by SARAH ROWLAND

According to director Rian Johnson, the one thing you shouldn’t do before making a modern-day noir film is watch any film noir. That’s why prior to shooting his enthralling debut Brick, he instructed his cast and crew to avert their eyes if a copy of The Big Sleep or Chinatown should happen to cross their line of vision, and don’t even think about The Maltese Falcon.

“We kind of knew that the big danger of putting a detective movie in a high school was that it could turn into just a goofy parody,” says the L.A.-based filmmaker, who’s calling from home. “And so it was really important that the whole creative team, especially the actors, were able to come at their roles fresh, as opposed to thinking, ‘Okay, I’m doing a version of Bogart or a version of the femme fatale.’”

It was during the audition process that Johnson realized how few young thespians could handle the Dashiell Hammett-style vernacular with any conviction.

“There was no specific train wreck case per say,” he says. “But we saw a lot of actors and you could immediately tell when someone sat down and started going whether it was their sort of thing or not.

“I mean, the modern definition of good acting is being able to be natural without any artifice—and in a weird way that’s the exact opposite of what we needed here. So it wasn’t so much that we were seeing bad actors—it’s just that it’s a very specific skill set.”

No average joe

Johnson eventually found what he needed in Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who many will remember as the mouthy brat in 3rd Rock From the Sun. Here, he plays Brendan, the hard-boiled private dick armed with clever, cryptic lines for every occasion. After his ex-girlfriend’s (Emilie de Ravin of Lost) body shows up in a creek near his Orange County high school, Brendan becomes obsessed with finding her killer. His search leads him to a well-connected temptress (Nora Zehetner), who hosts exclusive after-hours parties, a crippled kingpin (Lukas Hass—aka the mute kid in Witness), who runs a drug ring from his parents’ basement, a short-fused vice principal (Richard Roundtree) who wants him off the case, and of course countless thugs—each having a go at our hero.

Gordon-Levitt deftly delivers the jive patter while dodging and throwing punches, making Brick his second praise-worthy performance in a row—the first being last year’s Mysterious Skin in which he plays a sexually damaged hustler.

“When I talk about him, Johnny Depp’s career trajectory keeps popping up,” Johnson says of Gordon-Levitt’s future in show biz. “The cool thing about Joe is that he’s not just admittedly anti-mainstream film. He’s going to do bigger stuff too. But at the same time, he has indie sensibilities—in terms of wanting to find interesting material and refusing to work on anything that he isn’t truly inspired by. So if the next thing he does is a $50-million movie, I know it will be one that I want to see.”

The big sleeper?

With casting issues safely behind him, now all Johnson has to worry about is if his ambitious exercise in genre can draw some sort of a following. After all, while some are calling it a future cult classic, it’s quite conceivable others will walk out of a Brick screening thinking, “Where do those little L.A. shits get off making such a pretentious load of crap?” This reality is something that Johnson is all too aware of.

“Even in the early days of writing Brick, I knew it wasn’t going to be for everyone. I knew it was something that was only going to please a certain type of moviegoer.”

What he didn’t expect, however, was that the most positive feedback would come from adolescent cinephiles.

“When we first starting showing it, I expected it to play better with older audiences just because I figured they would be familiar with the traditions of noir. So I’m particularly surprised at how many young people have been enthusiastic about it.

“My crackpot theory on that is because they’re less familiar with those movies and those traditions that they’re less likely to intellectualize, contextualize it and pick it apart—and more willing just to jump into the world on its own terms.”

Brick opens Friday, April 7

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