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BRICK: Movie Script, Screenplay
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 24, 2026
Learned the other day that Rian Johnson has the shooting scripts for most of his movies available on his website, and Brick is also paired with a fun novella-styled treatment of the material. The prose rendering is pretty neat, and comes with some gorgeous accompanying art.
Nine years pass between the original script being written and the movie coming out, and it's fun to see what changes and what stays the same over that time! It's also neat to see just how much Rian is bringing to this material as a director; I do think there is some inherent juice to this script, but a lot of what I love the most about the movie is clearly in the visual style and the performances. The Dashiell Hammett dialogue is neat but mostly, to me, serves as a way to jar the audience out of expectations and keep them more active in the work of piecing the movie together. When I watch the movie, I can kind of let it all flow over me and pick out the threads that I can, but in reading the novella it's much easier to get drowned in the dialogue - especially when it is so clearly rendered as a script and you don't have a ton of interiority. Notably, most of what gets cut from the script across iterations is the density of the crime plot and the exposition. There's a lot of background work that gets cut from the film, and a lot of characters (especially Laura) explaining who they are and how connected they are to everything. Clearly, Johnson learns over the process of whittling this down just how little an audience really *needs* to know in order to hang with your story. If anything, a lot of that scrubbing keeps these characters enigmatic and interesting. You lose a lot of the tension around Laura when you learn so much about her from the top.
All that said, a fun alternative look at the movie! It's funny to think of Rian Johnson passing this script around for nine years because I can kind of see why a studio would look askance at it when it's not paired by his clever direction and those soulful performances. I imagine he learned a lot from the experience, which is how you get the razer-sharp precision of his scripts now. I have a few published screenplays I have picked up over the years and maybe this is the year I finally check out a few of them.
Nine years pass between the original script being written and the movie coming out, and it's fun to see what changes and what stays the same over that time! It's also neat to see just how much Rian is bringing to this material as a director; I do think there is some inherent juice to this script, but a lot of what I love the most about the movie is clearly in the visual style and the performances. The Dashiell Hammett dialogue is neat but mostly, to me, serves as a way to jar the audience out of expectations and keep them more active in the work of piecing the movie together. When I watch the movie, I can kind of let it all flow over me and pick out the threads that I can, but in reading the novella it's much easier to get drowned in the dialogue - especially when it is so clearly rendered as a script and you don't have a ton of interiority. Notably, most of what gets cut from the script across iterations is the density of the crime plot and the exposition. There's a lot of background work that gets cut from the film, and a lot of characters (especially Laura) explaining who they are and how connected they are to everything. Clearly, Johnson learns over the process of whittling this down just how little an audience really *needs* to know in order to hang with your story. If anything, a lot of that scrubbing keeps these characters enigmatic and interesting. You lose a lot of the tension around Laura when you learn so much about her from the top.
All that said, a fun alternative look at the movie! It's funny to think of Rian Johnson passing this script around for nine years because I can kind of see why a studio would look askance at it when it's not paired by his clever direction and those soulful performances. I imagine he learned a lot from the experience, which is how you get the razer-sharp precision of his scripts now. I have a few published screenplays I have picked up over the years and maybe this is the year I finally check out a few of them.
January 23, 2025
"Throw one at me if you want, hash head. I've got all five senses and I slept last night, that puts me six up on the lot of you."
This has been my favorite movie since I watched it for the first time in 2022, and if my Letterboxd records are accurate I've rewatched it seven more times since. Super excited to see this on film at the Music Box in February! (I'm going to be in the same room as Rian Johnson!!!!!)
This has been my favorite movie since I watched it for the first time in 2022, and if my Letterboxd records are accurate I've rewatched it seven more times since. Super excited to see this on film at the Music Box in February! (I'm going to be in the same room as Rian Johnson!!!!!)
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews