Higher Definition

Episode Number: 314

Episode Title: Rian Johnson, James Scurlock

Description: Pop-culture critic Robert Wilonsky talks with director Rian Johnson about his new film, Brick, in which a teen pushes his way into the underworld of a high school crime ring; and from the South by Southwest Film Festival, director James Scurlock talks about his new documentary, Maxed Out, an inside look at how Americans have become financially crippled by debt.

Transcript:

On this episode of Higher Definition one of the most promising young directors I have seen in a very long time. His name is Ryan Johnson and he has a brilliant movie out called Brick. Also we have James Scurlock whose movie Maxed Out will change your life, I know it did mine. They're next on Higher Definition.

Welcome to Higher Definition. I am as always your host Robert Wilonski or as I like to say Higher Definition's answer to Byron Allen. Today's episode is a real treat because we have on it Ryan Johnson, a first time writer and director whose movie Brick may be the best movie of 2006 and I say that of course with several months being left in the year but Brick is my kind of movie. It is as Daschle Hammett wrote Fast Times At Ridgemont High, a film noir set in a San Clemente High School, in face the very high school that Ryan Johnson actually attended. For several years he could find no one to bite on this movie, apparently no one bought the concede that Joseph Gordon Levitt talked like Humphrey Bogart in the year 2006. It is a startling revealing movie that looks at high school as it really is with teen pregnancy, with drug dealers, with thugs, with gangs with bullies with romance and all the things you find in every other high school movie but this high school movie is spoken in a dialogue of Daschle Hammett with gats and snitches and all the things you would associate with a film noir set in 1955. So here is Ryan Johnson a brilliant young filmmaker talking about his smash sensation at Sundance in 2005 just now getting released this year, it is called Brick.

Brendan Emily. I really screwed up. Screwed up how? The Brick. I didn't know it was bad but the pin is on it, you gotta help me. Slow down now.

This isn't good. No. Emily said words I didn't know. Tell me if they catch Brick No. Tug Tug might be a drink like milk and something. Pin. You know the king pin, crime lord right? Bigtime. What are you gonna do. She asked for my help. I just wanna know if she is okay. So what is first? I'm going to start shaking things up. I mean it is just this amazing experience, not to be obscenely obsequious but I mean it really, just because I have never seen anything like it in so much as I have seen things like it be it China Town or you know the Big Sleep or the Maltese Falcon but not like this, not in a million years would I have ever imagined it. Right. And I can't imagine or I can't fathom how difficult it would have been to have gotten in made because it is such a unique and entertaining piece of work. So as your trying to get it made, as your trying to raise the money, as your shopping it around, what were the reactions. What were the negative reactions that made it such a long haul. Well it was mostly and this I absolutely can't blame people for, in script form, I mean the whole thing is very kind of euphemistic phrase that kept coming up was a very execution based, in other words you can imagine how it could have very easily been done wrong, even slightly wrong, and been not just bad, but unwatchable. You know if it were a bunch of it, you know because everyone in it talks in this kind of slang of kind of old, old, old detective stories. Daschle Hammett. Yeah Daschle Hammett slang and if it had come off as just a bunch of kids doing Bogart impressions, I mean it really could have been a train wreck really.

So you didn't know this boy? No sir never seen him.

And he just hit you. He asked for my lunch money first, good thing I brown bagged it. To me this is the most honest high school film in a lot of ways since Fast Times. I mean I think they sort of make an interesting supposition with each other. Right, interesting. Fast Times is the only other high school film I have ever seen that takes high school seriously that realizes this is a dark, dowered depressing place full of a lot of bad stuff. Yeah, yeah yeah and whether it is the abortion or a lot of these things and there is a pregnancy Right. I mean there is just a lot of things in there that parallel in some ways. Yeah and even more so than specifically raising specific social issues they have a one to one connection with high school, even more than that what we were kind of interested in is pushing the level of the gravity of the situations up to almost a ridiculous kind of mythic level you know and to kind of elevate everything style wise to this place where it really does not have a lot to do with what, a high school experience is actually like but by raising it up to that level, I think that is one of the few ways you can get, you know by pulling you into a world that is that bizarre and that is that you know intense sort of, hopefully to try and bring you back to the place you were at in high school where is wasn't that stuff that was happening, but that is kind of the level on which the stuff which was happening felt like, you know. Who was going with who, who gave you a dirty look in the hall, this and that you know, I mean all that stuff has intense gravity when your actually in that world and that is kind of part of the thing that we wanted to capture by making our world, so insane. Your coming into a certain situation, it is twisted. I'm looking for Emily. You loved her. Yeah I did. You better be sure you want to know what you wanna know. Complicated. Everyone has their thing.

