Let’s start with The Beatles. The Fab Four were released at the close of 1968. The White Album, which would become tabloid-notorious within a year because some hippie cult leader named Charles Manson sent his followers on a killing spree under the guise of the hidden meanings he’d uncovered in their songs. However, no one seems to remember that there was an already-existing track on the album, aimed at weirdos who search for hidden meanings within Beatles songs.
Lennon McCartney is the credit for this song “Glass Onion” was primarily written by Lennon, as a tease to those looking for profundity in the band’s surreal lyrics. And as a title and an end-credits theme it fits the first sequel to Rian Johnson’s Knives are Out perfectly. After the old-dark-house setting of the 2019 film, where Daniel Craig’s detective Benoit Blanc snooped in the shadows trying to smoke out the killer of elderly Boston crime novelist Harlan Thrombey, this time events take place in broad daylight, in the sunny Greek holiday home of tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton), who has summoned some people he thinks are his closest friends for a murder-mystery weekend.
As a casual collector of priceless art and other pop-cultural items, Bron’s vulgarity is breathtaking, and in that sense, the song’s line about seeing “how the other half live” It seems particularly cutting. But Johnson hadn’t actually thought of it as a title until he’d already started on the script. “I didn’t have anything in mind, which was terrifying, because the first movie I’d had cooking for about 10 years,” He says.
This is exactly where the Beatles are. “I’d gotten to a point where I had the idea of a central metaphor that Blanc could latch onto and beat like a dead horse,” He says. “Something that was made of glass. Something that was layered, but the center was in plain sight, and so on. And I thought, OK, well the billionaire is going to have an island, and maybe he has some structure on it that’s made of glass, so … is it a glass castle? Is it a glass palace? I literally opened the music app on my phone and just searched the word ‘glass’, and “Glass Onion” popped up.”
It was then that he realized how perfect it was. “But I was always surprised, when I was showing the script around, how many people didn’t know it was a Beatles song. I thought everybody knew “Glass Onion”, but I guess they don’t.”
Original Knives are Out premiered in Toronto in 2019, following just two years after Johnson’s Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi. At the time, it was seen as one of those smaller, more personal movies that a director might do as a big exhalation of breath after making a studio monster, but, in retrospect, that wasn’t quite the case. The premiere of the movie at the Princess of Wales Theater was a huge success and it completely reshaped the public’s perception of Daniel Craig.
Even before the movie was screened, though, ideas of a sequel began to bubble up. “The first one was clearly so much fun to do,” Ram Bergman, producer. “It was a no-brainer: we should go and make another one. I always believed, even from the script stage, that, if this worked out, this was a character you could actually build a franchise — for lack of a better word — around. But it was only around the time the movie was coming out that we realized it could work.”
Craig certainly wasn’t expecting it either. Craig describes his arrival in the original as a surprise. Knives are Out almost didn’t happen. “My agent was so cloak-and-dagger about it, which I suppose is apt,” He recalls. Craig had been tracking Johnson since 2008’s Brothers Bloom, and just the director’s name alone piqued his interest. “I can say this now, but normally a script has to have my name watermarked all over it, so that if I decide to sell it, then they know it’s me. This was my agent’s one, with his name emblazoned over it. He said, ‘Read this. Don’t tell them I’ve shown it to you.’ So, I read it. And of course, I was just like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to do this.’”
According to him, the attraction was more about the story than the character. “The character wasn’t quite there for me. There was stage direction: ‘lilting Southern accent’. But that’s all I got, so, it wasn’t in my head; I didn’t have a clear picture. But when you read a script that good, it’s so rare.”
Yet, no one was seriously considering a franchise at this point. This even after Craig had finished his Bond tenure. “When we were filming,” He says: “we fantasized about it, like you do: ‘It would be quite nice to do another one of these.’ But who knows? You don’t want to make predictions that the movie’s going to be successful. We’ve been there, done that, and failed, on a number of occasions.” (The specter of 2011’s Cowboys & Aliens It comes to my mind. “But the fact that people liked Knives Out so much, and the fact that it was such a success, made us think, Let’s see what happens.”
