by This article contains mild spoilers for the film Knives out.
When I last spoke to filmmaker Rian Johnson, in 2019, he was two years removed from working on one of the world’s biggest franchises—Star Wars– and had quickly turned a smaller, quick-witted mystery-comedy set in wintry Massachusetts called Knives out. It was enough of a hit to start a new franchise around Daniel Craig’s tough detective, Benoit Blanc. Knives outits first sequel, Glass onionshit Netflix last Friday, and it’s guaranteed to be quite a contribution.
glass onion, which already had a limited run in theaters at the end of November, is a noisier, spookier film than its progenitor. It places Blanc on a Mediterranean island with billionaire tech industrialist Miles Bron (played by Edward Norton) and some of his closest “disturbing” friends as they play a murder mystery game. Of course, things are not as they seem – a real death occurs, and Blanc works to find the culprit. But as with Knives out, there are surprising layers to the story, much of it following Miles’ former friend and current rival, Cassandra Brand (Janelle Monáe). The film is a fun ride that rewards repeated viewings, but it’s also an angry work about the absurdity of the mega-rich, specifically set in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic.
Ahead of the film’s release, I spoke with Johnson at Netflix’s New York offices about dialing up the satire of the first film, the inherent paternalism of the mystery genre, and how Netflix provided Glass onions the company’s widest theatrical release ever.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
David Sims: What was the first idea with Glass onions?
Ryan Johnson: I think the first idea was the setting, the idea of doing a destination mystery.
Sims: Did you think the opposite Knives out? “We made cold, now let us warm; we made old money, now let’s make new money.”
Johnson: Less money, more attitude. First of all, there is a subgenre of whodunit that I love—Evil under the sun, Death on the Nile, The last of Sheila– the holiday mystery. I’ve recently been trying to dig up and see more and more. But there aren’t many of them. I think it has to be perceived as very popular to justify making a movie out of it.
Sims: But I’m a 30-year-old and I swear half my friends only watch shows about cops and detectives solving mysteries. It almost seems like the most reliable genre in media, and yet it is not a reliable cinema singer.
Johnson: It’s a tough genre to do. It’s very easy to mistakenly assume that the mystery is what people are interested in, that picking up clues and solving the mystery is going to keep people entertained. It will for about 20 minutes. You need the heart of a thriller; you need some kind of real story.
Sims: So you have an island idea. Was it the pandemic when you wrote? Have you always wanted the film set then?
Johnson: I wrote it in 2020, in the middle of lockdown. None of us knew where it would go. The March orders I gave myself were: This is a whodunit set in America right now.
Sims: What I love about Knives out is that Benoit is emotionally invested in what’s going on, which I feel is often not the case with this genre. IN Knives outhe walks into the room and says, “Well, [Ana de Armas’s character] did it.” But the game is more to him Why did she do it, and then finally, whether she was justified in doing it. And in Glass onionssomething like this also happens.
Johnson: It’s a fun challenge. It also requires something very important, namely that there is a protagonist who is not Blanc. Because he has a heart-to-heart connection with someone means there has to be someone the audience is going to like. It is important. There has to be a beating heart at the center of the film, and it can’t be Blanc looking for clues and solving the crime.
Sims: Did you write with certain actors in mind?
Johnson: It’s always tempting, but I really try not to. Because you always get your heart broken. Inevitably you write with someone in mind and they are not available. It’s probably healthier anyway, because then you’re just trying to create a character. Then I get together with my casting director and we figure out who is available and who will be fun in the role. One thing I am conscious of when writing is to play to the delight of the all-star cast. Knowing that we’re going after movie stars for each of these parts makes me work a little harder to make sure they all have something to do in the movie that warrants it.
Sims: Who surprised you the most?
Johnson: Dave Bautista. When I wrote [his character, a men’s-rights streamer named Duke Cody], I imagined a skinny guy trying to overcompensate. When Bautista was brought up, I was immediately so struck by the idea. I have been a very big fan of his dramatic chops as an actor.
Sims: Quietly the biggest switch-to-actor ever.
Johnson: I absolutely agree 100 percent. And I think some people like it [Paul Thomas Anderson] going to give him a real role and going to look like a genius. As a person, Bautista is genuinely, immediately vulnerable when you meet him, and that’s what I was excited about. This is someone who has the physicality of someone who would play it big, but he actually brings sensitivity to the role.
