While Rian Johnson will undoubtedly have a long career, with fascinating choices, it’s hard to imagine any film he’ll make being as big as “Star Wars: Episode VIII.” It’ll be his mark on one of the biggest pop-culture phenomenons of all time. But before he landed that gig, the director of “Brick,” “The Brothers Bloom,” and “Looper” was pursuing projects that — no surprise — would’ve seen Johnson moving in quite different directions.
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In a report about the director’s current legal battle with his former agent (if you’re curious about those details, THR has them) it’s revealed that before being hired for ‘Episode VIII,’ he was eyeing a WWII spy movie and an adaptation of Haruki Murakami‘s “Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki.” The latter in particular is interesting, as it would’ve seen Johnson taking something quite new for him, a narrative build around what sounds like a mid-life crisis of sorts. Here’s the synopsis from Wikipedia:
In this Bildungsroman of the realist kind (hints of the author’s magical realism are left to dreams and tales), the third-person narrative follows the past and present of Tsukuru Tazaki, a man who wants to understand why his life was derailed sixteen years ago.
In the early 1990s in his home town of Nagoya, the young Tsukuru was a fan of train stations. In high school, the two boys and two girls that were his four best friends all had a color as part of their surnames, leaving him the “colorless” one of their “orderly, harmonious community”. But one day in 1995, during his second year in college, his friends abruptly cut all relationships with him. That never-explained, Kafkaesque ostracism left him feeling suicidal then guilty “as an empty person, lacking in color and identity”; and when his only college friend vanished the next semester, he felt “fated to always be alone”.
Now in 2011’s Tokyo, the 36-year-old engineer Tazaki works for a railroad company and builds stations. His new girlfriend Sara spurs him “to come face-to-face with the past, not as some naive, easily wounded boy, but as a grown-up” and seek his former friends to mend the relationships and find out why they rejected him, because she won’t commit to him unless he can move past that issue. And so he will visit them one by one, first back in Nagoya, then in rural Finland, on a quest for truth and a pilgrimage for happiness.
Let’s hope that movie isn’t off the table, because it would be fascinating to see Johnson use his cinematic storytelling tools on a work by Murakami. As for the WWII picture, there’s not much in the way of what that one was all about. And don’t forget, Johnson had also been working on an original sci-fi script as well before ‘Episode VIII’ rolled along.
Will Johnson ever revisit these projects? Well, his career will be in a very different place after ‘Episode VIII’ comes out, and there will likely be other big opportunities coming his way. Whether he goes after visiting the galaxy far, far away, we’ll be eager to follow.