For your reading pleasure, please enjoy this free excerpt from our interview with Rian Johnson about his new mystery Glass Onion from Backstory Magazine’s issue 48 – now available to read! If you enjoy what you’ve read, we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the issue by subscribing to Backstory Magazine!
Writer/director Rian Johnson walks us through the twists, turns and writing choices that make up his latest murder mystery.
By Danny Munso
Rian Johnson officially has a franchise on his hands. What began as a mid-budget murder mystery—2019’s Knives Out—has transformed into something of a phenomenon. The first film made over $300 million worldwide, garnered Johnson Oscar and WGA nominations for Best Original Screenplay and became something of an anomaly in Hollywood: a hit not based on existing material. Johnson always planned to do more stand-alone mysteries in this universe, and he and star Daniel Craig—who plays the southern detective Benoit Blanc—immediately signed on to do two more in a record deal with Netflix for over $400 million. The first film in that deal—Glass Onion—became one of Netflix’s 10 most watched films in its first two weeks of release, and Johnson seems headed for more screenplay nominations this awards season. In a sit-down with Backstory, Johnson reflects on the writing of Glass Onion and notes he’s in the early stages of writing the series’ third film, teasing that the beginning of the process is exactly the same as for the first two. “It always starts with a cloud of things,” he says cryptically.
For Glass Onion, that began with a setting, Johnson again taking inspiration from some his favorite murder-mystery films: the 1978 version of Death on the Nile and 1982’s Evil Under the Sun—both adaptations of Agatha Christie novels—and, most prominently, 1973’s The Last of Sheila, a film publicly championed often by Johnson and penned by the unlikely duo of Psycho star Anthony Perkins and one of Johnson’s writing idols, theater legend Stephen Sondheim. “I knew I wanted to do a tropical vacation mystery,” he says. “That was to set it apart from the first [film] but also because I loved those movies and it seemed like the right place to take it.” With a locale in place, Johnson jots down handwritten ideas as story and character possibilities slowly start to form. “I was thinking about a group of people out on this vacation and isolated together. The notion of it being a group of friends immediately made sense. And that leads to the question, Who’s at the top of the power pyramid of this friendship. The notion of a tech billionaire came at some point, so all those things were floating around but the reality is the gears didn’t start turning until the basic structural gambit of the movie came to me. That was really the starting point.”
As viewers know, Glass Onion is hiding a big secret in plain sight throughout the first hour of its 139-minute runtime, which sees Blanc invited to a murder-mystery weekend getaway planned by billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) for his close group of friends, who are shocked not only by Blanc’s inclusion but that of their old friend Andi Brand (Janelle Monáe), Miles’ former business partner whom he unjustly ousted from their tech company, Alpha. But at the halfway point, after one member of the group—alt-right streamer Duke Cody (Dave Bautista)—turns up dead, Johnson plays his trump card. The character we knew as Andi is actually identical twin sister Helen. She’s the one who invited Blanc to tag along, and the two are secretly trying to solve another crime: Andi’s murder, which hasn’t yet been made public and which they suspect one of the friends committed. Right after the murder, Glass Onion essentially hits pause and then flashes back to show us Helen and Blanc meeting, before heading to the island where we revisit scenes from the film’s first hour with a different perception of the material. This bold idea came to Johnson very early in the writing process. “It was when I was juggling that cloud of ideas,” he says. “I was looking for the fishhook that was going to grab it and propel it forward—this notion of showing the first half of the movie and doing a reset. You show the exact same story again in the second half but from a different perspective. Everything else stemmed from that decision.”
Rian directing Daniel Craig on set
The writer wants to make one thing completely clear: He did not initially want to do the twins twist. For him, the story simply dictated that was the direction in which he had to go. “Once I realized, Oh, God, I’m going to have to do twins, I said, Shit,” he laughs. “Just because if it’s handled incorrectly, it can be an eye-rolling trope. What gave me confidence to go, Fuck it, let’s try it, was the reason I was coming to that decision was not to do a big twist at the end but because the story required it. What we really needed is essentially a new character you can immediately invest in and care about that draws you in even deeper in that second half, so the audience now has skin in the game with somebody. But it obviously wouldn’t work to introduce a new character in the second half, because how could they have been around in the first half? So it needed to be someone who was there already. All of that led to the inevitable conclusion of, Okay, this person is not who we thought they were.”