This is the timeline for how long it will take to complete the script. Glas Onion took to come together exists mostly in the elastic mind-fog of the Covid era, but it was certainly pretty quickly by anyone’s standards. “I think it was less than six months,” Craig says. “Rian was in lockdown, so he didn’t really have an awful lot else to do. He was sort of a prisoner. But I was nervous to read it. Where do we go next? You don’t want to say that you have to top the last movie … but you kind of do have to top the last movie. That’s what it is, isn’t it? And he did.”
First Knives are Out owed a subtle debt to one of Johnson’s favorite films, Sheila’s LastStephen Sondheim, Anthony Perkins wrote the 1973 cult curio “Mad Hatter”, Glas OnionHowever, it borrows almost the entire premise. “It’s a great murder-mystery,” He says: “but the main thing that I took from it was the idea of a rich jerk inviting all of his friends out to an exotic locale for a murder-mystery game. Within that, there’s also the hierarchy of a group of friends, with somebody at the top of the pyramid, and everyone having a reason to bump them off, and the way that money plays into that.”
With Glas Onion hitting cinemas, and later TV screens, in the wake of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, it might seem like serendipity, but Johnson really wasn’t anticipating that. “The fact that Bron’s a tech billionaire — which made a lot of sense for the story — became an obstacle in the writing. Because — I don’t think I even have to say the names — there are some obvious, real-world analogs. And the instant I started thinking about any of them too specifically, it got so boring so quickly. And so, disconnecting him from that, and trying to build him as his own kind of clownish character, became a challenge.”
Edward Norton is here to help. “Edward and I have wanted to work together for years,” Johnson says he was approached by the actor following his 2005 Sundance success. BrickHigh School film noir with a high stylized style. “He’s a tremendous actor, and he also has a foot in that world of tech investors and all of that. He’s moved in those circles, and he was able to really have fun with it.”
Norton recalls their first meeting in New York’s coffee shop. “We talked about doing something someday, but it took a little while longer than we hoped.” This chance came in spring last year, when Norton was given the script. Glas Onion. “I laughed so hard,” He says.
Norton immediately ignores any effort to spot the Miles Brons real-world counterparts, just like Johnson. “My take on this was really to know that Miles is a character cut from a very specific species,” He says. “They’re all around us these days, and they’re really getting lionized. So, for me, the job was with Rian to pick and choose the perfect characteristics to send up a particular type of person, and to do it by embedding within him a lot of the best and worst of what we see in these people, but still find a way for it to feel organic. With satire, if you overplay it …”
He takes a moment to pause. “It’s like the line in Raging Bull,” he says, referencing Jake LaMotta’s thoughts on cooking steak. “‘You overcook it, it’s no good. It defeats its own purpose.’ You’ve got to find the moment where it’s both funny and credible at the same time.”
This time, the social satire is definitely very different than the first. Knives are OutThe drama unfolded in the relatively simple American MAGA-era landscape. Craig: “The difference with Benoit in this one, is that when he goes to Boston, the sort of people that he has to deal with are urbanites. They’re quite different from the people he has to deal with in Glass Onion. I’m not saying that the people in Glass Onion are necessarily stupid, but… Well, some of them are.”
This time around we get an insight into Blanc’s process, as he reveals a little more of his personality and, especially, his methods. “It was really just a product of the requirements of this story,” Johnson explained. “In the first movie, we come in through the eyes of Ana de Armas’s character, Marta, who’s Thrombey’s nurse, and Blanc is very much like the shark in Jaws — he’s kind of circling her, and on the periphery — but we’re seeing things through her perspective. Whereas in this, we’re coming to the island through Blanc’s eyes, so when we meet all the characters for the first time, they are the enigmas. That naturally leads to the audience being with Blanc.”
