KNIVES OUT
Writer/director Rian Johnson has assembled an A-list cast for Knives Out, a deviously entertaining mystery that'd make Agatha Christie proud. Here, in his own words, Johnson tells Total Film about plotting a murder... AS TOLD TO DAMON WISE
We suspect Rian Johnson with the typewriter in the ominous family mansion.
Knives Out was inspired by one of my earliest memories, of seeing Agatha Christie novels on my parents’ bookshelves. It’s kind of a deep, primal memory, because those covers always looked vaguely scary, and that’s something that always stuck with me. When I was older, I moved on to the movie adaptations, and the ones that I watched the most were those with Peter Ustinov as the detective Hercule Poirot, like the original Death On The Nile, or Evil Under The Sun. Those were on cable TV over and over, in the days when I would just sit and watch cable TV all day. If there’s an example of anything that Knives Out most tries to emulate, it’s the tone and the feel and the fun of those movies specifically.
By that I mean there’s a seductive combination of two things. First, there’s the puzzle box element of it: the fact that when you sit down to watch one of these movies, you’re sitting down to a game
– a game with well-defined rules and a game where you know the author’s going to try to trick you, and you’re probably going to get tricked, and that’s part of the deal. It’s like watching close magic. But then you combine that with the fact that, despite all the elaborate plot machinations, the whodunnit is essentially a character-based genre, and the real enjoyment is in these big, often on-the-verge-of-caricature characters who populate these stories, either as suspects or as the detective. For me, the perfect whodunnit is a combo of those two things, but the best ones always add a combination of self-awareness and creepiness: there’s always a dark shadow hanging over the proceedings.
When I started writing it, I zoomed way back to the basics. I was thinking purely in terms of genre mechanics.
I love whodunnits, but I also do kind of agree with Mr. Alfred Hitchcock, in that all too often a whodunnit is just a big build-up to a big surprise at the end. The idea was to figure out how to give the movie an engine that was something beyond just a collection of clues and the mulling-over of suspects, but which still had all the pleasures and the payoffs of what I love about whodunnits. Once
I had that, I began to dig a little deeper, and that’s when I came up with the actual story. I usually don’t start with the characters. I start with a story, and then I find that the characters kind of form themselves according to the needs of the plot. The very last step was figuring out who the murder victim would be. Who was Harlan Thrombey? It made sense, for all sorts of reasons, that he was a famous mystery novelist, and that his death would start an epic family battle over his fortune.
NEED FOR SPEED
After a long period of gestation, I started piecing it all together, and when I actually sat down to write it, it came really fast for me. I wrote it in about six months. In fact, it all happened very, very quickly – I started writing in January of 2018, we had a script that was ready to read in June, and we’d wrapped the movie by Christmas. This surprising turn of events was all really triggered by Daniel Craig. I’d had my eye on him very early on for the part of Benoit Blanc, the detective, but he was busy doing Bond. But then Bond was pushed back, and he had this window. His people said, ‘He can do it, but you have to be filming in six weeks.’ So we
jumped on it, and the rest of the cast came together very quickly.
It was always my intention to have a big, starry cast, and that, again, goes back to those early ’80s, late ’70s whodunnits that I love so much – they were big, all-star spectacles, and for every actor who shows up on screen, there was always that moment of, ‘Hey, look who it is!’ whether it’s Bette Davis, or James Mason, or David Niven. That was always part of the fun of it, for me, if only because the opportunity to work with a crop of actors this big and this talented seemed like an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. And getting them was also surprisingly easy – one of the advantages of doing a whodunnit is that everybody knows what they’re getting into, because what’s appealing about it as a viewer is also what’s appealing to an actor who’s reading your script. They get it. And so the one question that I had to talk to everybody about was tone. How big could we go with this? Fortunately, everyone was happy to hear that we weren’t remaking the 1985 Cluedo spoof Clue. I mean, I love that movie, but we were not doing a parody of a whodunnit, we were going to play this straight. These characters are larger than life and they were going to be right on the edge of caricature, but it was important that however big we went with them, they were still grounded and we were telling a story that was actually a story and not just a payoff.
character assassination
Because of that, I knew the character of Marta, Harlan Thrombey’s private nurse and confidante, would be incredibly central to the whole thing. Marta – arguably – holds the whole movie together, and it was a very hard part to cast. On one hand, that character has to feel like they’re of a piece with all these other huge performances from this massive group of movie stars. But on the other hand, they have to be the grounding device, the emotional touchpoint, that we connect with. We got really, really lucky finding Ana de Armas. There were some absolutely fantastic actors in the mix, and it was the one part that we really did a casting process for. For everybody else, it was just, ‘Wow, Jamie Lee Curtis is in? Don Johnson? Christopher Plummer? Toni Collette? Michael Shannon? Chris Evans…?’
