FIRST FILMS!
FIRST FILMS!
FIRST FILMS!
FAMOUS DIRECTORS!
Rian Johnson is a filmmaker whose career adhered to the classic arc: film school; shorts; indie features; Star Wars. To focus on the shorts for a moment, it’s fascinating to look back on some of Johnson’s formative doodles and being able to see the creative primordial ooze of a man who now has Hollywood in the palm of his hand. With the assistance of various, popular online streaming platforms, we went in search of some early short films from a clutch of famous filmmakers – Lars von Trier, Barry Jenkins, Claire Denis, Guillermo del Toro – to see if we could guess where they were going to head. Has Richard Linklater always been interested in time, nostalgia and cultural artifacts? Did Edgar Wright always have a knack for moving the camera? Has David Lynch always been drawn to the weird and arcane? The text that follows is the product of the LWLies Short Film Investigation Unit.
1 NINJA KO: THE ORIGAMI MASTER
RIAN JOHNSON 1990
Imagine the scene: your parents’ have a home camcorder that they whip out for holidays, birthdays and the odd track meet, resulting in a shelf full of boring tapes that are used as drinks coasters. Then, your pals all come around, get hopped up on Cool Original Doritos and Apple Jacks, watch an ’80s Kung-fu quickie on TV and all start wondering, “Hey, we could do that!” This is probably not an accurate inception story for Rian Johnson’s plucky 1990 short, Ninja Ko: The Origami Master, but it does represent the kernel of a creative impulse discovered by so many greats on such a whim – hell, Steven Spielberg has just made an entire movie on this very subject.
itself offers a scratchy ode to the hyperbolic machismo of direct-to-video martial arts movies, and manages to pack in all manner of in-camera trickery and wacky physical comedy into its three minute run time. Johnson is credited as director and co-writer, and the film offers obscure but vital evidence of his skills as a fond parodist as our hero deals with a variety of domestic tasks, to view the first instances of his skills as a constructor of complex narratives, but also as a director with rare dynamism and visual elan – someone who fully embraces all the sensory possibilities of the medium. Perhaps the only thing we don’t see in these early films is the way Johnson, in films such as and , uses the fuel of classical genre to run a vehicle of sincere emotion with a modern political outlook.
