Rian Johnson

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1:08My friend Glenn Close brought Rian Johnson to the River Cafe when they were filming Wake Up Dead Men, the third Knives Out movie. And for the rest of the summer, he was what we call a regular. Yesterday, sending me photos of her new grandson, these were her words. Ruthie, working with Ryan is a highlight of my career. He wrote a great script, cast an amazing stable of actors, and set us on a sublime adventure together. Ryan is a master storyteller who makes work both serious and wildly fun. I am honored to call him a friend. Well, if a friend of mine says that about a friend of hers, I do believe her.

1:49Family is crucial to Ryan. He talks movingly about his father's influence on his career, his earliest film memory, being put in the car by him to go see Star Wars H5? Yeah, it must have been. Maybe? Yeah. We're here together at the River Cafe to talk about family and friends, movies and food. It's going to be serious and hopefully wildly fun. Thank you for coming. Thank you for that beautiful introduction. I owe Glenn a big hug. I think the first time you came, you came with Glenn, did we? I think I might have been here a few times, but that's one of the first times we really connected. Yeah, yeah.

2:26I was here with Glenn. And then we had Sunday lunch, and then we kept trying to have other times. Watched the World Cup. I saw you there with your mom. And so family is important. And you're here now with your family. Tell me what you're doing in London right now. So we finished shooting and cutting together the movie Wake Up Dead Man, and right now we're recording the score. So we're at Abbey Road. And my cousin Nathan, who's my composer, and we've been making movies together since we were 10 years old, he's here. And because we're at Abbey Road and because I'm really close to my extended family, including my aunts and uncles, and two of my uncles who really kind of gave Nathan and I sort of a real love of music growing up, I brought them out with us.

3:09The music that I keep coming back to in my life is mostly stuff that they were playing, you know, when I was a kid. It was mostly kind of like the folk rock era of a lot of Joni Mitchell, a lot of Neil Young. It was kind of that era of post-hippie sort of folk rock. But yeah, and my dad also, that was a big connecting point. I think that music stays with you for the rest of your life. Somebody said that buying music, you mostly buy your music between the ages of 17 and say 22. And that's the music that stays with you. It imprints. I think so. I think there's an argument to be made that everything, that most of kind of the major taste things in your life end up getting set kind of, you know, before you're 15.

3:54I think that early stuff, the sitting in the back of the car with your dad and with whatever song was on that, you know, that forms the grooves, I think. Could you have recorded the music anywhere or was it important for you to come back to London to do it? Well, we've done the past few movies at Abbey Road, and it's a really special place for a lot of reasons. But also a lot of the people that Nathan works with are out here, and we just know the musicians are so good. And it's also a treat. Come to River Cafe. Yeah, I know. That's why I'm here, really. It might not be a bad country to get. I came out to do the podcast, and I was like, oh, I'm here, we might as well record the score while we're here.

4:32It is amazing. It's so exciting to see how many movies are being made. It's insane. Made in England at the moment. And the crews are so wonderful. They're just... Yeah, I was just saying about British crews. Is that true? It's so, so true. It feels like making a family movie kind of in the best way, my experiences, including Star Wars, which was a huge production, but it's still... Everybody in it cared so much. And when I did it, I kind of chalked that up to, well, is it because we're making a Star Wars movie and everyone grew up with it? But then being here again, making this movie, I was like, oh, no, this is just...

5:05Everyone's just stoked. Did you grow up thinking that food and work and school and life, was that part of your family? Was it all integrated into a home life? Did you sit down for dinner most nights? You know, we did. That's one thing. We did sit down for dinner every single night. And my mom would always cook. Her dad was Italian, and her mom was a really good cook. And most of my childhood kitchen memories are from my mom's mom. But she wasn't Italian. No, she wasn't Italian. She was, what was she? She was, I think, mostly, yeah, British. But she would make pies and she would make, yeah, she was a very good cook.

5:46And so most of my sitting in the kitchen memories are from her. Did she live nearby? No, she lived in Illinois. So we would go to like Mundelein, Illinois, which is a little suburb in Illinois. It's also where I got, my uncle had a pizza place called Pizza Tony. and that's where I got introduced to like thin crust. Did he make thin crust pizza? He made thin crust pizza, yeah. And it was the most delicious thing I'd ever tasted. I was just like, oh, that's, yeah. You would come from Maryland or from L.A.? So I was born in Maryland, but we were only there for like a year or two. I don't really have any Maryland memories.

