KNIVES OUT
RIAN JOHNSON reveals the secrets of his Knives Out master detective, Benoit Blanc
Rian Johnson fills in Benoit Blanc’s doughnut.
COUNT YOUR LUCKY stars that you weren’t hanging around the Empire office late last year. Because, for a couple of weeks in the run-up to Christmas, Benoit Blanc was everywhere. Every conversation, every bit of throwaway badinage had a Blanc reference or quote in there somewhere. And you couldn’t move for impressions; bad take-offs of Daniel Craig drawling, “I suspect foul play,” or, “I have eliminated no suspects,” or, most fun of all to say, “I am a passive observer of the truth.”
All of which echoed the rest of the world’s reaction to the master detective created by Rian Johnson for his wonderful whodunnit, Knives Out. Johnson made no bones, from the off, about his desire to create a cinematic case-cracker to rival Poirot, and in the shape of Craig’s eccentric, Sondheim-loving, brilliant private eye, who solves the murder of a successful New Englandbased mystery writer, he succeeded so spectacularly that he’s already hard at work on a sequel. And when we sat down with Johnson recently, we decided to become passive observers of the truth behind Benoit Blanc…
People have wholeheartedly taken to Benoit Blanc. Has that taken you by surprise?
You always hope people are going to respond. But I sat there, watching Daniel do it, and we all, on set, had our own mini-version of that reaction. So I’m not that surprised. Even seeing him in the moment do this character was pretty infectious. Daniel is so charming, and I think the key to it is not just a funny accent, but that he’s bringing real humanity to the part. I remember when I showed the movie to my buddy, Noah Segan, who’s Trooper Wagner, he said, “He’s a real person.” He’s so big and goofy and yet, at the end of the movie, he feels like a real person that you kind of trust. There’s something that feels really nice about that, I think.
His relationship with Ana de Armas’ Marta is very much the heart of the movie.
The only way that’s really satisfying is if you’ve started with the opposite. In the beginning of the movie, Blanc is basically the antagonist. The reality is, even though you like him, there’s that tension of he’s the one who’s going to have to catch Marta at the end. And you’re kind of worrying that he will catch her. Hopefully that makes it more satisfying at the end when you get to have your cake and eat it too.
Or your doughnut. Precisely.
Where did his voice come from? I don’t mean the accent, but the way he talks. His doughnut analogy is so gloriously convoluted, for instance.
I wrote in a manner that I thought was pretty straightforward. I had a little bit of fun with his sense of self-inflation. You can tell he likes the sound of his own voice. Other than that, I approached him in a fairly straightforward
way according to the needs of the story and figured whoever I would cast in the part, by nature of their personality, would end up defining the character. It’s not like we did a bunch of improv — we basically shot what was written, but Daniel really did create that character through the way he embodied him.
So the doughnut speech, where Blanc explains the mystery via an over-elaborate metaphor, was on the page?
It was. I almost cut it, actually. I thought, “This is kind of goofy.” I wanted it to be something where the detective does one of those belaboured metaphors about the case, which doesn’t really make any sense. You see that pop up in detective fiction. And also, to define the notion that there’s still a piece missing. It was funny on the page, but I remember telling Daniel that it was kind of goofy, and he told me, “Leave that in, I’d like to try that.” On set, I was feeling like, thank God we left that in.
Did it take a while to make that speech make sense? There are so many holes to keep track of.
The weird thing is, it does make sense. Essentially what he’s talking about is we, the audience, know that the hole that’s missing is Marta’s story, that we’ve seen, so we think we know what goes in the middle of the doughnut. But the hole in the doughnut is the Ransom [Chris Evans] part of it. That’s what he uncovers at the end. It does describe the plot, in a weird way. The whole time we’re waiting to see if Blanc is going to figure out this missing piece that we know, but we don’t know that there’s a piece missing from the piece that we know. It’s actually a pretty economical way of describing it.
What about the first time you saw and heard him as Blanc on set, on day one?
The very first thing we shot was a tiny little scene up in Harlan’s [Christopher Plummer] study, when Marta and Trooper Wagner are watching him search the study, and he flips the Go board over, and Ransom comes in. It was kind of a little, no-pressure scene. But the first big unveiling, the first moment when the rest of the cast got to see him doing the accent, was the moment when he steps forward and stops Marta from telling the truth, and calls them a bunch of vultures at the feast, with their knives out. None of the other actors had heard him do the voice. All of them were there, behind the camera. It was a great unveiling. It was pretty fun.