Have you every crossed a shady deeds, they have symbols so that they can tell each other without word getting around.

Coffee and Pie. Coffee and pie, Oh my. Keep up with me now. How difficult is it to get your cast to get their minds and their mouths around the dialogue. Yeah that was, I mean well, it was definitely the thing that we worked on most with the cast. I don't know if I would call it um, it was difficult but at the same time in the casting process, that was a big part of the casting process. It was immediately apparent that it really was kind of a light switch thing when I met with actors whether or not they could handle the language or not and it is not even like if they were good enough to handle the language, it was literally just if it is something that is in their skill set that they could do being such a specific thing. Um, I had about three months to work with the main actor which Joseph Gordon-Levitt and we you know we our first approach to the language was okay, let's do this very natural, let's just kind of ignore the fact that it is this type of language and try it just in the modern very natural way of saying it and that didn't work at all, we realized okay, if your going to have words like these, you have to grab the bull by the horns, you gotta attack them, so we started looking at a bunch of Billy Wilder movies and looking at old movies that you know, looking at kind of the style of performance you don't see much today where it was much more theatrical. Which Wilder movies would you look at? I showed them The Apartment which is one of my favorites but I think we also looked at Sunset Boulevard. I was going to say because every time anyone asks me about the film, I always say just imagine this film on high school, imagine it in black and white, imagine the lead as William Holden. (laughing) That is fantastic. I mean that is, it is funny that I didn't realize that Sunset Boulevard was a thing you watched because really you feel it. Oh yeah definitely. Holden seems to be very much a role model. Absolutely, I think so yeah. Even more so than Bogart actually. I forbid any of the cast to look at Bogart movies while we were making it just because I knew there was such a distinct touchstone, I didn't want anything to feel derivative of any of those performances.

You got a cigarette? I don't smoke. I have seen you smoke. I don't smoke cigarettes.

I thought we had orange juice, I'm sorry. Water's fine Ma'am thanks. Oh wait a minute, we have apple juice, it is country style. Was it important that this be the first one. I mean if there is something else that had come along to you that you think might have been. This is more saleable, this is more doable, I will do that first or was it important to make Brick. Yeah. It is a very ambitious sort of declaration at the beginning of your career. Right. Well, I think that it was, I mean that was a temptation at different points, but I think a couple of things. First of all, I think I did somewhere recognize that I looked at the kind of things that filmmakers I admire had come out of the box with and I recognized that you know what, they aren't you know timid things, they are things that do come out and you know take a risk the first time out. But that was a very tiny part of the equations. You know most of it was just this is a story that I really want to tell and in terms of thinking of other stuff, once you kind of commit to I want to make this movie, it takes so much energy to do it and you have to be so completely 100% dedicated to it; otherwise, how are you going to get other people on board. It is not like you can be saying, yeah this is something I want to make if I don't think of something else better first, you know you have to be a freight train, just heading down the track if you want to start, hope that anyone jumps on board you know.

If I get to the bottom, whatever this is. What do you want? Just to see you sweat. If it gets too hot. You gotta a discipline issue with me? Write me up or suspend me. I see that your trying to help her and I don't know anybody who would do that for me. Now your are dangerous.

I set out to know who put her on the spot, I put her in front of the gun.

There is not much chance of coming out clean.

Was it true that at Sundance distributors were bad mouthing Brick simply to throw people off the scent of buying it because everyone wanted it but they didn't want to start a bidding war. That there was the idea that this film could have gone for far more than 2 million that it went for. Oh I don't know that it could have gone for more than that, and I don't know that it would have been that I would have necessarily wanted it to. Just because you know, we made the movie for under $500,000, you know we got, we did very well and got a great return on it and I think that in a way for me it was, it is almost more important that the film is seen contextually as a success than you know if someone had made a huge like Hustle and Flow type sale with this movie, I would have been terrified. I might not have even let it happen, now because then if it comes out and it doesn't perform up to standards then you, then that can be something that can effect you negatively. I thought it was a very smart kind of amount for them to pay for it, but yeah there was all sorts of weird treachery stuff going on. That's true. People were bad mouthing it and then I found out later they were bad mouthing it just because they actually wanted it. Yeah it was I found that out later too. It was weird man. That's it, it's the wild wild west you know and that was my first exposure to that world up at Sundance, the deal making and everything and it was cool because I was able to have fun with it and enjoy the ride because I felt so well protected. I had my producer Ram Bergman, I had this guy John Sloss repping it who is a really, he knows it so he is a pirate for the good guys you know. Right. So, I was able to kind of just ride the raft down the white waters and enjoy the ride a bit. Brick is in theaters this very week and of all the films I have ever recommended on this show, this is the one that I think you should run out to see immediately. A friend of mine saw it in New York the other day. She didn't like it as much as I did. She is in fact the very audience that Ryan Johnson talks about. Either you smile your way through the film or you smirk your way through it. I found myself with a very wide grin, Gene Shallot style. Coming up next James Scurlock, the write and director of a startling new documentary called Maxed Out. But the one thing you can't talk about, the one taboo is being in debt.