6:20Really, I was a kid in Colorado. Oh, Colorado. Yeah, that's where my dad's family is. Near Denver. Yeah. In Inglewood, yeah. I went to school in Carbondale. Oh, okay. Remember that? Oh, my God, Carbondale, yeah. It's right near Usman. Yeah, yeah, yeah, up in the mountains. Yeah, kind of a school on a ranch. Oh, okay. It was kind of one of those very liberal schools where they thought education was part of the academic and the rest of the road horses and, you know, made beds. It was really, it was good. It was pretty great. I miss the, do you miss the mountains? I miss the mountains, yeah, I do.

6:49The summer in the mountains. I always sometimes think, you know, you could keep the beach and see the flowers and go to the mountains. I do find myself craving, yeah. I got to get up to the mountains every once in a while, even though I don't really ski anymore. But, yeah, I don't know if there's something about it. It's growing up there, you do just kind of start craving it. Yeah. So tell me more about the food. So you had your grandmother's food when you went to visit her. I went to visit her. Did your mom work? Did she have a food? No, my mom didn't work. She worked because she had kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

7:19She worked a lot. How many were there? So I'm the oldest, and I have two younger brothers. I have two younger brothers and a younger half-brother and then a younger sister. That's a lot. It's a lot. I have a big family. Also, I'm the eldest of like 40 cousins, and I'm as close to some of my cousins as I am to my brothers and sisters, and we're a very, very close big family. My grandparents on my dad's side would put the effort in to get the whole family together for vacations, and so we'd have these, and we would also make movies together. We'd make family movies together, so I would just... Not movies of the family, but you'd actually have a plot.

7:58Have a plot, oh, yeah. And we'd always the director? I would always, yeah. I would always, yeah. I would always basically, the poor kids would spend their whole vacation being like conscripted into service. Making these stupid little movies. I would say lucky kids, yeah. It was fun. It was fun. Who wrote them? We didn't. That was what was fun is like, so it was really me and Nathan. And we didn't. Nathan's who's coming tonight. He's coming tonight, yeah, who's now does the music. And we would just have an idea. Let's do like a James Bond parody or something. And we would write it as we shot and we would edit in camera, which I did a lot of shorts in high school that way.

8:39And I think that that's a great way to learn because it also teaches you editing at the same time. It just teaches you kind of storytelling with a camera. And this is what year? What year would that be? Oh, boy. So I was in grade school up through kind of the mid-'80s, basically. So this is pre-digital iPhone editing. It's pre-digital, pre-digital editing. We were shooting with, I mean, my early movies in junior high, I did get a Super 8 camera. But I also had, it was right around when compact video, like Hi8 was like the new format. And so you could have a camcorder that wasn't huge and have kind of a mini format.

9:20And I mean, the quality was nothing compared to what's in our phones right now. But it was pretty good. And so I made a lot of movies with that. We have a Rian Johnson film festival. Oh, my God. I wouldn't subject you to that. I wouldn't subject you to that. That would be a horror show. When you watch them, do you think they're funny? Yeah, I think they're funny because they have my family in them. But I wouldn't subject you to them. I'd like to. We could have it here at the River Cafe. We could put a big screen outside. But the food was part of your – was it important to you? Because it seems important to you now.

9:50It seems like it's what you say, the way you eat and the way that you were a kid. I mean, it wasn't, that's the thing. It's not like I grew up in like a family where it was all about the food, but my dad and my dad was a, tell me about your dad. So my dad who, um, yeah, he passed away just a few months before I was offered the Star Wars movie. So he passed away. He was too young. He was in his early sixties. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Every experience you have, you do kind of filter it through boy. What would my dad feel like? Like I imagine if my dad had been around when we were making the Star Wars movie, he would have camped out on set.

10:30I would have never. He would have been just there every single day. And, yeah, he got to see me kind of become sort of someone who could make movies for a living. And he got to see us making Looper, which was kind of my first, like, bigger movie. But he loved – I think he really wanted to make movies. Honestly, he was such a ham, I think he wanted to be an actor. But I can just like, I just think about, yeah, what it would have been like if he had been around for Star Wars or for these murder mysteries. And I also think about what parts he would have demanded that I write for him. What do you think?

11:05Yeah, what would he have been in? It would have been bigger and bigger parts, yeah. I'm sure in Star Wars he would have wanted to be like on the deck of a Star Destroyer or something or like, yeah. But I love, I don't know, it's something that, yeah, anyone who's lost a parent, you know. It's a long journey. It's not something you kind of go through and get out of. It's something that just, it's part of the road for the rest of your life. It is. Food-wise, he wasn't a gourmet. He was a gourmand. Would he cook? He would cook, yeah, and he would cook extravagantly. He had a, like if he was making ribs and making like a barbecue sauce, he would put every spice that he had in.