So he didn’t do it in rehearsal?
For that moment, we wanted when we were rolling for that to be the first time they saw it, so we didn’t do full performance.
As the creator of this character, what was it like for you watching him come to life?
So much fun. Daniel gives my favourite type of performance, which is a performance that is huge and still feels like a person. That’s why what Noah said coming out of that screening made me happy. With this, we wanted to land it as an actual movie and that meant having characters who are larger than life, but they still have to work. Seeing Daniel pull that off, with that accent and this bigger performance, it takes an actor of exceptional skill to do that.
What sort of conversations did you have with him about his backstory? We don’t get to know much about him, other than that he was profiled in The New Yorker.
It’s a genre where the detective gets to be the central figure and the one you walk away from the movie remembering, yet he plays a very supportive role in terms of the arc you’re actually following. We talked about the references of not just Agatha Christie’s books, but the movies of hers that I grew up watching, and he did too. He got it very quickly, so there was no real reason to do a deep dive into, “Where did he go to school?” Daniel may have come up with that stuff on his own, but the answer is who he is, on the page. If Daniel had needed more, I’d have supplied it, but that’s all you really need.
But he’s clearly a big noise. He’s well-known. He’s renowned. He’s been profiled in The New Yorker.
That’s part of the fun of it. Poirot had that element of celebrity to him, and I enjoy that. I enjoy how he’s aware of that. That’s kind of delicious, especially when you have someone with the movie-star charisma that Daniel has. He could do the schlubby outsider, but it felt more fun to me to make Daniel Craig be this kind of guy that everybody is a little excited to be in the room with, until the case starts grinding on and they get more and more annoyed with him. Eventually Don Johnson is saying, “You’re full of shit.”
That was the origin of the Southern accent, actually. It was, “Okay, this is going to be set in New England, amongst all upper-crust WASPS.” And giving him a Southern accent makes him a fish out of water, in a way. You might expect these folks to underestimate him.
New Yorker
That’s a very sly reference to one of my favourite movies, which is the 1970s version of Sleuth.
In the beginning, the character of Andrew, who’s played by Laurence Olivier, is a mystery writer dictating into a tape recorder the ending of his current novel, ‘Death By Double-fault’, which describes how a body was discovered in a tennis court.
Jenny Eagan is our costume designer, and we spent a lot of time talking about Blanc. Everybody else in the family, we had a handle to grab onto.
Blanc could be anything. And I more and more liked the idea of him dressing in very comfortable, worn-in tweed fabrics. It doesn’t really come across, but the idea is that his jacket has these big pockets that he uses. It’s like Mary Poppins’ bag. He can pull anything out of those pockets. He feels soft and comfortable and at the same time he’s formidable and a welcoming presence. He wore a tie because he’s got a police background, so he fits in with Trooper Wagner and Detective Elliott [Lakeith Stanfield]. I loved that Daniel’s thing was rolling up his sleeves and tucking his tie into his shirt in the end. That’s something Daniel wanted to do. I don’t know where it came from.
His purpose never changed. I went through about 22 revisions of the script. That’s not page-one rewrites. But his purpose didn’t change. I was refining his character throughout the whole thing. I wasn’t sure who he was going to be. It was almost like a TBD slot in terms of ‘the eccentric detective goes here’. I had Poirot on my brain, and I went down the very unhelpful route of coming up with all these quirks. It got ridiculous and kind of stupid. That’s when I ended up throwing all that out, and trying to write him a little more straightforward.
I think the goofball element is important. A certain amount of humour and clownishness to me was really important to the character. I think it makes the audience like him more if he’s not this serious, badass detective. He’s really silly but also good at his job. But it’s just fun. I was listening to Follies a lot when I was writing, and that song was in my head. And also, he’s kind of losing his mind because he can’t really figure out the case.
That was in the script, but different. He was originally tapping the back of Elliott’s chair with his foot. I realised when we started blocking it on the day that it wasn’t going to work because of the geography of the room. And there was a piano in the room, and so I told Daniel to play this piano key instead of tapping.
By quirks, I mean eyepatches. I mean stupid stuff. There’s a good reason it’s not in there.
KNIVES OUT IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD