals.
We werent going to be able to create expressive sets.
We werent going to be able to go to town with production design.
It was just going to look like a high-school movie, until somebody opened their mouth.
Once they did, you then knew this was something different.
You had to prick up your ears and figure out what this world was.
It was making sure that the audience felt secure in that disconnect of being in a fantasy land.
This is moreBlue VelvetthanThe Rivers Edge.
We did hours of rehearsal, just saying the words over and over again.
It was like learning a piano piece.
There was one line, I remember Joe doing it on set and thinking,This movie might work.
Joe said its the kind of line you have to earn with the rest of the movie.
There were some Southern California beach-kid turns of phrase that worked their way in there.
Theres a reference to a They Might Be Giants song in there.
I know I made up the name of the drug.
Theres a scene where Brendan finds the brick of drugs lying out on plastic in the Pins basement.
She was like, You would never do that!
And I was just staring blankly at her.
Fail to cast James McAvoy.
Actors got snatched up, and other projects frequently came in and threatened to stealBricks shine.
My producer at the time said, Have you heard?
Theyre doing a noir in high school.
On paper, it was like Oh shit!
But when I met Joe, I was completely committed to him being in the part.
I grabbed onto him like a guy in the middle of the ocean grabbing a buoy.
By pushing for a few months, something could happen and the money could go away.
I was like,We gotta wait for Joe.
I got so lucky finding Joe.
Theres half a handful of people in the world that probably wouldve worked for it.
Pick a different kind of coat.
Humphrey Bogarts Sam Spade had his trench coat and fedora.
InBrick, Gordon-Levitts Brendan has an olive-green army jacket.
We spent so much time searching for the jacket.
It was something he could disappear into.
I was also really into the shoes defining the character.
I think those were Joes grandfathers shoes that hes wearing in the movie.
Which I like hes losing hissole!
Dont give your detective a plan.
In structuring his mystery, Johnson took a few pages from the masters playbook.
I knew I was going to do the flashback structure at the very beginning.
But that also implicates him.
Its the point of no return.
The only visual representation I can think of is that its the sperm trying to get into the egg.
Theres really no plan.
The process of that leads to the Pin.
You realize, this is not the supervillain whos pulling the strings.
I knew I wanted to basically take a page fromRed Harvest, where Brendan just blows it all up.
Lean into the moral ambiguity.
Whats the difference between a detective story and a classical whodunnit?
For Johnson, it all comes down to moral clarity, or lack thereof.
He considersBrickandKnives Outemblematic of the divide between the two strains of literary mystery.
Theyre chalk and cheese, he says of the two films.
Besides the word detective in the synopsis, theres very little overlap between them.
The more important thing was that Brendans character was gonna have real moral culpability at the end.
I think at the soul of it, the difference between those two genres is moral ambiguity.
Hammetts books always had this queasy moral ambiguity in the antihero.
Put away the graph paper.
Raymond Chandler famously wasnt sure who murdered the chauffeur inThe Big Sleep.
Johnson doesnt leave any equivalent loose ends in his own mysteries, but thats not his highest priority.
The context in which the story needs to make sense is the intuitive plane, not the logical one.
But the reality is, most people are going to experience it as a narrative.
Then you try and work out the other stuff, and hopefully it all lines up and makes sense.
Hitchcock had contempt for that, I dont.
*This post originally misstated the project on which James McAvoy blew up.
