RIAN JOHNSON WAS DAUNTED
He didn’t know if he could pull it off. For the first time, he had challenged himself to write a sequel to one of his own original films and make it just as fresh, unique and exciting, in a much shorter space of time. “It was quite terrifying for a moment there realising, ‘Oh, it took ten years to get Knives Out [made] — am I gonna be able to do it?’” he says of his follow-up sojourn into the world of murder-mysteries. “If you have a movie that’s well received, it becomes this gilded object that feels very outside of yourself and you forget how you made it. The insecurities can be a lot worse.”
Johnson is no stranger to mystery-writing, and 2005’s Brick and 2012’s Looper showed off his penchant for genre-bending, but 2019’s Knives Out was a true game-changer, dusting the cobwebs off the traditional whodunnit formula defined by the works of Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes novels. Rather than simply adapting those stories, which have been done to intricately plotted death, Johnson invented his own sleuthing world with a thoroughly contemporary landscape. There was thriller pacing, sharp social commentary, even sharper zingers, an A-list ensemble and an eccentric gentleman detective to rival any screen versions of Holmes or Poirot.
Knives Out is the filmmaker’s best-received movie on Rotten Tomatoes and earned a pretty penny at the global box office ($311.6 million against a $40 million budget), as well as an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, and it found an even wider audience after landing on Netflix. No surprise, then, that the streaming service wanted to bag the rights to two sequels, with Daniel Craig returning as famed “Kentucky-fried” investigator Benoit Blanc. So much so that they shelled out a staggering $469 million for the privilege. Yet for Johnson, the question of being able to recreate that magical concoction in as refreshing a way as possible loomed over the writing process.