Johnson made an unprecedented storytelling gamble by essentially not introducing the film’s protagonist until well over an hour into the film. While she has been there onscreen, the audience can’t fully invest in Helen until we know not only her true identity but her drive to get her sister the justice she deserves. “It all stemmed from the challenge of after you do the story once, when you reset and get back to telling it again, how do you keep the audience engaged and keep their shoulders from sagging? The answer to that was to emotionally engage them on another level. It couldn’t just be an intellectual thing, where you’re seeing things from a different perspective. It’s used as something to further engage you at the midpoint as opposed to surprise you. It’s not a gotcha. In that way, my hope was instead of alienating the audience, it brings them onto the team.” That decision would obviously have major repercussions for how the second half of the film played out, ones that presented the writer with major challenges in the first half as well. Unlike Knives Out, which delivered a phenomenal lead character—Ana de Armas’ unable-to-lie caretaker Marta—right from the start, Glass Onion would have no such character for a lot of screen time. “It became tricky,” he adds. “It’s asking the audience a lot to go through the first half of the movie without anyone to really root for. So there were a couple things I leaned into to try and mitigate that—first and foremost was Blanc. The reason Blanc is more of a central character in this film is because I needed him to be, especially in that first half. I needed somebody the audience likes to introduce and guide them through it, because we were waiting for Helen. So, knowing that I was going to have Daniel and the audience would know Blanc from the first movie, I very much leaned on that in the first half.”
The second thing Johnson relied on was the fact that the audience is already anticipating a murder, due to not only the success of Knives Out but because it is inherent in the genre itself. That gave him the confidence to stage his big murder scene over an hour into the film. “The genre is so defined, and there’s a definite promise that there’s going to be a murder and there’s going to be a mystery,” he says. “So I think you are given a grace period from the audience. They’ll stick with you because they know the promise is on the table. I went back and looked at Death on the Nile, which is one of my favorite whodunit films, and I was very relieved the murder doesn’t happen until about an hour into that movie as well. I think it’s similar with Sheila. That’s something I was really leaning and counting on. The audience will wait and see what’s going to grab them.” Because while Blanc is the connective tissue that unites the two films—as well as the future ones—he is not the protagonist of either movie. Though he enlists both Marta and Helen to assist him in solving the case, his role in each film is very different. “Part of what defines his relationship to them is figuring out what Blanc is to both of them. In [Glass Onion], he actually becomes a sidekick to Helen. It’s almost like a buddy movie. But in the first one, just in terms of storytelling terms, he was the antagonist. He’s the one the audience thought was going to catch Marta, and that drove your concern for most of the movie.”
Rian’s hand-written outline of the film’s first half, exclusive to Backstory
While we are given very little information about Blanc in Knives Out besides being told about his fame as an investigator, Glass Onion shows us a little more of the character—but only to a point. We do meet his partner, Phillip (Hugh Grant in a cameo), and discover Blanc has been missing solving cases, which have been put on hold due to the COVID pandemic. But that is as much as Johnson will give away. “The element I do try and refine going forward with each movie is his attitude toward the work and toward the case,” he says. “Discovering, for example, that he has to have a moral center and his code as he solves these things—that’s the extent to which I figure him out as a character. I don’t sit down and write out where he went to school or how he became a detective. But if Daniel needed that, I would do that for him. The reality is I don’t think that’s interesting. To me, it’s important to write these movies as mysteries, and that means the detective is interesting [simply] because of what he does to solve the case.” This is part of Johnson’s brilliance. Choosing to not reveal much about Blanc could lead to the films being cold, no matter how interesting or intricately their mysteries are plotted out. The emotion and investment on the audience’s part actually come from its leading women, and that will not be changing moving forward. “Knowing that I’m hopefully going to be continuing to make these, I want to avoid my least favorite thing in franchise movies, which is the layering on of mythology and backstory: You meet his dad or you meet his uncle or you meet his whatever. To me, that’s the least interesting thing about Blanc. I want each one of these things to be like a fresh scoop of sorbet, where you don’t have to remember anything about Blanc’s backstory.”
