Rian Johnson’s latest film, the ingenious dissection of the whodunnit that is Knives Out, is not what you think. In it, the 45-year-old director has constructed a Trojan blockbuster, using the mechanisms of genre to smuggle a commentary on American identity into international multiplexes. The true nature of his game sneaks up on the audience like an assassin, its critiques sharp as a concealed blade. It is a Rian Johnson picture in the purest sense, a work of popcorn pleasures with something meaningful to say before the credits roll.
“I wanted it to be an entertaining ride,” Johnson says over the phone while in France, drumming up buzz prior to the film’s public debut. “Something satisfying, that you can still chew on for a bit afterward … Get your ticket and see what happens! Then, you know, keep thinking on it.”
A decade ago, Johnson started turning over a concept in his head for a different breed of murder mystery. “The elements that I came up with 10 years ago were structural,” Johnson says, “the big-picture genre work in which I could mash up a whodunnit with a Hitchcock thriller.” The avowed student of cinema knew the ins and outs of this tradition well enough to zig where everything before zagged, with twists that could pull the rug out from under even the savviest moviegoers.
Subverting expectations has brought Johnson acclaim and international prominence as he has leapfrogged from genre to genre. He broke out with the teenaged neo-noir Brick in 2005, moved on to the heist flick with The Brothers Bloom, and tackled the time-travel thriller via the instant cult hit Looper. This daring approach to genre has not pleased everyone, though. When he took the reins for his first all-out blockbuster, 2017’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, he approached space opera with the same mix of faithfulness and irreverence. The film moved fan favourite Rey to the fore and raised some tough questions about her parentage, drawing the ire of a small but vocal contingent of franchise purists. These diehards set up petitions to have the movie wiped from existence, deluged Rotten Tomatoes with negative reviews, and flooded Johnson’s Twitter account with bile.
Yet Johnson is sanguine about the onslaught he has received online. “Anyone who’s online is going to encounter some degree of trolling. Now, I have had,” he laughs, “slightly more than most people. Though people would be surprised if they had my timeline, to see how little of it I now have to deal with. It’s just the same assholes doing it over and over. I’ve blocked, like, 150 people, so my mentions aren’t so bad any more. I’m no martyr; if I wasn’t having a good time, I wouldn’t be on Twitter. Once it stops being fun, I’ll log off like a shot.”
With all this in his rearview, Johnson sat down to pen the script for Knives Out, fine-tuning the pages over what he describes as a brisk six months. He credits the speed with which he wrote for the sense of immediacy that permeates the finished product. Despite the idea for the film popping into his head a decade before, its screenplay “feels very much like it’s set in 2019”, packed with up-to-the-minute allusions that speak to class and character: a lifestyle brand modelled after Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop; Gen-Z-ers fluent in the dialect of the online; performative love of Hamilton as proof of progressive bona fides.
“Part of what got me excited about writing this movie was the idea of applying this genre to the America of right now,” Johnson explains. “If the whodunnit genre ever feels a bit quaint or dusty, that’s only because we’re used to seeing Agatha Christie adaptations. To be clear, I love Agatha Christie. What I mean is that the adaptations of her work are generally period pieces. It’s very easy to look at Christie’s movies and think that they’re timeless, when the reality is that she was writing for her present. She engaged with the culture of her time.”
So Johnson followed her example, integrating today’s debate about power dynamics in the United States into a mainstream release. He whipped up a puzzle-box plot about an upper-crust family in Massachusetts who are shocked to find that their patriarch (Christopher Plummer) has been murdered. But inspector extraordinaire Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, sporting a buttermilk-battered southern accent) has a hunch that one of the deceased’s adult children – a rogues’ gallery of pampered ghouls played by a starry ensemble including Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris Evans and Toni Collette – may be the culprit.
The gumshoe wisely selects the victim’s loyal nurse and confidant Marta (Ana de Armas) to be his co-detective of sorts, well aware that she knows where the family’s metaphorical bodies are buried. One of the film’s slyest tricks lies in how she gradually turns into the main character, both as the next name on the killer’s to-do list and as an immigrant whose presence complicates the film’s theme of entitlement. Johnson set his sights on an “empathy-driven suspense”, in which the stakes are as simple as “here’s a person you like, they’re in danger, let’s all worry together whether they can get out of it or not.”
Beyond the thrills, one of Knives Out’s most entertaining elements is Craig’s purposely overripe performance. Benoit Blanc makes for a colourful addition to the Bond star’s repertoire, with his meandering country soliloquies about doughnut metaphors and deception, delivered in caramel tones. “Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and Columbo all have an eccentricity of some kind, and the problem was that, while I was writing, I wanted too many layers of eccentricity. It got ridiculous, like Poirot karaoke; Benoit [had] an eyepatch at one point. Eventually, I pulled it back and thought: ‘OK, he’s in New England, let’s give him a deep south accent to make him someone the Massachusetts Wasps can look down their noses at.’ Daniel brought the level of self-satisfaction that makes Benoit buffoonish, and what makes him work, more so than the accent.”
While commandeering the A-listers and gloss of a Hollywood production, Knives Out retains the idiosyncratic wit of Johnson’s well-loved indies. With humour and intelligence, he skirts every pitfall into which a lesser version of this film would have stumbled. While he takes his potshots at the blue bloods with conservative temperaments, he is adroit about exposing the ethical lapses in liberal pieties as well. “I’m not trying to ‘both-sides’ the argument,” Johnson clarifies. “At the same time, I fundamentally feel like – especially considering that I am, strictly speaking, a Hollywood liberal – it’s important in anything I’m doing to work on myself. To self-indict. If you’re touching on politics overtly, whenever you start finger-wagging at someone else for being the problem, you’ve also got to take a breath and a close look at yourself, too.”
If Johnson is taking that hard look in the mirror, he’s got ample cause to like what he sees. He may have more Star Wars work in his future; he is rumoured to be directing a new trilogy of films, although he claims, “I know as much about that as you all do.” For all the ire he received in its wake, he maintains that he had “ a wonderful time” on The Last Jedi, but admits to enjoying the refreshing pace of change in making Knives Out. “It felt good to make something fast and so dialogue-based. In the universe of Star Wars, you’re trying to say everything in as few words as possible. It felt good to shoot people in rooms talking. There’s something pleasurable about being low to the ground.”
And he is unlikely to stop at space operas and murder mysteries. He recalls chatting recently with his composer about trying his hand at a musical. It’s one of the few remaining genres that he has yet to turn inside out, having already left so many expertly mangled in his wake. “I’m just trying to make hay while the sun shines,” Johnson says. “I want to make as many movies as I can before they kick me out.”
Knives Out is in cinemas now
