New York Magazine - USA (2019-11-11)

98 newyork| november11–24, 2019

The CULTURE PAGES

Knives Out

Will

K i l l You

Cracking the mystery

of why Rian Johnson followed up

Star Wars with a whodunit.

By Adam Sternbergh

knives out is in theaters on November 27.

T

he madcap drawing-room
whodunit from writer-
director Rian Johnson,
Knives Out, is notable first
and foremost for its extreme
improbability. Not in its story line—
though the plot is reliably packed with
hairpin turns and reversals—but rather
for the unlikelihood of the film’s existing
at all. It’s an original take on an anachro-
nism: the star-studded sleuth film. When
Johnson finished a first draft of Knives, an
idea that had been germinating for a
decade, and showed it to some of his
friends, they were skeptical. “A few reac-
tions were ‘We like this kind of movie, but
why do you want to do this?’ Thatdid give
me pause,” he says. “But I felt like I knew
deep down inside why I wanted to do it.”
Johnson’s new film isn’t the only recent
whodunit—Kenneth Branagh cast him-
self as Hercule Poirot in a 2017version
of Murder on the Orient Express, and it
grossed over $300 million worldwide.
But Orient Express is a famous piece of
intellectual property from a best-selling
author and had been previously adapted
for the screen, TV, radio, and the stage.
Knives Out is the opposite. It’s original,

offbeat, carefully observed, aimed

squarely at adults, and, while funny, not

at all a send-up like, say, Murder by

Death. It’s also overtly political in con-

tent, cleverly investigating our divisive

current moment. In short, Knives Outis

the kind of film that exhibits “the unify-

ing vision of an individual artist,” as Mar-

tin Scorsese put it in a recent New York

Times op-ed about the kinds of movies he

feels are disappearing from Hollywood.

What modern Hollywood wants instead

are franchise films like Star Wars: The

Last Jedi—as it happens, the last film

Johnson directed, which goes a long way

toward explaining how he managed to

marshal the forces to get thisidiosyn-

cratic movie made.

Johnson didn’t worry that he wasbuck-

ing a trend in Hollywood. “MaybeI am

completely oblivious, and all thesky-is-

falling predictions will turn out toberight,”

he says of the state of the studios’appetite

for original films, “but there’s great,fun

stuff being made for adults all yearlong.

You’ve just got to go out and seeit.I love

big franchise stuff too— obviously—but

I feel like it’s still very possibletomake

this.” And to hear Johnson, who’s45,tellit,

there’s not much difference creatively

between Knives Out, reportedly budgeted

at $40 million, and Jedi, reportedly bud-

geted at Whatever It Takes.

“At the end of the day, the thingat every

step that matters about them is thesame,”

he says, when I meet him theday after

Knives Out’s premiere at theToronto

International Film Festival. Hehasbeen

cloistered in a hotel suite fortheday,

answering questions about themovie’s PHOTOGRAPH: CLAIRE FOLGER/COURTESY OF LIONSGATE