11:48He made a thing called a bunny cake, which he would basically make a chocolate cake that had all the chocolate. You can imagine that plus molten Snickers bars. And it was just this molten just heap of semi-liquified congealed chocolate. And the motto was nobody likes it, but everybody eats it. But that was just anything he did. He was going to do the most of it. And that included food and that included eating. and not the best and not a refined version of it, but he loved food, though. My dad would just pick up from the local rib joint and would come home and just like way too much food. But he could be a really, really fun guy.

12:34And he was a big guy in every way, yeah. Did you put him in your childhood movies? I put him in. So the one movie that, this was my dad, on the set of Looper in his costume. Oh, look at him. Yeah, I'll send you the picture. Oh, yeah, would you? Yeah, I will, yeah. And he got to get shot in the face by Bruce Willis in the movie. In the movie? It was the highlight of his life. He was so happy. He liked it. He was like a little kid. But he survived it, or did he die from the shot? You get shot in the face, you die, yeah. Was Lupita the first? What was your first movie? No, so my first movie. So just tell us the trajectory from going from the Super 8 movies and the editing to your first movie.

13:14Did you go to film school? I did. I went to USC. I got rejected like six times from USC and became an English major. You mean you got rejected from even going there? From the film school. From the film school. But there was no place else I wanted to go, so I went undeclared and kept applying. I mean, my grades were terrible in high school because I was just making movies. You think that a film school might have recognized that maybe? I guess so eventually. I also get it, though, because USC, see, you know, they take a really limited amount of people. They have so many applicants. But I did end up getting in and like did an undergrad program there and then graduated.

13:54And I wrote a script for what ended up being my first movie, which was this weird kind of sort of the Maltese Falcon style mystery, but set in an American high school. It's called Brick. And I wrote it right out of college and basically spent my 20s broke in L.A., hating Los Angeles and failing to get my movie made and just kind of working day jobs. And I was lucky. What were some of the day jobs? Did you work in a restaurant? No, I never did. That was a dream. I kept applying and I never got working in a restaurant. But I had some really great day jobs, actually. I worked at a preschool for deaf kids called the John Tracy Clinic that's in L.A.

14:36and I was kind of their AV guy. And I worked at the Disney Channel producing promos, just kind of, yeah, really, really good jobs with really lovely people. But the whole time I was just trying to get my first movie made. How did that happen? So after years and years of it almost coming together and falling apart, and finally I met my producer, Rom Bergman, who is still my producer today. And he didn't find the money, but he said, look, the way that most people go about trying to make their first movie is they get a budget for their script and someone tells them your movie is going to cost$3 million and they think, oh, I need three.

15:16And so then you end up never getting$3 million. And so Rahm said, look, this is a very weird script. I think it's really good, but it's very strange. The only way this will work is if you have control over it. So you need to just figure out how much money you can get together and then that's your budget. and then you'll figure out how to make the movie for that. So that's what we did. And it was my family kind of, because they're in the home building business, they had had just a big deal just go through. So they had some cash to invest and they made a very stupid investment. Was it a stupid investment?

15:51Well, investing in an independent film. Did the movie make any money? It ended up doing well. Yeah, it ended up being a very good investment. But investing in an indie film, I mean, God bless them. God bless them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just going to ask you a question. How did it relate to the, because I love the Maltese Falconers movie. Was it the same sort of genre? So it's basically taking a Dashiell Hammett, like hard-boiled mystery, and just setting it in a modern high school. But all the kids talk like they're in Dashiell Hammett. So they all talk in this weird, it just sounds insufferable.

16:26I think it actually kind of works on the screen. But yeah, so it's basically just a straight-up hard-boiled mystery, but set in a high school. It's a very weird hybrid, but it kind of works, I think. Did you film it in black and white? No, we filmed it in color, but a lot of people who saw it when it came out will come up to me and say how much they love the black and white cinematography. So people remember it in black and white sometimes when they've seen it, yeah. Dashiell Hammett, we were talking about him the other night. Oh, yeah? He actually went to jail for not naming names. I think he was blacklisted.

16:59Swept into the whole thing? I know that he was a Pinkerton detective. I know he worked. And then I think in the McCarthy era when people had to testify before the House of American Activities, he refused. And I think he was. He was the one that refused. He was a great man. Fascinating. His writing. Oh, my God. I love his writing. Me too. And his writing, I think people kind of confuse him with Chandler. I love Chandler, too. but Chandler has those kind of long metaphors and kind of like descriptive passages. And Hammett's like Hemingway. He's sparse and just like hard cut. And I love his writing.

17:33Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but I made that movie. And then because I had connected with Rom, we just kind of kept making movies together. And some of them didn't do good. Some of them did good, but we were able to keep piecing them together. And we were able to keep creative control. I was able to just to always write the next movie I wanted to make and then make it pretty much how I wanted to make it. I've been really, really lucky in that regard.