Welcome back to Higher Definition. Well we were at the South by Southwest Film Festival a few weeks ago and there I had the opportunity to talk to a young filmmaker named James Scurlock who brought is first documentary to South by Southwest called Maxed Out. Initially I have to admit I had very little interest in this movie. My producer hoisted this one upon me, I just didn't want to see a movie about credit cards in America. Well as it turned out, Maxed Out was an inreadibly profound movie. I watched it a couple of times and immediately set out to rectify my entire credit and financial situation. Once you see this movie, you will want to do the very same thing. Scurlock initially set out to make a movie about the fast food industry, not only is his name very much like Morgan Spurlock maker of Supersize Me but in fact he saw, that is Scurlock saw Spurlock movie and said, you know what, Ill do a movie about something more important, the way Americans are financially crippled by the credit card industry. So here is James Scurlock whose movie Maxed Out was the most talked about and most thought about movie at South by Southwest talking about Maxed Out.

The more debt obviously the more opportunity there is for delinquency and the more opportunity then for collection, and uh, we assume that will drive buyers and sellers to the outlet or just brining people together, almost like a dating service. But for debt. That's a good one. My reaction was watching this sort of sick feeling in the pit of my stomach for about 90 minutes. Just sort of going wait, that is not only those people, but it is also me and everyone I know. So I sort of wonder how people act when they see it and what they tell you. Yeah that is probably the reaction. I think people have the suspicion that things are bad, but they don't quite realize it is that bad and I don't think we put in anything new, we didn't go in with hidden cameras, we didn't, it is not an expose, and yet just putting all the pieces of the puzzle together, it is pretty shocking. Um, you know so I think most people have that reaction. There have been very specific reactions like a publisher who watched it with her family um, ended up having her son come out to her and her husband saying you know we have this 12,000 credit card debt I have never told you guys about. And people just beginning to talk about it, but it is such a secret, you know and it is really. We were interviewing a guy from debtors anonymous which is the 12-step program for debtors, they have one in Austin, they are all over the country, and he was saying you know you can talk about your sex life, you can talk about being alcoholic, you can talk about being a drug addict and this guy is like in multiple 12- step programs, and it is cool. You know you're a drug addict, that's cool, you're a recovering alcoholic that is a social like it gives you a whole new social life, but the one thing you can't talk about, the one taboo is being in debt. You know and that means financial problems. You know one of the most popular customers of credit card companies is right now? People who have been through bankruptcy. The reason as one of the vice presidents of Mastercard once explained to me is that we know two things about them. One is that they can't file for bankruptcy again, and the second is they have a taste for credit and I said what does that mean, and he said well, they are willing to make minimum monthly payments forever. And that is where we make our money. Part of the way people have been using debt is to prop up their lifestyle. You know and stay in the middle class and use debt as this cushion, this sort of life raft you know so then to say not only that was an illusion, that was a mirage, but they are actually completely broke and they are just ruined is a huge jump. It is a huge leap downward and most people don't want to talk about it. When you say most people are surprised, they knew it was bad but not how bad, I assume you had the same reaction as well. Yeah I mean I thought this was going to be kind of a comedy. I thought it was going to be more like Supersize Me where we went and found all of these silly Americans who were young, fabulous, and broke like the Suzie Orman book Right, the $30,000 millionaire. Yeah exactly, like the Uptown millionaires in Dallas and so I thought it was going to kind of be this romp through consumer culture and um, there is a little bit of that but we found out pretty soon the real story was how the financial industry is making its profits off of people who can't pay the money back and really preying on people and finding customers who declared bankruptcy or right there on the edge you know and just exploiting them. I think the most shocking thing was the revelation that credit card companies want as their customers people who can't pay their bills. I mean it is such a sort of I don't know, it is a difficult thing to reconcile as a viewer and as a credit card customer quite frankly. And I think that is why they have gotten away with it for so long because it is so counterintuitive. You know if you told someone the bank's best customer, the best customer for a bank is someone who is broke, they would think you are nuts. Right. But once you get into it and you see how the industry works, where the profits come from with late fees, over limit fees, interest, you know very high interest rates, you understand well the real profit center is the guy who is willing to pay anything and it is just going to make the monthly payment every month, is just barely above water, he is going to stay in debt for the rest of his life and is going to pay the fees and pay the really high interest rates and never argue because he needs that, you know needs that fix to stay afloat. We're so trusting of the system because we see names like Bank of America and Bank this and Bank that and well gosh their not going to take advantage of me, and exactly the opposite is true. Those are the entities