Joseph Gordon-Levitt says Rian Johnson’s Brick was one of the toughest movies to rehearse due to the “stylized” language of the crime thriller. Gordon-Levitt starred in the 2003 film as Brendan Frye, a high school student who finds himself pulled into the criminal underworld of his California suburb after his ex-girlfriend calls him begging for his help. In his search for her, Brendan will be forced to form tenuous relationships with those running the drug ring through his high school and enlist the help of his friends and ex-girlfriends to solve the mystery.
Alongside Gordon-Levitt, the cast for Brick included Nora Zehetner, Lukas Haas, Noah Fleiss, Matt O’Leary, Emilie de Ravin, Noah Segan, Richard Roundtree, Meagan Good and Brian White. Johnson wrote and directed the film in his feature debut, drawing from the hardboiled detective genre, namely Dashiell Hammett’s novels, which he discovered after the Coen brothers cited them as a key inspiration for their acclaimed neo-noir gangster film Miller’s Crossing. Hitting theaters in 2003 with a limited release, Brick proved to be a critical and commercial success, grossing over $3.9 million against its reported $450,000 budget and receiving largely positive reviews for its genre homages and Johnson’s direction.
In the latest episode of Vanity Fair‘s “Scene Selection” series, Joseph Gordon-Levitt reflected on some of the more iconic movies from his career. One such movie was Rian Johnson’s Brick, which the actor recalls being one of the toughest movies he’s ever made to rehearse due to the film’s unique language style. See what Gordon-Levitt shared below:
“That’s the trick of Brick, because the language is so stylized, how do you bring any sense of real feelings to it? I probably did more rehearsal and repetition on this movie than probably any other movie I’ve ever done. Usually learning lines isn’t that hard, especially if the writing is good, because if the writing is good, then you’re just saying something you would say. But in Brick, with such heightened, unnatural language, it’s this kind of lyrical, strange, poetic thing. You just have to brute force commit it to memory and that came from repetition. Once it becomes muscle memory, then you can bring whatever feelings you want to bring to it, because you’re not having to focus or think about the lines you’re saying.”
Though Brick has received largely positive reviews from critics and audiences alike since its release, Johnson’s decision to retain the old-fashioned dialogue of the hardboiled detective genre has divided many over the years. Some have commended the debuting writer/director for effectively recreating the hyperstylized feel of the genre’s past while others have felt it made the film difficult to penetrate or take seriously, questioning whether a direct spoof would have worked better than its serious approach to the material. Many William Shakespeare adaptations have run into similar division, most notably Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet, which some felt was lessened by its younger actors reciting the poet’s original dialogue word-for-word while probably not fully grasping the material.
Regardless of one’s connection with the stylized dialogue or not, Rian Johnson’s Brick has remained an important entry in both its genre and the filmmaker and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s careers. The two would continue to work together on nearly all of Johnson’s future films, namely the sci-fi thriller Looper, while Johnson himself would return to the detective genre with the acclaimed Knives Out, which has two follow-ups in the works at Netflix. With Gordon-Levitt only making a vocal cameo in the first Daniel Craig-led mystery, one can only hope the two-time Golden Globe nominee properly appears in one of its sequels.
