Can we talk about Rian Johnson for a second?
Holy cow. Here's a kid who grows up in southern California and goes to film school at USC. He graduates at age like, 27, and a year later writes his first real movie script, called Brick. He begs and borrows $450,000 off family and friends (could you convince your pals to give you that much to make a movie?) and in 2003 convinces Joseph Gordon-Levitt to star in it (JG-L is known for being incredibly picky about the roles he takes. Getting him in your movie means you wrote something pretty amazing.)
Brick is a hardboiled detective story a la Dashiell Hammett. It's got all the slang and double-talk of a 1930s film noir. Oh, but it's set in a 2000s high school.
IT'S. BRILLIANT.
The film does pretty good, nets about $3.5 million. Not bad for a guy's first swing. It launches some pretty good actors (At least three of the actors in Brick can be seen in Inception) and Rian makes his bones as a creative filmmaker. Brick's got it all: mystery, action, romance. To top it all off, it's exactly the sort of intrigue that no one thinks goes on among pre-adults, but totally does.
So. Brick's a good film. Next up, Rian Johnson goes on to make a story about two conmen in 2008, called The Brothers Bloom. Mark Ruffalo, Adrien Brody, and Rachel Weisz. It was a box office flop, but garnered pretty good critical reviews and had an eat-your-heart-out soundtrack. Listen to this right now:
A few years down the road, Rian strikes again with Looper, a mind-messing sci-fi mafia tale with a strong streak of time travel. I know, right? With a $30 million budget, Looper brings in a whopping $176 million. Talk about spinning straw into gold.
With a science fiction success like that under his belt, it's little wonder that Rian Johnson was tapped to write AND direct Star Wars: Episode VII.
And this gets me to my point. Here's a guy who went from film school to directing a film in one of the Holy Grails of Hollywood cinema IN THREE MOVIES. It's like rolling a ball to your toddler and instead of rolling it back he swishes it from half court. In comparison, J.J. Abrams, who directed Star Wars VI, had a directorial career spanning three decades before he got the job.
I'm really, really excited to see what Rian Johnson does with Star Wars. I know he's got the writing skill (Brick) to make a good film. He's got the artistic filmmaking sense (The Brothers Bloom) to make magic. And he's got the imagination (Looper) to really have fun with the Star Wars universe.
By the way, in the interim years between making his trifecta of fantastic films, Johnson directed a few episodes of a little show called Breaking Bad, one of which, "Oxymandias" is considered ONE OF THE BEST EPISODES OF TELEVISION OF ALL TIME.
OF ALL TIME.
Think for a second about what that means.
And even after all this, he's not a very well-known director.
We are sitting on my bland, espresso couches. Let's start with Brick, I say. I invite you to settle in as I put on the movie.
