KNIVES OUT
RIAN JOHNSON’S NEW MOVIE, Knives Out , IS A LOVE LETTER TO — AND JOHNSONIAN DECONSTRUCTION OF — A GENRE HE’S LOVED ALL HIS LIFE: THE MURDER MYSTERY. HERE, HE TELLS US HOWHEDUNNIT
Rian Johnson tells us how he planned the perfect murder, and would have got away with it if it hadn’t been for that meddling Empire.
THERE ARE CERTAIN things you need when making a murder mystery. A murder, ideally. A mystery, preferably. But that’s not all. As Rian Johnson found when he was writing and directing his latest movie, Knives Out, there are staples of a genre that stretches all the way back to the 1800s that must be incorporated; that help set a whodunnit apart from any other type of detective fiction. “When people say what’s a good whodunnit and start listing stuff, I’m like, ‘That’s more of a procedural, that’s more of a detective noir,’” says Johnson. “Whodunnit to me is much more specific than that. It’s a tricky genre to do, cinematically, because it has that basic weakness Hitchcock always talked about, where the whole thing hinges on one big surprise at the end. I came into it from a genre-tinkerer’s point of view. How do you approach the plot mechanics of a whodunnit in a way that can make it fresh and still give you all the pleasures of a good whodunnit?”
For anyone who’s seen Brick, Johnson’s spin on a film noir, or Looper, his time-travel twist, it won’t come as a surprise to learn that Knives Out both respectfully nods to, and then pulls the rug out from under, the whodunnit. We asked Johnson to tell us how he tinkered under the genre’s hood.
THE VICTIM
Knives Out hinges on one big question: who killed octogenarian Harlan Thrombey, and why? And is that technically two questions? We may never know the answer to that last one, but we can absolutely, definitively reveal right here, right now, that Rian Johnson killed Harlan Thrombey, officer. And he had a swell time doing so.
“I really had been thinking about it for the past ten years,” admits Johnson. And the evidence can be found, not on a wall chart in his office, liberally festooned with red string, but in a series of Moleskine notebooks. It’s in those that Johnson cooked up Harlan Thrombey’s demise, from the motive to the murder weapon and the identity of the murderer, or murderers. “I happen to have a brain that quite enjoys that puzzle-box aspect of it,” he says. “Keeping track of all the threads and timelines and everything, for me that’s fun. But every time on set an actor would come over to me, and I could tell they had a question, my heart would stop a little because I was terrified they would unravel the entire plot with the one thing
I hadn’t thought of.” That it didn’t happen, that nobody could tug at a loose thread, is perhaps disquieting. There’s a chance that Rian Johnson has cooked up the perfect murder.
Although the movie begins after Thrombey’s end, the fact that he’s played by Christopher Plummer should tip off even the Watsons in the audience that he won’t spend the entire running time as a corpse. And sure enough, through flashbacks, Johnson begins to shed some light on this mysterious figure. And here are the first signs of his tinkering. “Most often in mysteries, the person who’s going to get killed is sort of the bad guy for the first third of it, or doesn’t have that much to do in terms of the mechanics of what makes the story work,” he says. “That’s not necessarily the case with this one.”
As we meet Thrombey in flashbacks, Johnson paints the picture of a wise, often warmhearted old man, who’s made his family very rich indeed through his successful career as a murder-mystery author. “I thought it would be quite fun to give it a slight meta layer,” laughs Johnson. “That’s something that has a rich and deep tradition in whodunnits.”
That choice also allowed the director to have fun with another genre constant — the spooky old mansion, replete with tricked-out corridors,
fake doors and the like. “Sleuth, for me, was a big touchstone for that,” says Johnson of his murder house, which was mostly played by a real house just outside of Boston. “Clue, a little bit. Or Murder By Death. It’s kind of the classic murder-mystery mansion. In addition to all the fun, there has to be a slightly spooky element, a sense of dread that is lightly laced all through it.” It has to be the sort of grand, gothic, slightly grim mansion that has a library where, say, a master detective can gather a large group of suspects for a grand unveiling. Speaking of which…
THE SUSPECTS
If the question is, “Who killed Harlan Thrombey?”, then the answer lies in the coterie of cads that Johnson meticulously assembles, virtually all of them related to Thrombey, and virtually all of them equipped with a solid reason to help the old man shuffle off this mortal coil. “That’s something murder mysteries do quite well,” says Johnson. “Every single person has a different motive.”