Blanc seems more balanced this time around, but Craig still laughs at the idea of having any. “character development” This may have been done between Knives are Out Glas Onion (“I don’t know if I’m that kind of actor”). But he does agree that he is much more secure in Benoit Blanc’s skin these days. “My go-to with him in Glass Onion is that he’s incredibly curious,” He says. “I think he’s kind. He’s genuinely interested in human stories, in people, and what they’ve got to say. It’s how he does his job. He may want his suspects to hang themselves, but he does it by being open. You see it in the movie, he says, ‘I’m going to loosen them up.’”
Though he refuses to be drawn on plot points that could be considered spoilers — and in Glas Onion there really are a lot of them — Craig is surprisingly fine about the recent revelation, made onstage at the London Film Festival, that Blanc is gay and shares his home with a character played by … well, that’s one of the surprises Craig does not want to talk about. “It’s all good,” He says. “The less of a song and dance we make about that, the better, really, for me, because it just made sense. And also, as I said at the LFF, who wouldn’t want to live with the human being that he happens to live with? It’s nice, it’s fun. And why shouldn’t it be? I don’t want people to get politically hung up on anything.”
Before the film take us to Miles Bron’s Greek island lair we get an insight into his social circle via the invites that he sends out: a lavish wooden box incorporating a series of physical puzzles. “First of all,” Johnson: “it felt like a great way to get through the tough part of any murder mystery, which is introducing all of the suspects. But it was also a very nice, shorthand way of seeing them all at home during the pandemic.”
There’s a further hint as to how things will go when the guests arrive on a Greek jetty to catch a boat laid on by Bron: a famous actor gives them all “the rich person vaccine” A fleeting appearance that was only one.
“I think we can say that people know Ethan Hawke is in the movie,” shrugs Johnson, who accepts that a fair few of the film’s secrets are already out. “He was in Budapest doing Moon Knight with Oscar Isaac, and he very kindly came down with his family for a weekend to do that one little scene. It was at the beginning of our shoot, so he was like a saint, blessing us. He gave us his blessing and then kind of vanished off into the sunset.”
It turned out that the blessing was needed for this set. “It was right during the Delta spike,” Johnson: “so the numbers were really, really bad.” The burden of safeguarding against this fell to producer Bergman, who, after scouring the four quarters of the globe — “There wasn’t a place or an area we didn’t think about” — settled on Villa 20 at the luxurious Amanzoe resort in Porto Heli for the exteriors (“Not a bad place to hang every day”). Still, there was some work to do: as you might suspect, the house’s giant glass-onion feature is a visual effect, but then so is the island (“It’s actually, like, 20 minutes from the beach”). The scenes inside Bron’s resort were shot even further away, some 500 miles north, in the capital of Serbia. “We’d looked in London,” says Bergman, “but we couldn’t find enough stage space. So, after Greece, we went to Belgrade where we built all the interiors. Everything that you see inside the house, we built.”
The behind-the-scenes photography from the shoot shows a world at odds with the idyllic world of Miles Bron’s champagne get-togethers. “I would say that probably, of all the shoots I ever had, this was the most stressed,” says Bergman, “because of the fear that one of the actors, or Rian, would get Covid, and then we’d have to shut down for two weeks. On top of that, there’s the ripple effect, especially with a cast who are working together every day. What impact will it have on their next project?”
“Ram was just tearing his hair out,” Craig laughs. He did an amazing job and so did the rest of his team who were there to protect us. I suppose we were fairly isolated anyway — being in Greece, it was easier to be able to go out and be a bit more kind of social.”
Craig actually felt at ease enough to hold a party. He smiles. “I said to Ram, ‘I’m going to have a party whether you like it or not. We need to do this. I need to get this group of people together, so that we can get to know each other.’ So, The first week I was there, I rented a place, and I got a stack of booze and some food. And Ram parked an ambulance at the end of my drive, so everybody could be tested.”
When the Serbian shoot began, things got more complicated. “We were much more in lockdown there, because we were in a studio,” Craig: “and I didn’t get to know the crew the way one normally does. I didn’t know what anybody looked like because they were wearing masks.” The actor has mixed feelings regarding the fact that they were put up at a different hotel than the crew. “But it meant that we could socialize together and hang out. Which I think was a really good thing for the film. We got to gel socially, and that helped the movie for the energy on set.”
“We were very, very lucky,” Johnson. “Everybody stayed safe. We had some positive cases, we had a few people get sick, but we never had any major shutdowns. And given the size of our production, I was thankful for that.”
And, as a director, he doesn’t take that for granted. “I’ve talked about this recently with some filmmaker friends,” He says. “When you’re making a movie, there’s a strange little bubble of unreality that forms around the production. It’s always very weird when, for instance, there’s a death in the family, either for you or someone in the cast or crew, because your reality, your fairy tale world, has been punctured, and you remember that the real world is happening outside. And for anyone who made a film during Covid, the constant presence of that felt very heavy, in terms of how essentially inconsequential the thing that you’re doing basically is — you’re making a dumb little movie, but you’re asking people to show up during a pandemic and put themselves at risk.”
Someone who definitely put themselves at risk is Janelle Monáe, but for very different reasons. Until now better known as an R&B/soul singer, Monáe plays the ice queen of the piece, Cassandra “Andi” Brand, Miles Bron’s former business partner whose unexpected presence sets the other guests’ tongues wagging, mostly because they know about the shabby way he has treated her. But as the story unfolds, so does Monáe: rather like the glass onion of the title, she reveals layer after layer.
“I’m so happy that we got Janelle,” Johnson states. “Really, what her performance is about is the scope of the performance. It’s not one specific scene. It’s not anything you can capture in an audition read, so, to a certain extent, we were going with our gut and rolling the dice. But the scope of what she accomplishes — and the fact that she’s able to do all that and emotionally ground it — is pretty amazing to me.”
Johnson and the rest of the cast were fortunately able to smile. Glas Onion, Monáe already had him in her sights. “I met Rian through his work,” Sie says. “He didn’t know me, but I knew him. I saw a film of his called Looper that just blew my mind — being a time-traveler myself, the idea of you having to go and kill your future self is just wild. I was like, ‘Rian is doing something super-innovative in the sci-fi genre and if I ever get an opportunity to work with him, I don’t care what it is, I’m saying yes.’” It was the right time, when the script came out. Glas Onion arrived. “I was a big fan of Knives Out,” Her memory is, “and after I got finished reading the script, it was, ‘Hell, yes.’”
Her character will be all she has to say. “Andi’s a leader. A gatherer. Very wealthy.” The party is over once it gets going? “Let’s just say shit gets weird.”
As her fans know, Monáe herself is not short of fashion confidence, as witnessed by the insanely elaborate Fifth Element She wore a costume to Halloween recently. But she’s full of praise for costume designer Jenny Eagan. “I have to give her the biggest round of applause,” “She says. “I had one conversation with her about what I thought, then she told me what she thought. She was a great fitter. The fitting was really all it took.
“With every character, the clothing has to speak before the character speaks,” She explains. “and through Andi’s clothing you get a deeper understanding of who she is. She’s very stylish, there’s a lot of attention to detail. She’s a Type-A personality, so she’s totally on point in the fashion world.” But, surprisingly, for a seasoned performer, Monáe wanted to preserve some distance. “It was a beautiful thing to be able to watch the film and not see myself. I saw the essence of Andi. It wasn’t Janelle Monáe playing this person. I was like, ‘Wow, I really see this person’s spirit. I see what they want. I see what they’re trying to get. I empathize with them, and I’m going on this wild ride.’”
Is it possible to keep everything together? “That’s my job,” She says it flatly. “I had to lock in, focus. I had to cut out all the noise. I had to fully submit. Being in Greece wasn’t a bad thing, but, just as I would on the singing side, I never stopped training, bouncing back and forth ideas. I’d say, ‘What about this? What about that?’ Luckily, I also had an amazing, collaborative director who just allowed me to play.”
