He's done it again. Rian Johnson, that is. The refreshingly unassuming director of 2005's remarkable teenage noir thriller Brick has once again made the old seem new, the tired seem fresh, and the implausible both plausible and endearing. The Brothers Bloom, which he himself describes as a "con men love story," is fascinatingly original. Not in premise perhaps, but in tone, setting, and the conclusions it draws about life, love, and other such cons. We sat down recently to discuss his most recent film, as well as what he makes of Wes Anderson comparisons, his writing process, and the con artistry of filmmaking.

Amanda Mae Meyncke: One of your great strengths lies in your dialogue; how do you make it seem so effortless?

Rian Johnson: Dialogue is something I really enjoy; in some ways I feel like I enjoy it too much and that's one thing I've been trying to work on as a writer, not saying everything with dialogue and trying to pull back on it. As a writer, it's so tempting to put everything into words. One of the reasons Rinko [Kikuchi]'s character, Bang Bang, in [The Brothers Bloom] is silent, is to give me one character in the whole thing who couldn't lean on dialogue. Forced my brain into thinking of each of the scenes visually, and thinking about different ways of communicating information rather than talking.

AMM: There's a potential here for the film to be seen as a bit too quirky or hokey. How do you keep things genuine?

RJ: For me, [a film] has to genuinely be about something that I'm dealing with in my own or thinking about in my own life. When you sit down to create something, having a question in your head that you genuinely don't know the answer to. For me, that question was the issue of where reality interacts with storytelling. When I say that I don't mean as a filmmaker, and living in Los Angeles, it seems like everyone you meet tells stories for a living. As a human being I think [storytelling is] a big part of the way that we live our lives, no matter what we do or where we live, the process of living your life and building your image of yourself, building this narrative line of what your life's going to be, that's storytelling. It's fundamental to how we parse the world around us, and the way that we live a good life as a human being. I think that's the reason why we go to the movies, why narrative has such a strong hold on our psyches, I don't think it's for entertainment from the outside, or for relief from some sort of unstructured world of our own, it's because it's a real reflection of the fundamental way we operate as human beings and the way our minds work.

AMM: How was the process of making [The Brothers Bloom] different than making Brick?

RJ: It was shockingly similar actually, even thought the scale of this was much bigger than Brick. We shot this internationally, we were based in Serbia, and went to Montenegro, Czech Republic, Romania, we were all over. It was a much bigger shoot, [with] much bigger movie stars in it. With [The Brothers] Bloom, we weren't working with a studio, we financed it independently, so we had kind of a real budget to work from. We didn't have studio executives breathing down our neck or looking at dailies, we could just kind of go off and do our thing, in that way it was shockingly similar actually to doing Brick, but there were a lot of differences, and the learning curve for me was tremendous. Both in the logistics, but also from working with these people. Anytime you work with new people you're going to learn new stuff, especially when they're so good at what they do, Rachel [Weisz], Mark [Ruffalo], Adrien [Brody], I really got ten "film schools" out of it.

AMM: People are going to go into The Brothers Bloom wanting Wes Anderson, but I think you've got a lot more of David Lynch, who says things like, "I don't make weird films, I make films about real people in real life."

RJ: The Wes Anderson comparison has come up largely because [in The Brothers Bloom] they're wearing colorful outfits, the camera's on a tripod, and there's a dry sense of humor to it. I'm actually a huge Wes Anderson fan, I really love his last couple movies. There's a lot of artifice to his films, but it's always in the service of what I find to be really genuine emotion. I really like the David Lynch comparison, because I do kind of feel a little bit, like maybe there is a slight gap between how weirdly people perceive the end product to be, and how un-weird my approach to it is. I always felt like it would be unbearable if it felt like it was contrived. When I'm making the film, the only aim I have is to make it feel as real as possible, now for me, obviously, there's some pretty crazy stuff, but part of the fun and the challenge is laying out these big bombastic things and then seeing how real you can play them, how genuine you can make them. A lot of my favorite movies pull it off, and that's something Lynch pulls off. I equate it to what I get from opera, the fact that it's this big huge ridiculous overblown thing, but when it works, and when it connects and hits you at a pinpoint on a human level, if it focuses down to a point of real emotion then the whole huge bombastic machine that's driving it, is going to push that point just further into your chest than anything else could, and these are big words and in terms of achieving that, I just hope to keep working and getting better at trying to do that.

AMM: Since The Brothers Bloom is essentially about a con, how is con artistry related to filmmaking?

RJ: The way that you get things going on a film, even on a logistic and financial level is by convincing people that the film is rolling. It's almost like you run down the mountain shouting to the villagers that the boulder is coming down the hill, and when you get to the bottom you turn around, the boulder really is rolling down the hill. This being my second film and Brick being a very small affair, where I was working with really seasoned professional actors but who were my age or younger, so there was a certain automatic connection there, transferring to [The Brothers] Bloom which, by Hollywood's standards, is still a small movie, but is for me huge, working with people who I've seen on magazine covers before, there was a certain "waiting in line for the roller coaster" nervousness. And a feeling of fear, first of all, but once you start the work, that all goes away, it completely vanishes. Even in the buildup to it, I kind of realized that this is kind of what [The Brothers Bloom] is about, it's about this idea of attacking life as something where you can put on a hat and go into it, and start doing it. It is kind of like a con, when you step onto a set as a director, you have to project a certain kind of fatherly omnipotence, have an answer for every single question.

AMM: David Gordon Green has said he wants to make a film in every single genre. Is that your plan?

RJ: [laughs] That's cool, I'm not as deliberate as that, I don't have that grand scheme, I really enjoy doing something different each time, not only in terms of genre, but tonally, and in terms of what [each film is] going for. The thing I'm writing right now is science fiction, it's called Looper, and it's a dark little sci-fi thing, it's got time travel in it, it's a complete one-eighty, tonally, from [The Brothers] Bloom.

AMM: One of the best lines in [The Brothers Bloom] is: "Did you rent a '78 Caddy? Controversial choice." How'd that come about?

RJ: I have no idea. I think I had some friend who used to use that phrase a lot. You'd put on a CD and he'd go, "Ah, Steely Dan, controversial choice." Also that realm of Cadillac is a car I owned back in my early 20s, so maybe that's it.

See The Brothers Bloom in select cities on May 15!

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