Sims: This film is, I would say, higher than Knives out. Most of the characters are pretty brassy. How do you find the balance between confidence and sheer idiocy? The characters can’t be complete jerks.
Johnson: Just casting [Edward Norton] in the part went a long way towards grounding it. On the page, the role is so big that he could afford to play it straight. I like that word, brassy. It’s like we use the brass section a bit more on this one. For me, I was a little nervous about it. But once I realized what this was supposed to be about, your voice naturally raises a few decibels.
Sims: Daniel Craig has so much control over [Benoit] in ways that surprise me, because he’s such a big, broad, stupid character.
Johnson: And on a second viewing it becomes clearer in some situations why he is big and absurd. There is always a method to the madness.
Sims: With the Miles Bron character, did you think of Elon Musk in particular? He reminds me a lot of Musk, but Musk is clearly on my brain.
Johnson: He was in the cloud of people it was about. But you have to think that back in 2020, all the current unpleasantness was far away. And also, I found very quickly that it got really boring if I started thinking too specifically about someone. What our interesting was our strange relationship in American society to [these kinds of people], where we want to hate them, but we also kind of want to believe they’re Willy Wonka. The very American, natural instinct to mistake wealth for wisdom and competence.
Sims: The best line in the movie is Benoit saying to Kate Hudson’s character [a fashion designer named Birdie], “It’s a dangerous thing to mistake mindless speech for speaking the truth,” and her reply, “Are you calling me dangerous?” You illustrate the voice that certain people present to society.
Johnson: The whole film, to me, is a bit of a primal scream against the carnival-like idiocy of the last six years.
Sims: Do you think it’s an angrier movie than Knives out?
Johnson: I think it’s definitely an angrier movie, at least for me. I hope the experience of watching it doesn’t feel like an angry, hateful thing. But it definitely comes from a place where you just want to scream about a lot of things.
Sims: Mystery films, and films about detectives and police, can feel a bit easy. People get rightly frustrated these days with the conclusion of “The sirens are going; he is about to be taken away; great, problem solved.”
Johnson: However, it gets to the heart of the genre. It is a mainly conservative genre. Chaos ensues, and then the father detective finds the truth and solves it all. Look at the periods in which this genre has increased in popularity, the golden age of detective fiction, which peaked in the 1930s during the rise of Hitler and the uncertainty of the world. You look today, and the genre is having a bit of a resurgence—just when the whole concept of a truth that, once revealed, sets everything right is being shaken to its foundations.
Sims: I think people long for endings. I love endings and often, in our current culture, things cannot end; stories must tease the next. And I know you’ll be making another one of these. You are part of the problem.
Johnson: I have tried hard to make them independent. Honestly, I’m pissed off that we have it A knife-out mystery in the title. You know? I just want it to be called Glass onions. I get that, and I want everyone who enjoyed the first movie to know that this is the next in the series, but also that the whole appeal to me is that it’s a new novel off the shelf every time. But there is a gravity of a thousand suns against serialized storytelling.
Sims: When you wrote Knives out basically you had just made one Star Wars film; you had made episode eight in a series that will probably never end. Did you feel like getting away from it, or did you immediately think that you could do a bunch of [Benoit Blanc mysteries]?
Johnson: See, when it applies Star Wars the film I did, I tried to give it a hellish ending. I love endings so much that I tried to give it an ending even in the middle chapter of the trilogy. A good ending that recontextualizes everything that came before it and makes it a beautiful object unto itself – that’s what makes a movie a movie. It feels like there is less and less of it. This whole toxic idea of creating [intellectual property] has completely seeped into the bedrock of storytelling. Everyone just thinks, How do we continue to milk it? I love an ending where you burn the viking boat in the sea.
Sims: Your film is coming to cinemas, which I am very happy about. But I would have liked to see it in theaters longer.
Johnson: I would like to have it [in theaters] further; I would have liked to see it in more theaters. But I also appreciate that Netflix has done this, because this was a huge effort on their part, and the theater chains, to reach across the aisle and make this happen. I hope it goes very well so that we can demonstrate that they can complement each other.
Sims: I like watching movies at home. But you and I both know it’s not the same.
Johnson: It’s not about the size of the picture, or the sound, or the sanctity of the room, or the magic of the cinema, or whatever the hell it is. It’s about having a crowd of people around you who laugh and react. Because these movies are made for it.