So, we have Jamie Lee Curtis as Harlan’s hard-nosed daughter, Linda (“She has a strength, a control, an emotional connection to her father”), Michael Shannon playing against type as Harlan’s weak-willed son, Walt (“Seeing him play a character who’s a little more subservient is the opposite of what you think of when you think of Michael Shannon”), and Jaeden Martell as Jacob Thrombey, Harlan’s grandson who, not to put too fine a point on it, is something of a budding Nazi and internet troll extraordinaire. Which, Johnson claims, has nothing to do with his experiences at the hands of whingeing fanbabies after the release of his last movie, Star Wars: The Last Jedi. “Total coincidence,” he says with an admirably straight face. “That’s much more from being someone who lives in 2019 and is on the internet. It’s not unique to my experience. If Agatha Christie were writing today, she’d have a character who’s an internet troll. It’s about using this form to create a caricature of today. Also, it’s quite fun to write.”
There, we suspect, is largely the rub with Martell’s character; it’s hard not to sense Johnson’s glee as he skewers the type of incel edgelord who went after him with barely disguised, grammatically inept relish. And in rounding up the rest of his unusual suspects, most of whom are venal and vile, sniping and snarling at each other in an attempt to avoid blame, interested only in self-advancement, self-interest and the old man’s dough, he saw a chance to say something about the state of the world. Or, specifically, modern America. “I think any time you sit down to write something you better have something on your mind, something that you’re, for lack of a better way of saying, a little angry about,” says Johnson.
As a student of the genre, he knows that this isn’t new. “Agatha Christie never wrote
social-issue books, but she was writing in this kind of caricatured way about British society.” Not for nothing, he says, was Poirot a foreigner, an immigrant, having to battle negative preconceptions of his Belgian ways. Columbo, also an influence on Knives Out, was something of a class warrior, taking down the rich and entitled every week. “This isn’t a message movie,” adds Johnson, “but the idea of using this very entertaining form to present you with a slightly inflated caricature that you can hopefully take something from, the idea of doing that for America today is a big part of the appeal for me.”
Accordingly, Knives Out has more on its mind than who/where/why/when/how/whatdunnit. Although it’s been in Johnson’s head, and notebooks, for a decade, he only started to write it in January 2018, and it’s clearly a movie about Trump’s America. There are themes of racism, the treatment of immigrants, entitlement, greed, about the haves, the have nots and the really have nots. “It all happened mind-spinningly fast,” says Johnson. “That was a really nice thing, so I could take the structure I’d spent all this time working on and put all this stuff in there that felt very present and modern and today.”
It also allowed him to fulfil a dream he’d had ever since he fell in love with classic Peterustinov-is-hercule-poirot movies such as Evil Under The Sun or Death On The Nile as a kid. He didn’t intend to stuff Knives Out with wall-towall A-listers — it just kinda happened. “I would have thought it was absurd to get these people in the cast,” he laughs. “It’s wonderful to have a big cast of movie stars, because that’s part of the pleasure we’re going for.” In addition to the aforementioned actors, Johnson also attracted Ana de Armas as Harlan Thrombey’s nurse (“A very important character that has some very complicated things to do throughout the story”), Toni Collette as a self-satisfied hanger-on of sorts, and Chris Evans — Captain America himself — as Harlan’s grandson, the wonderfully named Ransom Drysdale, a role which requires Evans to go from playing America’s ass to America’s asshole. “It’s very fun writing a character where you can dig into the more obnoxious elements of their personality,” admits Johnson. The moment in the movie’s first trailer where Ransom invites several members of his family to “eat shit” nearly stopped the internet in its tracks. “I think the internet is made of tougher stuff,” laughs Johnson. “I wasn’t thinking about Ransom in terms of Captain America saying this stuff. I was excited to see Chris dig into this.”
In any other movie, Ransom would be the standout role, the showiest part, the shiniest jewel in a collection where every piece has been polished to within an inch of its life. In Knives Out, though, Ransom and the rest of the suspects must defer to one man: Benoit Blanc. Rian Johnson’s master detective.