This quote has a literal meaning, since cast members were encouraged to participate in parlor games. “Rian made everybody comfortable,” Sie says. “He saw us as humans, he cared about us as people, not necessarily for what we could do for the film, and he would invite us to these murder-mystery games on the weekends where we would drink, listen to music, tell stories, and really just bond. All of that offscreen quality time helped with us to be able to trust each other on screen.”
Which kind of games are these? She says that games are like Werewolf AssassinRandom cards are used to assign murderers and victims. There’s a pause. “You’ve never played them?” Elle asks. “I do this at my house all the time with my family, for Christmas or Thanksgiving. We play games, we dress up, and we have a really good time.”
She still remembers the time she watched Murder She Wrote With her grandmother and Jessica Fletcher, she was equally surprised to see Jessica Fletcher in the film. This shout-out to Angela Lansbury — glimpsed playing an online Zoom game during lockdown with Blanc and Sheila’s Last co-writer Stephen Sondheim — is an apt one: when Murder She Wrote The first TV crime show was broadcast in 1984. These shows are still dominated by men, even though Glas Onion starts out as another case for the genius detective Benoit Blanc to crack, it’s actually Monáe’s character who sets him on the path to put right an egregious wrong. This makes for a hilarious comedy-thriller with serious points from the real-world. Glas Onion, about morality, responsibility, and how badly people are inclined to treat others they don’t believe are their equals (also a big theme of Knives are Out).
“Yeah,” says Monáe, who clearly isn’t inclined to read too much into that. “But I think Rian said it best: it’s about bad people on a beautiful island, and a brilliant detective.”
With Glas OnionRian Johnson only has six films left in his filmography. But it looks like there are many more. That might be because there doesn’t seem to be any hesitancy, any floundering: they are what they are. His debut, Brick, was a stylized attempt to transplant Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled noir novels to high school, while the 2008 follow-up, Brothers BloomThis movie could best be described by the term “fever dream” – a romantic comedy made with the help of Hunky Dory-era David Bowie. It wasn’t until LooperHowever, it was almost as if a pattern was developing. This director was not only testing the limits of the genres he knew, but also finding ways to make the films more human and relatable. At which point — perhaps quite obviously, in retrospect — he was scooped up by the Star Wars universe.
We’ll return to that later, but Johnson is quite unusual among his peers in the sense that his resumé bucks the typical “one for them, one for me” trend. The example of his refutation is that he believes his. Star Wars He was inspired by his experience to return into indie music, looking for a way to express himself. “I’ve been very lucky to feel a sense of freedom with every movie that we’ve done,” He says. “And this was no different.”
The secret to success Glas Onion no different is Johnson’s continued fascination with the rules of storytelling and exploring the plethora of subgenres that exist within every genre. He describes Brothers Bloom as “a conman movie”, while also accepting that’s “a weirdly limited genre in itself.” LooperHe notes that he found, similarly amorphous. It was more like a time-travel movie, than a sci-fi film. “But with a murder-mystery, it’s tighter. There’s a murder, there’s a group of suspects, the detective investigates the crime, and at the end of the movie he sits in the library and solves it. You couldn’t lay out those beats for a conman or a time-travel movie.”
Though critics often dwell on the quirkier aspects of his films, which the market has bent to accommodate in the last 17 years, they can’t deny the attention to logic that goes into them. “The thing that’s fun to me about working in any genre — and in this one specifically — is that it’s such a defined chess board. First of all, it’s a lot of fun to play with the form, but it also, for me, makes it way less daunting to come into it.”
Edward Norton had something to say on that. Especially in light of Johnson’s removal from the genre of murder-mystery. “Old-fashioned remakes of Agatha Christie can be fun, but they can get a little bit clinical,” He said. Instead, he points at Knives are Out and its focus on Ana de Armas’s character Marta. “Rian always makes sure that, at some point, you know who you’re rooting for. He gives you just enough of an emotional investment to decide that there’s one character you can ethically relate to. There’s one person who, amidst all the nefarious undercurrents, is actually kind of righteous. And once you figure out who that is, you have someone to root for. There’s some heart in it, and that’s not always true with murder mysteries.”
