Hollywood Q&A

Q: I heard Daniel Craig is going to be in a new Agatha Christie movie. Which story are they doing?

A: Rian Johnson can be a confusing guy to fans of classic literature. With his breakout debut, “Brick” (2005), he proved that he can make a tribute to a genre so faithfully you forget what you’re watching isn’t a classic itself. He seems poised to do that again with “Knives Out,” which is a tribute to Agatha Christie, not a rendition of Agatha Christie. “I’ve been a diehard Agatha Christie fan since I was a teenager,” Johnson said at this year’s CinemaCon, the official convention of the U.S. National Association of Theatre Owners. “’Knives Out’ was my attempt to take everything I love about a good Agatha Christie whodunnit, jam it into a movie with an all-star cast, give it a Hitchcock-thrillerlike twist, and set it in modernday America.”

Among those things he loves about a Christie story — and therefore reproduced in “Knives Out,” which he wrote and directed — are a claustrophobic, lockin setting (the murder suspects are all locked in an old mansion together), a group of suspects who are all blood-related to the victim, and a seemingly indifferent detective who is not taken seriously by the suspects he’s investigating.

This is where Craig comes in. He plays Benoit Blanc, who despite his French name is not a displaced European, like Christie’s beloved Hercule Poirot, but rather a displaced Southern Gentleman. He’s there to examine a star-studded cast of suspects including Michael Shannon, Jamie Lee Curtis and Chris Evans.

If it worries you that Johnson is working without source material, you can rest assured that he’s proven he knows his way around a murder mystery. The previously mentioned “Brick,” his first feature, was a critically and cultishly beloved tribute to the hard-boiled American mysteries of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

He even borrowed some of the slang for his characters to use (e.g. “bulls” for police, “shamus” for detective), despite the fact that the characters were modernday high-school students, which proves that he can effectively relocate such stories to a new setting.

Q: I’m a huge fan of the movie “The Transporter,” particularly for the visuals — the look of it. Where was it filmed?

A: The short answer is France, but you probably want more detail.

“The Transporter” (2002) is probably the best-known film from director/producer Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp production house, which is beloved by fans over here for producing American-style action films with a European sensibility. (It also has its detractors, who have called it a “Eurotrash action factory,” but we’re not talking about them right now.)

Part of that European feel has come from the clever decision to shoot them in Europe.

This is certainly true of “The Transporter,” about a former British special-forces tough guy living in France as a driver for hire to the high-end criminal community.

And he’s living well, as shown by the scenes at his house/villa/ miniature castle, the externals of which were filmed on location in the small town of Cassis on the French Riviera — the English term for the gorgeous and rich part of southeastern France that lies on the Mediterranean coast. Indeed, much of the film was shot in or near the French Riviera (known in French as the Côte d’Azur).

The opening car chase, in which he’s driving a group of robbers through claustrophobic urban streets, was shot in Nice, the largest city in the Riviera region. There were other locations in France as well. The highway car chase through mountainous terrain was shot in the D9 motorway west of Marseille, and parts of yet another car chase were shot in Paris.

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