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Rian Johnson on unravelling GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY

[EDITED BY CHRISHEWITT]

RIAN JOHNSON IS tired. Rian Johnson is jet-lagged. In fact, there’s a chance that when Rian Johnson sits down in London to talk with Empire about Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, that he may not actually be in the room. “I’m not even here. I’m like Luke in The Last Jedi,” he says, neatly referencing his own movie. “I’m back in my cave.” Force projection aside, the reason why Johnson is so tired is that he’s been hither and thither promoting the heck out of Glass Onion, the second instalment in his series of mystery movies featuring Daniel Craig as the indefatigable detective Benoit Blanc. Unusually for a big Netflix release, the film had a major theatrical run (albeit for just a week), during which it was clear that this was a meticulously constructed crowdpleaser that will largely live its life without a crowd to please. But it’s also, like The Last Jedi, a sequel that rips up the rulebook, swapping gloom for sunshine, Boston for Greece, a straight-up murder-mystery for something more labyrinthine involving deception, internet-dudes doltery, the Mona Lisa, and more. Here, with some spoilers lurking within, Johnson talks about all these things.

Daniel Craig returns as the mysterious, heavily accented Benoit Blanc.

So, where do you start with breaking a movie as intricate as Glass Onion? How do you come up with crimes so precise and ingenious that the entire movie can be built around them?

I start structurally. I start working in notebooks. I don’t start with a crime, I start with the structure of the story, and what the audience’s journey is actually going to be through the story.

Which has to do with the crime, but more than that, it has to do with who we care about and why. In the first movie, the mechanics of the murder I had to come up with as a secondary process. The first thing was figuring out the broad strokes. You have a protagonist who you reveal early on actually did the crime, and yet the audience remains sympathetic to the protagonist. And then we’re worried that the detective is going to catch the protagonist, and you reveal at the end that there’s actually a murder-mystery lurking under this the whole time. That’s great, as opposed to, “Let’s come up with a great murder,” where you’ll drive yourself insane trying to do it.