t seems as if Rian Johnson is the man with the Midas touch. Since
making his debut in 2005 with the excellent neo-noir Brick, he’s
slowly but surely produced an enviable filmography notable for smart
storytelling and a wicked way with genre. After eccentric caper film The
Brothers Bloom and head-spinning sci-fi Looper, he took on the mantle
of a multi-million dollar franchise with Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and
Disney were pleased enough with the results to hand him a forthcoming
standalone trilogy set in a galaxy far, far away. First though, he returns
to his lo-fi roots with his unique take on the classic cinematic whodunnit
in the star-studded crime romp Knives Out, which sees Daniel Craig as a
Cajun detective investigating the suspected murder of a millionaire author
at his plush New England mansion.LWLies: When did you first discover murder mysteries? Johnson: I’ve
been reading Agatha Christie books since I was a kid. I distinctly remember
seeing the paperback books on my parents’ shelves and thinking, ‘That looks
really adult and dangerous’. I have wanted to do a whodunnit forever. The
first one I remember reading was ‘Curtain’. It’s Poirot’s last case and it was
published posthumously. It’s a very weird book. Creepy and wonderful. I had
the idea for this about 10 years ago – it goes way, way back.It feels like you went completely the opposite way to Poirot with Daniel
Craig’s detective character, Benoit Blanc. A little bit, although the essence
of what he’s doing is the same. I grew up watching the Poirot movies with Peter
Ustinov, and the thing he got about the character was his clownishness. I feel
like all great detectives have something about them that makes you not take
them seriously. With Poirot it’s his fussiness, and that element is the same –
with the thick Louisiana accent Daniel does, and this buffoonery he brings to
the character.In the film there’s a reference to a whodunnit author having the whole
book plotted out before he even writes it. Did you know always know
where your story was going to end? I knew I wanted to do a whodunnit,
and they have specific rules around them. But I also fundamentally
agree with Hitchock, that there is an inherent weakness in the genre,
especially translated into cinema, which is this clue-gathering in the
service of one big surprise at the end. All the best whodunnits, be it
books or films, find a way to put another engine into the car. Like how
‘And Then There Were None’ has a horror/slasher engine.
So I started thinking about what I knew I wanted: the scene where
the detective questions everyone at the beginning; the reveal at the endin the library where the detective lays it all out – that’s my favourite type
of scene in whodunnits. But I had to figure out a way to have the movie
be driven by our concern for a character that we care about, as opposed
to clue-gathering and ‘are we going to solve this puzzle box?’ I had to
figure out how to start as a whodunnit, change into a thriller, and then
turn back into a whodunnit at the end.There’s a sort of timeless look to Knives Out, but at the same time it
contains very contemporary flourishes. What made you decide to make
it so of the moment? That was part of what was exciting about it to me,
to make it contemporary and to actually try to plug it into right now.
I know I keep bringing it back to Christie, but she was writing about
contemporary British society all the time, even though she wasn’t a
political writer per se. I had this notion of throwing away the idea of
timelessness and saying, ‘No, this is now, this film for this time’. This
is to be watched today. And because we got the whole thing made so
quickly, there was a pulpiness to it. Like doing a quick paperback run- get it out there really quick, not be too precious about it. Especially
after having an amazing, four year long experience in the Star Wars
world, the idea of just going to press really quickly with Knives Out
was appealing.
Why do you think the whodunnit genre still resonates with audiences
after all this time? On one level it has the fun cerebral puzzle thing,
where it’s almost like you’re sitting down to a chess match with whoever
is writing it, seeing if you can win. And then it’s essentially a character-
based genre. So you are going to have all these big fun characters as
the suspects who are all these kind of elevated, caricature types. Now,
this isn’t my theory – I agree with it, but it’s not my original idea. The
whodunnit as a novel arguably had its heyday around the 1930s – you
think about the kind of place the world was then, and you think about
the moral uncertainty.
The whodunnit offers you a contained world where there is a crime,
and the everything is thrown into moral chaos, and you know that, by
the end of the book, the detective is going to put everything back in order
and catch the killer and save the day. A moral order will be restored.
You can see how appealing that was in the 1930s. You can see how good
that would be right now, the notion that that could happen. It’s the idea
of moral certitude which sets it apart from other types of crime fiction.
It’s a fantasy, but it feels really nice. The bad guy is going to get caught.
That feels goodRian Johnson
LWLies meets the writer/director who took the fustiest genre ever
(the whodunnit) and produced a slick, bitchy romp.
I
IN CONVERSATION Illustration by TOM HUMBERSTONEINTERVIEW 051Interview by HANNAH WOODHEAD