Rian Johnson Gives Us His "Brick" Picks Part 3
Rian Johnson, writer/director of the Joseph Gordon-Levitt film Brick, brings us his final installment of favorite scenes -- the Tugger car showdown, which he calls "another one of our Looney Tune-esque" sequences.
Like the chase scene (which if you recall was Johnson's first pick), this is a non-dialogue moment in an usually wordy movie. Johnson was watching Sergio Leone films while storyboading Brick, "and the bald-faced thievery is definitely in evidence here," he said.
For the shot where Tugger punches Brendan for the first time, they shot Noah Fleiss approaching Gordon-Levitt and winding up for the punch, and then had the actors freeze in place. With the camera set to around six frames per second (for a very fast motion effect), they started up again, dollying in while Fleiss completed the punch at a quarter of the speed. "A low tech speed ramp, I guess," Johnson said.
Though the shoot overall was predominately safe, this was another scene where an actor was injured. On the eighth take of Fleiss punching Gordon-Levitt, "he got a little too close ... and actually clocked Joe." Johnson didn't realize anything was wrong until Gordon-Levitt didn't get up.
"Luckily, he was alright," Johnson said. "He chalked it up to extreme method acting, and finished out the day."
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- Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Rian Johnson, brick
