Following up on his last film, Brick, Rian Johnson decided to take things in a slightly different direction. The Brothers Bloom is the story of two brothers who grew up as con men. When one wants to retire, the other wants them to pull off one last great con. But there's an x-factor they hadn't counted on - love. Or had they?
In this exclusive interview, I had a chance to talk with Rian about The Brothers Bloom. We discussed writing the movie, shooting in exotic locations, the wrecking of Lamborghinis, and some new details on his next movie, a science fiction film caleed "Looper".
So, why do a con movie?
Johnson: It seems like it's a genre that a lot of people seem to universally love, film nerds do I think. I don't know why that is. I could postulate as to why that is, but I probably wouldn't be any closer to the truth and I would sound like an asshole.
Maybe it's that people like the danger of being a con man.
Johnson: There's that and there's also something about the gentleman thief aspect of it. That's one of the things that's always been appealing about the con man, that he's a criminal and so there's that excitement, but there's a class to the way that he operates and he doesn't strong arm people. Of course these days, in the real world what con men are is a lot less glamorous.
Right. Now they're just credit card thieves.
Johnson: Exactly and a lot of people have lost their savings to con men in a horrible, seedy and not very entertaining way. But in the realm of movies, for me my interest was in really not so much looking at the procedural mechanics of the con game, the way that 'The Sting' did or some of [David] Mamet's movies have done, but going more the route of 'Paper Moon' I guess and being more of a relationship based film in the con man world. It's trying to pull something off where the payoff at the end isn't a plot twist. It isn't about who's screwing who over, but is much more about the plot kind of falling apart and you being left with what happens to the characters I guess.
Is it tough to write a workable con?
Johnson: Well, it's fun. That's the element of it that I feel…I mean, it's difficult. I feel like I have to keep working at and getting better at it. It's something that I feel very comfortable with, the plotting element of it. For me, the character stuff was the much scarier, more challenging stuff. That's where I definitely sweat the most, trying to really create living, breathing characters that you'd care about by the end of it. That's where most of my energy ended up going into writing wise.
What's your favorite con movie?
Johnson: God. I don't know. I love 'House of Games'. I have a deep affection for 'The Sting'. I think that 'Paper Moon' though would still be my favorite. I mean, again, that was kind of tonally the thing that's closest to 'Bloom'. It's also one of the first con men movies I saw where…all of them have that. 'The Sting' is obviously about that relationship between [Paul] Newman and [Robert] Redford. I mean, every movie to a certain extent is about the relationship between the characters, but 'Paper Moon' with that father and daughter relationship – I don't know – struck a chord that really resonated with me. I just think that it's kind of a perfect movie. 'Paper Moon'.
Was it a long audition process for you or did you have certain actors in mind when you were writing this?
Johnson: No. It was a long process. I didn't have anyone in mind just because unless you're friends with movie stars, which I'm not, you end up getting your heart broken if you write for a specific person because it's a really complicated process logistically, the casting process. Everybody in Hollywood is going after the same twenty actors and inevitably the first person you think of isn't available and the next person either. So you end up going through a lot of different options. You kind of have to learn to take joy in how liquid the thing ends up being. By that I mean every time you end up thinking of somebody different for the part the entire movie adjusts in your mind, how it would play with this new person. I think that's a really fun thing actually. That's something that I actually enjoy because you're writing the movie and you have it a certain way in your head and then you see that movie and it's much more interesting to see what happens when someone you wouldn't quite expect is pumped into in one of the roles. You get to see how it changes and evolves.
I loved a lot of the locations you shot in; Romania, the Czech Republic. That had to have been great. Is that fun or is it a pain in the ass shooting overseas?
Johnson: It's nice for me. It's a pain in the ass for the people in the production trailer. I kind of get the fun part. I get to show up on set and have fun with the actors and play these scenes out in these beautiful places, but the people who are behind the scenes doing the real work, making sure that production trucks get through customs on the borders of Transylvania, those are the people cursing every single log line that I wrote in the script. But for me it was just a once in a lifetime fun experience.
How long was the shoot?
Johnson: About fifty five days, I think, give or take a few. The first film that I did, 'Brick', was a nineteen day schedule. So this seemed luxurious to me.
I wanted to talk about that opening scene, the brothers as kids, because it's so important in setting the tone for the film. Did it take long to write that scene?