that will take advantage of you. At one point you had initially set out, you had thought about making a film about fast food, about something like Supersize Me, you had seen fast food. I mean Supersize Me was at Sundance a couple of years ago. You know it is funny, it strikes me that this is a far, far more significant and universal film than Supersize Me because a lot of friends I have don't eat, would never think of eating fast food, but man they would think nothing of whipping out the credit card for a cup of coffee, or for dinner. I mean it is the thing you have with you all the time. And I think I mean without been too self-serving, I agree with you. I went to see Supersize Me at Sundance two years ago and um, I had really wanted to buy the rights to fast food nation because I love the book and I wanted to do the film the Morgan Spurlock essentially made but I remember standing in line at Sundance waiting and thinking you know the bigger story is debt because you can say no to fast food, you can decide not to go to McDonalds. I don't go to McDonalds, I don't eat fast food, like you I mean I know a lot of people that just wont set foot in a fast food restaurant but you can't not use a credit card. Everyone is plugged into the grid. Everyone staying in this hotel used it, no one paid cash to stay at this hotel. And the people who don't think that they are plugged in and don't think that they need credit are delusional because. I was having a meeting with an editor the other day late 30s, he is from the UK, he is with Random House, very accomplished editor, just got divorced and went in to buy a very cheap car from a dealer in Manhattan and realized he does not exist because his wife has always had the credit card. She has been the American citizen so in America he literally does not exist, he does not have a credit history so how is he going to go get an apartment, get insurance, you know if he switches jobs, get utilities. Right. Everything depends on your credit history, which has nothing to do with being an accomplished editor, it has nothing to do with making a great income. It doesn't matter. All that matters is this history you have with the banks, with the credit card company, or the utilities that you have paid them every month and he doesn't have it, so now he is trying build a life for himself in his late 30s you know it effects everybody. If you are 18 and your not in college or you 18 and you're a VO tech student or your 18 and your working, you don't get the credit card applications. It is the college students that get it, so if your going out there and you've got a job and your actually working, they don't want you cause maybe they figure you know the value of a dollar then but those people don't get it so we are setting up a two tiered system here and, I believe they are exploiting the college students, an easy mark. The kids who are suckered in, the college students with the promise of a free T shirt, that also having been away from college for a few years, you tend to forget that is out there and that is the beginning, in a lot of cases, the beginning of the end for some folks. Sure. I mean that must have been you know it is one thing, it is sort of novel seeing somebody getting an OU T shirt with their MBNA card but to hear the after effects of what seemed a very simple and innocent transaction. What kind of toll does that take on you and the people working on it as you make the film, hearing these stories and feeling the pain of the people that your talking to. Yeah, um, I think it makes you not very fun to be around you know. Cause your head is in this place that is very dark and very depressing in many ways and talking to people who have entered terrible ordeals. A lot of people just feel trapped you know and then your supposed to go home at the end of the day and everything is okay, and that is very hard, very hard to do. And are you paying for the film on your credit card. No. No, I'm not but it is being paid for in cash but What are you expectations for it at this point. My expectations for it are that it asks the question, is this the kind of society we want? You know is this the deal we want to strike with the financial industry. Well, assuming everyone answers no it is not the society we want, then what? I think that this is a systematic problem. You know and you can single out villains and you can you know we could have gone around harassing debt collectors and CEOs and so forth but the point to me is that this is a system that is failing us and we need to bring back some of the protections we have had for decades you know and the deck has just been stacked too far against the consumer and that will take people writing their congressman you know congresswoman and demanding systematic changes, um you know the congress is supposed to be the advocates. Advocacy group for the people and they need to start acting like it. Maxed Out did in fact win a special jury prize at South by Southwest, that was its very first film festival and I'm sure it will be making a festival circuit as it looks for a distributor, so keep an eye out for Maxed Out. Coming up next on Higher Definition, I will tell you of course who is coming up in the next episode of Higher Definition.

Coming up on the next episode of Higher Definition is a filmmaker whose work I have always liked. Her name is Mary Herron and she is the director of such movies as I Shot Andy Warhol and her brilliant adaptation of Brett Easton-Ellis' American Psycho. She has a new movie coming out called the Notorious Betty Page about the infamous 50s pin up queen played by Gretchen Mall who I'm sure you remember from a long time ago as the next it girl, well it seems as though her time has finally come. Now if you have anything you would like to send me or show me, feel free to do that at Higherdefinition@HD.net. Till next time, i'm Robert Wilonski and I do appreciate you watching this and I hope every episode of Higher Definition.