THE DETECTIVE
If the question is, “Who killed Harlan Thrombey?”, then Johnson needed to create a character worthy of answering it. And if it hasn’t become abundantly clear already, he’s a man who knows his whodunnit onions. Or whodunnions, if you will. So, when he sat down to create a master detective who could crack the Thrombey case wide open, he did so all too aware of the ghosts of detectives past peering over his shoulder: the Marples, the Poirots, the Columbos, the Lord Peter Wimseys, the Dr Fells.
“I kinda drove myself nuts a little bit when I was coming up with this guy,” he admits. “I knew the function I needed him to have, I knew how the whole thing was going to play, but who he was was, honestly, very daunting.” Initially, Johnson wanted the character to have something that set him apart visually, like Poirot’s moustache, or Columbo’s cheap raincoat and green cigars. “What’s his tic? What’s his weird thing? That’s the wrong way to approach any character,” he says.
Eventually, he decided upon three things. One, his detective would be “Southern, in the midst of all these New England WASPS”. Two, he would be called Benoit Blanc, first name a tribute to the guy who’s been forlornly trying to teach Johnson French for the last dix ans, last
name… well, “It just rolled off the tongue.” But it might also have been Johnson’s subconscious telling him something. Because the third thing Johnson decided is that the character would only start to take shape when he found the right actor to fill in the Blanc. “I didn’t write it with anyone specifically in mind,” he says. “I’ve learned not to do that because you just inevitably get your heart broken when you do it. I try to write for the character, and when we get an actor in there we’re going to figure out what his trenchcoat is, so to speak.”
So he wrote for the character, and when he was done, Johnson figured that the best person to play Benoit Blanc was, of all people, James Bond. Or Daniel Craig, to be more specific.
“I love Daniel as Bond, and had seen some of the stage work he had done, and had seen the range he had, and how funny he could be. But we didn’t think he was available.”
He wasn’t. He was committed to No Time To Die. But then that film switched directors, pushed back production, and suddenly Craig had a window in his schedule. A window large enough to allow him to begin work on a character so striking and eccentric that one character dubs him “CSI: KFC”. “It didn’t become a person until Daniel got in there,” says Johnson. “He’s a very collaborative actor. We talked about the accent. I sent him some recordings of Shelby Foote, the historian, speaking, Daniel would record him doing stuff and send it back to me. But I didn’t know how big a swing he would take with it all.”
The result is an extremely funny character, whether it’s unsettling the Thrombeys during interrogations by playing a single note on a piano, or bopping along to songs on his ipod. “He has a speech about the hole in a doughnut, and I remember sitting behind the monitor with a massive smile on my face, thinking, ‘Okay, I think we have a movie,’” recalls Johnson. He’s unorthodox, eccentric, and should he be fortunate enough to assemble all the key players in the library for a grand recounting of the whole story, you can be sure that it won’t be your average common-or-garden murderer unveiling. “A certain version of that happens here,” admits Johnson. “For me, it scratches that itch. I don’t love watching my movies, but that chunk of this movie I will be able to sit down for any time, just seeing Daniel go to town.”
There are elements of great detectives prior in Benoit Blanc. “I think the Southern accent makes everyone underestimate him a bit,” says Johnson. “He can be very gentle, so you forget how sharp he is.” That’s pure Columbo. In other instances — his emotional connection to one of the chief suspects, for instance — Johnson hearkened back to classic Christie. “With Poirot, you’ll see a melancholy connection he sometimes makes to the characters, and a sadness at the thing that’s unravelling. There are moments in this where Daniel makes a connection that’s extremely effective.”
It’s that emotional connection that Johnson is striving for with Knives Out, all too aware that it could, if not careful, become a stylistic exercise in box-ticking. So there are unexpected wrinkles throughout. Red herrings all over the shop. It’s not always the film you might expect. “The best whodunnits figure out ways of keeping you hooked throughout,” he says. “I wanted to have my cake and eat it too, with all the pleasures of a whodunnit, but a dramatic structure a little closer to a Hitchcock thriller.” It’s an admirable ambition. And if you can’t put your trust in the man who killed Harlan Thrombey, who can you trust?
KNIVES OUT IS IN CINEMAS FROM 29 NOVEMBER