What separates Johnson’s murder mysteries from others in the genre is the uniqueness of the details. Even though the conceit is a well-worn one, the sheer originality of this writer’s stories shines through. A handful of those details extended beyond the writing process into the editing room, where a few of the film’s highlights were either added or saved from the chopping block. During the movie’s big murder—a sprawling scene featuring nine characters all in a room talking—he brilliantly infuses tension from an unlikely source: the Mona Lisa. As viewers know, Miles has purchased the painting on loan from the Louvre, who needed extra cash flow during the pandemic. The priceless work came with security—a glass case that immediately slams shut at the first sign of fire. However, it’s ultra-sensitive and goes off fairly often, so in the moments leading up to the murder, we hear the amplified slams of the glass from the case over and over, heightening an already edgy moment. “Not only was that not scripted, but it wasn’t in the initial cuts of the movie,” Johnson says. “That was a late add. Once we got that scene cut together, I started to realize the tension that scene was creating for people, and I got excited by that. A buddy of mine made some reference tension-wise to the firecracker [drug deal] scene in Boogie Nights, and that got me thinking maybe we could lean into that even more.” The film’s second unit had extra shots of the Mona Lisa they took for coverage purposes that went unused but were suddenly needed, as Johnson frequently jump-cuts to the painting in the scene and that, along with the loud sound effect, creates a memorable moment. “The scene was working great, but I just thought it would give the scene a little more something.”
Another grit-your-teeth moment is seemingly small, but it got some of the biggest audience reactions in Glass Onion’s one-week theatrical run in November. Helen gets shot around the film’s midpoint, and the bullet hits her sister’s diary instead of her. Blanc wants her to play dead so she can snoop around undetected, and to sell this, he douses her with hot sauce provided to them earlier by Miles—sauce sponsored by actor Jeremy Renner. As Helen lies on the ground so the rest of the group can see her body before Blanc moves them inside, Johnson zooms in on a small drop of sauce slowly inching toward her nose. If it connects, she won’t be able to keep from blowing her cover. In a movie with multiple homicides, somehow this becomes the most anxious point, and it nearly didn’t make it in. “I almost cut it,” Johnson admits. “I really, really almost cut it. I had no idea it was going to get that kind of reaction. We had been showing the movie to friends and family in groups of five or six people, and it never got the reaction. I wasn’t sure it worked. I left it in for the first [full] preview screening, and the audience had a big reaction. Thank God I left that in.”
Not everything survived the edit, though. An entire runner involving Helen and her children was removed from the film. In the final cut, the audience is never even told she has kids. But Johnson penned and shot a comedic subplot that saw one of Helen’s daughters repeatedly call her on the island—usually in the tensest moments—because the daughter’s stool had turned blue after eating too many blueberry Pop-Tarts, and she was getting worried. “It took some really tricky editing to excise it from the movie, actually,” he says. “It was funny to see Helen trying to solve the case and then ducking behind something to talk to her kid. But it was entirely a pacing thing. Once we started the train going, I realized momentum-wise we had to keep going and solve the case.” He originally had those moments in the script to round out Helen’s character and gain her more equity with the audience, who needed to root for her. In editing, Johnson discovered it wasn’t needed. “I wanted to draw the audience into Helen’s character even more and get them on her side, but once I realized Janelle had done such a good job, it was something we could slice out.” The scenes will still see the light of the day at some point as Johnson and Netflix have already had discussions about how to get those and other deleted moments released.
Though Johnson is at work on the third film in the Knives Out franchise, it is not his next project. January 26 will see the release on Peacock of Poker Face—the first television series he created—which will drop the first 4 of its 10 episodes and then roll out the remainder weekly. The show is a murder-mystery case-of-the-week starring Natasha Lyonne as card sharp Charlie Cale but chock-full of celebrity guest appearances. While pitching the series, Johnson says he drew eyebrows for not wanting to do a serialized television show where the episodes are interconnected. And though he promises we’ll know more about Charlie than we ever will about Benoit Blanc, he is quick to point out that Poker Faceand the Blanc films share something at their core about the type of stories they are trying to tell. “There were conversations at the beginning of [Poker Face] on what was the arc of her character over the course of a season, and my approach was she has an arc over each episode,” he recalls. “I remember sitting in front of the TV and watching shows growing up like Magnum P.I. or Columbo or what-have-you. They would run them out of order and totally scattered. But because there was a little emotional arc to each episode, your brain does this stitching thing, and the more you watched, the more it felt like the character was growing. [Blanc and Charlie] are defined by their actions, and their actions are solving the mystery. So to me that means what’s most interesting in both the movie and the show is solving the case.”
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