Everyone is responsible Glas Onion It is a natural instinct to emphasize words like “fun” “entertaining” One of the greatest crowd pleasers in the year is a good way to reflect on the bizarre times following the 2020 Covid epidemic. The Oscars became more similar to the Independent Spirit Awards in those years. Best Picture was given to indie-hits, while the studios carefully eschewed big-budget releases. Nomadl and CODAThis was a sign of how personal and diffuse movie-going had been without tentpoles. And when it came to getting nervous audiences back into the picture palaces, it didn’t help that the blockbusters that did get released weren’t even that escapist: the bedrock of Marvel, Star Wars DC movies and DC comics alike are filled with the terror of a superpower capable of happily destroying everything, just for being able to.
This is the meaning of Glas Onion is at the forefront of a wave of films that are trying to reboot film culture in a way that doesn’t just rely on the industry guilt-tripping audiences back into cinemas to see their expensive movies just because that’s the way the system used to work. As the trailers acknowledge, Johnson’s film is an invitation, and, like Miles Bron, he’s worked very hard to make it one that’s impossible to refuse.
Norton considers comedy the key. “A good hearty laugh is a nice medicine in anxious times,” He says. “Coming out of Covid, the pleasure of comedy within a group experience is something we’ve perhaps forgotten, and it’s nice to remember how that feels. And in this case, a lot of it has to do too with the fact that Rian is very adept at the pleasures of the Swiss-clock murder-mystery. He achieves that perfect soufflé of the extra-special laugh you get from the knowing recognition of the times you’re living in, but without going too heavy on the commentary. It’s entertainment, but it’s also taking the piss out of the right targets, and he balances those two things really beautifully.”
Indeed, although Johnson enjoys playing with the boundaries of genre cinema — “It’s like having a defined chess board,” he says — there is also the fact that he’s trying to channel his own memories of cinema, like the time his father said, “Get in the car, I’m going to show you something that will blow your mind.” They saw the original. Star WarsHis epiphany at that moment explains why he leapt to create a Star Wars Film when he was given the chance. But also, why The Last Jedi The closing trio of the story’s saga is the strongest entry.
“The kinds of films I’m drawn to making are things that I have a personal connection to,” He says: “either from seeing them as a kid, or having been deeply affected by them growing up, or having some kind of rooted memory of watching them with my family. In other words, I know, on a very intimate level, what the essential pleasures of those films are. And part of what I’m trying to do — always — is to tap back into that.”
It’s worth noting here that Johnson, 48, grew up in the age of VHS: for the first time, a whole generation didn’t have to wait for a film like Star Wars To return to the cinemas, or worse, to turn on television. “When I was a kid, though, you had to get on the waiting list because the local store would only have five copies of it,” He giggles. “You’d get the tape, you’d watch it solidly, over and over, for 24 hours, and then you’d have to give it back. And because of that, the VHS tape was already wearing thin by the time you got it.”
So he understands and appreciates fan ownership. “Maybe it has something to do with having the toys, too,” He says. “Feeling like they’re yours to play with, that this world is yours. That’s something that’s been baked into Star Wars fandom, and not in a bad way, not in a toxic way. That kind of ownership is also why it means so much to people, and it explained why, when people would visit the set, inevitably they would start crying when they walked onto the Millennium Falcon.”
Each member of his cast has a story to tell about how the films impacted their lives. For one, Monáe vividly remembers seeing Robert Townsend’s Meteor Man Kansas City: One dollar back, then several years later being blown by The Matrix. Daniel Craig giggles at the memory of watching Grease While his sister screamed, 300 children hurled candy at him. “I grew up in a golden age,” He smiles.