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19:38Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. Parking shouldn't slow you down. ParkWiz gives every driver a shortcut. Book ahead, save up to 50 % and skip the hassle of circling the block. Park smarter, park faster. ParkWiz. Download the ParkWiz app today and save every time you park. I've never really been in a situation where I've been told what to cut and what not to cut in a movie, but then the reality is you get to the end of the process, You've lost all perspective on it, and you're just driving yourself insane, not knowing what to cut. So you do it. I mean, getting some kind of friction.

20:14It's never good to have your hand forced, but getting some kind of friction. Who do you go to? I have a lot of good filmmaker friends who I show it to, and then I have just trusted people who are close to me that I show it to. But it's hard. It's tough because you, I don't know, it's like you walk out of a movie with even your closest, smartest friends, like another just a random movie in a movie theater and one of them will say something where you just do a double take and say that's completely the opposite of my experience. So you kind of, you don't want to dismiss any note you don't agree with because there might be something there but you also need to remember that and when you're so lost at sea in the editing process the temptation to just grab something solid if it's somebody's opinion can be so I don't know, I'm trying to get better at it.

20:58Or even at a restaurant. Yeah. No, there's no comparison to just cooking a meal. But having an open kitchen, you can watch people. You can see their response. You can show them. Sometimes they're going like, no. How much do you, do the chefs watch people's reactions? Well, you're kind of aware. The waiter will bring something back. And if you believe in it, you know, if I believe in what I cooked or what we're serving, then it can be somebody's opinion. If you have sometimes doubts, or if somebody says it's too salty, That's really important. But it's all about feedback, isn't it? It's how you give the feedback.

21:35Even when I eat here, if I had a great meal, do I have something that I didn't think was quite right, and they're working, and last night I was in the kitchen, but now I'm sitting down, do I want to go and tell them? It doesn't feel right. But then if you say that was a great meal, and then the next day you come in and you say, you know what I told you was a great meal? Yeah, yeah. Actually, it's always how you give that feedback. It is a tough thing. The only thing worse than getting feedback from friends is giving feedback to friends on their stuff. Yeah, how do you deal with that? It's hard.

22:08I mean, I'm also like, I'm not, there are some people I think who love conflict. I don't love conflict. And so, but at the same time, especially if I'm close enough with the person, I'll always, I think if you can be honest, if you can not tell them like what they, you think they should do with it. But if you can be honest in a way you can see will be constructive in terms of, or I guess being honest about your experience of it is always helpful, I think. That's one of the reasons I quite like having my family here. because they will say, if I call up my son and I say, as a Spanish, I said, how was your lunch in the River Cafe on Sunday?

22:46He said, they had a really good time. I go, oh, was that bad? The weather was lovely. Oh, it was that bad. Okay, now you can tell me, tell me, tell me. I was sitting backstage after a play to meet an actor and another one of the actors was there and their family came in and had just seen the play. and their mother, the actor's mother, was like, oh, yeah, how did you enjoy it? Oh, great. And there was a pause and the mom said, the seats were so much more comfortable than the last show that you did. It was just very, I don't know if they just redid them or, and I was, yeah, I was melting into a puddle.

23:28But yeah, your mom, yeah, she's got it right. Are you critical about food? I can be, but I think I'm, I mean, my wife, I think has a much more refined palette than me. I'm a little bit of my father's son. If something's delicious, I'm just all... The happiest day. Yeah, but also I'm kind of like that with movies too. I tend to walk into a movie kind of very on the movie's side usually, and I do the same thing with meals usually. Something's got to really smack me in the face for me to reject it. That's really nice. So tell me about Star Wars, because we were going from making these films, having success and then going to what, I mean, what does Star Wars meant to you as a child who your father took you to the first one?

24:13I think beyond even the movies, I think for people who were kids when they were coming out, the toys meant that the ubiquity of the toys meant that the worlds that you were creating in your own imagination at home were in that world of Star Wars. I think that's a big part of why it's so powerful. In addition to the films, I mean, but the one-two punch of that. So yeah, Star Wars for me was, it's all the cliches of dudes my age, of just how Star Wars was beyond movies. It was really kind of closer to a mythology that I grew up with and it meant the world to me. And I had been kind of committed to, okay, I'm just going to write and direct my own things.

24:54And especially after I made Looper, which was kind of a science fiction thing, There were other franchise stuff that came knocking, and there were always bigger movies. And I had always just kind of said, no, I think I'm just going to stick to the path of making my own stuff. But then when Star Wars came around, yeah, it's an offer you can't refuse. And you came here to do it. Yeah, I came here. Was that the first time you'd left? No, I actually had made films. The second movie I did, which was a con man movie that very few people saw, it was called The Brothers Bloom. It was Adrian Brody was in it, and Rachel Weisz and Mark Ruffalo.