Marta is important for a number of other reasons too. Now, Agatha Christie was not a political writer. She wasn’t a socially active writer, or a social activist writer, at all. Her books are not message-y, and I didn’t want this movie to be either. But what they do do is they engage with the culture that they’re in. And if you read her books, all of her characters are types from British society at the time that everyone reading her work would have been familiar with, and they would have read the stories and chuckled at them. So, to me, if we were going to take a murder-mystery and set it in America in 2019, it was very important that we didn’t just skin it with the modern-day world, but that we did what Agatha Christie did and actually try to use it to engage with some of the character types that we’re experiencing today. And so that means if we’re telling a story about a family, they’re going to be arguing about the kind of stuff that we’re all arguing about with our families when we go home, and that’s going to have a political element. And, as an
"WOW THIS IS PRETTY SPECIAL" rian johnson
immigrant, Marta plays an integral part on several different levels. It’s fair to say that the family are jealous of her and her relationship with Harlan, because she’s closer to him than his own flesh and blood.
We shot the film in Massachusetts, just south of Boston, during the winter. So it was cold. Freezing cold. But on set, the biggest problem that we were constantly figuring out was tone. In terms of the performances, that meant how big everyone would go, and one of the main advantages of having actors of this calibre is that they can push it really far. They can make it big and still have it feel human. That’s always my favourite kind of performance: the type that swings for the fences but still connects with the ball. So on set it was all about dialling it up or dialling it down. The other thing was that, obviously, the script is kind of a jigsaw puzzle, so if we were doing a scene and the actors were confused in terms of the information that was being communicated in that scene, I would make adjustments. It’s obvious, really: if the actors don’t understand it, the audience certainly won’t.
Honestly, though, the biggest challenge for me was trying to block a scene with so many people, figuring out where everybody sits and where to put the camera and how to cover it without spending all day getting close-ups of everybody. But in terms of working with the group, there were none of the usual clichés. Everyone got along. They all had a good time on set. It wasn’t like everyone getting together and there were clashing egos. That didn’t happen. Everybody was there to play. And when you got them all together in a scene, they just had so much fun, riffing off each other, and yelling at each other, and playing off each other. The most fun days were the ones where we had scenes of the whole family together.
The thing I think I’ll remember most about the shoot is that, because we shot the lion’s share of the movie in the actual house that you see in the opening shot, the actors wouldn’t go back to their trailers. They’d all just go downstairs into this kind of basement rec room that we had set up as our green room and they’d all just hang out. I remember going down and there being a dozen movie stars sitting around this little game room in the basement of this New England house, just trading stories and laughing. I wish I could’ve just hung out down there all day long. That image made me realise, ‘Wow, this is pretty special.’
party time
We shot for 35 days, through October and November, and we wrapped just before Christmas.
For the wrap party we went to a bar in Boston and everybody got together for a drink. It went way late into the night, and then a few of us ended up back at Daniel’s place and got even drunker. It was really fun. I mean, again, it’s the stupid, clichéd thing that everyone says in every interview about every movie ever made, but it happened to be true on this one: we all just had a great time making it. I like to think the wrap party was genuinely just a party, with a bunch of people who liked each other getting to hang out.
The edit was surprisingly easy too. You always find the film, to some degree, in the edit room. But although my editor Bob Ducsay and I did put a ton of work in, by stripping out anything that didn’t need to be there, I’d say we did the least amount of big-picture tinkering with this one than on any movie we’ve ever done. It snapped together and found itself very quickly, and from then it was just a matter of fine-tuning and making it better.
After that, we tested it, which was really interesting. I’ve always hated testing movies, but then when we were making The Last Jedi – which we couldn’t test, for obvious reasons, because of secrecy – I began to think, ‘God, it’d be really nice to test this movie and see how it plays.’ So we did three tests, one in Orange County in California, then a couple in the middle of Texas, kind of outside of Dallas. It was really nice to see it play with a crowd who were just showing up for a free movie. Not a Hollywood crowd or a
festival crowd. I mean, I love festival crowds, but to see it and see it with a normal crowd felt really encouraging.
We didn’t know what to expect, but it tested incredibly well. I guess that sounds maybe like bragging, but I was surprised. I guess you’re always surprised when there’s a positive outcome to something you’re nervous about. But I think the thing that was the biggest revelation for us, watching it with the crowd, was how much people dug the humour. You could feel, at the very beginning, that they were kind of a little tentative, but once they realised they had permission to laugh, the whole thing just opened up. Seeing it play with a crowd like that was like playing the Hasbro game Mouse Trap – you’ve built your elaborate mousetrap, and then you start the marble rolling, and you hold your breath as the marble clicks and clacks its way down. And I thought, ‘This thing works. We have something here.’
The funny thing is, it’s not like I was thirsting for something I didn’t get from Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It’s not like I was dying to get back to something that was – quote unquote – mine. If anything, the fun of this was writing large amounts of verbose dialogue, which is something you don’t do on Star Wars movies. I got to indulge myself on this, and that was fun. Looking back, I’d say the film has more in common with The Brothers Bloom than anything since, but it’s different. It’s more finely tuned, a tighter machine. The Brothers Bloom – and I say this affectionately – was a kind of big sloppy kiss of a movie, and this is much more targeted.
And it’s a world I could see myself returning to. Obviously, I’m still working with Lucasfilm and talking to them about Star Wars, but I’m also thinking about my own stuff. Until now, I’ve never thought in terms of sequels to any of the movies I’ve made, but I had so much fun doing this, and Daniel and I had so much fun working together, that the idea of doing another Benoit Blanc mystery is really appealing to me, in a new location, with a new cast, just treating it like Agatha Christie would treat another book. That would be a blast.
KNIVES OUT OPENS ON 29 NOVEMBER.