But then, he’s also just signed off on another one, having finally let go of 007 in a swansong that sat in Covid limbo for 18 months, making the gap between No Time To Die Glas Onion They seem deceptively brief. What does he think about the Walther PPK being retired? “Listen,” He says: “I look back at it with a lot of emotion — a lot of emotion — and real joy and pleasure. But it’s very hard to sum up. It’s impossible, both because it was a huge part of my life for so long, and because I’ll never really be able to figure out all the experiences that I had on those films. I mean, I crammed at least three working lifetimes into 17 years. And that’s not just sum-up-able.” He takes a moment to pause. “Is that a word?”
But as to what’s coming next, no one really knows. “The industry is changing so drastically, especially now,” Johnson states. “It really is a bit like an avalanche that we’re all running on top of, waiting to see where it settles.”
Let’s get to the point. Glas Onion Netflix signed the record-breaking contract. Deadline’s Mike Fleming broke the news of the eye-watering figure — reputedly north of $400 million — in the spring of 2021, calling it “one of the biggest streamer movie deals in history.” Ram Bergman however is quick to dismiss it. “Listen,” He says: “we didn’t really want it to be a big deal. We didn’t want it to be in the news. We’re very low-key. But somehow, perhaps not surprisingly, it blew up. We’re not interested in that. All we’re interested in is having the best infrastructure and the best way to make a movie. And at the time, during Covid, it seemed like Netflix was clearly the best partnership. They offered the best deal and were willing to commit to more than one movie. So, we got very excited about that.”
If Glas Onion had tanked at its world premiere in Toronto this fall, Netflix would have had a lot of questions to answer, especially after the mixed critical reception that awaited the rest of the company’s 2022 arthouse slate: Noah Baumbach’s We have white noise, Andrew Dominik’s Blonde and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Bardo: A False History of a Few Truths. But after a standing ovation — Bergman’s insistence that the film should screen in the same cinema, on the same day (Saturday) and in the same time slot as Knives are Out clearly paid off — industry talk was not about the money spent on it but whether the third installment would maintain the franchise’s high quality.
This was also a great opportunity for the exhibition sector. The film’s Thanksgiving release will be limited in theaters to meet audience demand and qualify for the Oscars. Bergman says that was exactly what happened. “very, very important. We know that the first movie worked really big. Watching it in a movie theater with 400 or a thousand people is absolutely an experience, so we got Netflix to agree to really make an event out of it.”
And if it’s successful? “Hopefully it will get people to spread the word and more people can watch it on the platform,” He muses. “But also, hopefully it can help mediate between the chains and the streamers, because, until Glass Onion, Netflix movies only played on Cinemark here in the U.S. They never really played in AMC, they never really played in Regal, they never played in the cineplexes. So, this is kind of the first movie where there is the bridge between them. I can’t take all the credit for it, but we clearly wanted this and pushed for it. But I think Netflix wanted it too, and the chains wanted it, too.” They will likely want some of the chain’s pieces. Knives Out 3. “Oh yeah, we’re thinking about it,” says Bergman, “but we need this movie to come out first, then I need Rian to clear his head, take a break, and then go and start. I mean, he’s been thinking about it.”
Johnson affirms that Johnson has been contemplating it. “It’s interesting. We structured the [Netflix deal] so that if I wanted to do something else next, I could. And I think everybody assumed I’d have a couple other random ideas — unrelated projects — that I’ve been kicking around. But, honestly, over the past couple of months, the most exciting creative thing to me right now is that third movie. And so, I think I’m going to hop right into it. Not because of a contractual obligation, but, genuinely, that’s the shiny object I find my nose pointed toward right now. [It’s] the idea of figuring out how it can be completely different from this one as well as the first one.”
Surprisingly this process already began. “I’ve got a Moleskine notebook that I carry everywhere and I’m constantly jotting stuff down in it,” He says. “The first 80 percent of the process, for me, is scribbling in notebooks and structuring it all out. I’m trying to get ahead. Even when I’m doing all the publicity for this film, I’m trying to start building up a structure, an idea, so that after New Year, when it’s time to actually get to work, I’m hopefully not just staring at that horrible blank page. But you always are, I guess.”
Johnson’s job is made even harder by the fact that there isn’t really a road map towards where he wants to go. “It’s tough,” He says: “because it’s not an expansive genre. It’s not like there are thousands of classics, like film noir, where it feels like there’s unlimited amount of stuff to draw from. There’s been plenty of different Agatha Christie adaptations over the years, and those are always fun to dig into. But in terms of actual innovative stuff in the genre, you do find yourself coming back to the same titles. It’s funny, because every time we release a Knives Out movie, I’m asked, ‘What are the five whodunnits that you would recommend to people?’ And it’s going to be very frustrating by the third movie to be naming the same five over and over again. That’s why I’m trying to dig deeper into the genre and see if there’s any hidden gems I’m missing.”
Craig knows this, but he is confident that Johnson will inspire him to find the right third. “Rian seems to me to be very excited about getting on with the next one,” He says. “He’s already got some ideas, and they sound to me to be really interesting, so I’m going to let him just get on with that.”
What about the rest? “Down the line, yes, of course. I mean, if people are interested, then we’ll make them. But if there ever came a point where either Rian and I thought we were just churning them out, I think we would back away. I mean, I just don’t think that’s what either of us want to do in life. Unless people are getting genuine fun out of them, forget it.”
Johnson also agrees with Johnson about the dangers associated complacency. “Just in terms of my own personal feeling when I step onto a set, I’ve become much more confident over the years. But that comes with its own set of dangers — you’ll settle into a routine — and I’m especially conscious of that now that I’m making a series. Daniel and I have talked a lot about that, how the instant we feel like we’re turning the crank on another one of these, we have to stop. So, it’s very important with each one now, and the third one especially, that it feels kind of scary and dangerous. You have to shake the box.”
These Unusual Suspects
Rian Johnson, Director of Rian’s guests Glas Onion’s murder-mystery party.
Cassandra “Andi” Brand
Janelle Monáe
“Andi is Miles Bron’s former business partner, a tech entrepreneur. Janelle I’ve loved as a performer with her music and I’ve always loved her on screen. This movie definitely asks a lot of her, and she has to play in a lot of different modes.”
Lionel Toussaint
Leslie Odom Jr.
“Lionel is Miles’s chief scientist. He’s sort of the grownup of the group, and Leslie brings a grounded strength to the part. Your eyes automatically go to him as kind of an anchoring presence with all these crazies around him, and Leslie tapped into that.”
Duke Cody
Dave Bautista
“Duke is a YouTube influencer who’s kind of doing an alpha male scam. Dave was interesting to me because, physically, he’s the stereotypical version of that character, but he actually has a real sensitivity to him that undercuts that. It was an intriguing combination to me. It would not have been interesting to just cast somebody who was just a big hulking presence in that part — what’s interesting to me is the humanity.”
Whiskey
Madelyn Cline
“Whiskey is Duke’s girlfriend. Maddy has incredible comic instincts, and she’d always come up with shit. If you keep your eyes on her in the background of any shot, inevitably, she’s doing something insane. It’s like watching a whole different movie.”
Claire Debella
Kathryn Hahn
“Claire is a politician. You know, when people sign up for a film like this, I think they often expect that they’re going to have a fabulous wardrobe. But my directive for Kathryn’s character was just: beige. I wanted her to be just sad-trumpet beige. So, Kathryn would show up to the dressing room, and there’d be all the colorful pops of Benoit’s rack and Birdie’s rack. Then she’d see Claire’s rack… Just tan sadness!”
Birdie Jay
Kate Hudson
“Birdie is a former model who has her own sportswear line. I actually didn’t know that Kate’s nickname growing up was Birdie. She’s a great comic actor, and it was fun to give her a role where she could have an open field to run with those instincts. On set, Kate also had the best description of her performance. She said, ‘The way I play it, Birdie understands every third word,’ which I thought was terrific.”
Peg
Jessica Henwick
“Peg is Birdie’s assistant. Jess is hilarious — she’s kind of a brilliant straight man.”