Johnson: That was the very first thing that I wrote. I wanted something that would very clearly setup the emotional conundrum that Bloom was in so that the relationship between him and Stephen could provide a little template for the rest of the film. But also it's designed very specifically to be this form of storytelling possible. The fact that it's a little storybook sequence that happens and it's told in this rhyming, very strictly metered verse and is kind of presented as this little fairy tale type thing with a little zinger at the end, the fact that we start there and end, by the end of the movie, with the plot having completely fallen apart to a certain extent in the burnt out shell of a theater, I mean that arch in terms of the movie as a whole the opening sequence was deliberately designed to fit into it in that way. It was something that I wrote first and foremost and that was kind of the starting point for the whole movie I guess.
I think every guy remembers the first time as a little boy when they saw that girl and they just stood there.
Johnson: Oh, absolutely. It still happens to me. It also was that I liked the idea of having a self-contained thing that in an entertaining way, first of all, gives a traditional con movie payoff at the end of it because I knew that wasn't going to happen in the traditional sense at the end of the actual film. To give a little zinger there I thought was a nice thing. Also, like I said, to be able to just setup this encapsulated version of what the emotional stakes were for Bloom seemed to make sense. Hopefully it's something that everyone understands.
Any inspiration to some of the character names, like, Penelope Stamp and Bang Bang, Diamond Dog?
Johnson: There's the pretentious 'Ulysses' thing with Bloom and Stephen and Penelope. Obviously, the whole thing isn't really in any way structured on or doesn't really reference 'Ulysses' although the names in a certain way tie into something else which it references. Anyway, no. I'm babbling incoherently here. Let me figure out how to talk about this. There are things that the names reference for me and what I tend to do with stories like this, with the stories that I write is that I come up with an intricate backing of – I hesitate to call it symbolism as that sounds so pretentious, but there's no way to talk about this element of it without it sounding pretentious. I do come up with a kind of thread of thematic symbolism that runs through the entire thing, but that's something that I kind of come up with entirely for me. So the names reference things that align to that, but in a certain way I'm expecting that to be invisible to the audience. It's something that just helps keep me on track as a behind the scenes thing in terms of what this movie means thematically to me. Whatever remnants of that end up on the screen at the end of the day it's not really something for the viewer to catch. It's more just kind of the remnants of that backing that I had in my head when I was writing. That's totally incoherent. Strike that conversation. That made no sense.
How many Lamborghinis did you wreck?
Johnson: Actually, we had two Lamborghinis and they were real, honest to God, Lamborghinis and the Lamborghini guys drove them out to us. When we crashed it into that wall it was a Styrofoam wall and so it didn't do any damage to the car and then when it off the road that's a computer generated Lambo. So the only damage that we did to it was when she's supposed to crash at the docks. We had to bend the end of one of the hoods and smash one of the headlights. The prop guys were just like, I think they rolled dice to see who would get to be able to smash the thing. They were gleeful about it. The guys from Lamborghini, these poor Italian men, were standing on the sidelines looking like we were smashing one of their babies. It was really kind of sad to see the look on their faces when we did these awful things to their beautiful cars.
You're also working on a science fiction movie called 'Looper'?
Johnson: 'Looper', yeah.
What's that about?
Johnson: Well, I'm in the middle of writing it. It's set in the near future. Tonally it's very different from 'Bloom'. It's darker. It's got time travel in it, but time travel isn't really the focus of it. It kind of uses time travel as sort of the setup for it. It's much more of a character based thing. I don't want to say too much about it because I'm still in the middle of writing it, but I'm really very excited about it. It feels good to jump into something completely different after having been in the world of 'The Brothers Bloom' for a while.
A lot of people can get confused by time travel.
Johnson: And I'm one of them. I'm trying to write it so that we don't need a blackboard scene, so that we don't need to see lines on a blackboard at any point. In some ways the approach that I'm taking is very similar to the first 'Terminator' which I think is a phenomenally elegant film in the way that it handles that element of the plot, using it as a setup to set a situation in motion and then not really having to deal with it beyond that. That's opposed to like 'Back to the Future II', I guess, or 'Primer'. I thought that 'Primer' was fantastic, but that's an example of a movie that does go whole hog into the intricacies of time travel.
Is it one guy trying to fix past events?
Johnson: That's an element of it, but it's mostly about one guy dealing with someone who's come back to try and fix past events I guess. I've already said too much. It's that kind of setup where there's an element of coming back from the future to do something. The whole plot revolves around that.
If you could travel back in time where and when would you go and what would you fix?
Johnson: Oh, God. What would I do, where would I go and what would I fix? Oh, jeez. If somehow I was elected to that position I would probably pass on it because I would do something completely useless like going back and stopping the 'Star Wars' prequels from happening.
The Brothers Bloom opens this Friday. Look for my review (I liked it) this week.
You can also check out Rian Johnson's Brothers Bloom blog site HERE.
Don't get conned! Make sure you
