Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed The Last Jedi, and whose third fair-play whodunit film, Wake Up Dead Man, was released by Netflix this month, talked with PW about translating that beloved mystery subgenre to the screen, and the role of humor in his Benoit Blanc movies, which pay loving homage to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.
Some of the clues in your films are visual, but would not work in print. Could you expound upon your approach to planting them?
I love that question. It's funny, because it's very much the flip side to things that you can do in print that you could never get away with on screen. I guess the most famous example being Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Aykroyd. I've puzzled for years over how you do the gambit that Christie does in that book, visually, in the context of a movie, and so, it feels like fair game to use the strength of cinema to do things visually that you cannot in books. It's another form of something that is done on the page, just hiding a clue in plain sight.
You also use sounds to hide clues in ways that would not work at all in print, especially in Knives Out.
That's a place that I try to play very, very fair. The Knives Out example is a big glaring one, but there are also many smaller things, like in Glass Onion, when all the lights go out in the big room, which is when the gun is retrieved from the ice bucket. You can hear the metallic ring of it being pulled out really clearly. I don't even think on a second watch you would catch that clue. You kind of have to know it's there to catch it, but if anyone does pick that up, it's incredibly pleasurable.
Could you talk about using humor to distract the audience from something significant? Do you use it for major clues, or just for less-significant ones?
I've done it both ways. I've done little throwaway clues that are kind of fun to pay off down the line through a joke. But then also, in Glass Onion, one person's misuse of language, which is a gag, I use as a little bit of a clue for Blanc in terms of indicating the true nature of that character. But even the reveal of it is done as a joke. I think I probably tend to bury slighter clues in jokes, mostly just because, if it's a big clue, that means in the denouement, you're gonna be calling back to it and revealing it, and, it's never very satisfying to repeat a joke, I think. It's always more satisfying to kind of zoom in on a visual clue that was there the whole time that we played fair because you could have seen it.
When I rewatched Glass Onion, I first noticed a one-liner towards the start that pays off magnificently by the end. At what point in the writing process did you decide to plant that line where you did?
That gets to the way I approach writing. I write very structurally. I will spend the first 80% of the process working in pocket-size Moleskine notebooks. If I am writing a script for 10 months, 8 months of that will be in these little notebooks. I'll write dialogue at some point, but the big thing that I do in them is that I draw, everything from room diagrams to little arcs across the page, and I map out the movie that way. For me, keeping it in that state for as long as possible is so useful for exactly the thing you're talking about—of visually seeing, realizing, "Okay, if I have to land here, that means I have to set something up. Okay, back here would probably be the best place to do that."
Did your approach to presenting clues fairly differ in the Poker Face episodes that you wrote?
Yes, because of the how-catch-em nature of Poker Face, which is, to me, an entirely different beast. I made Poker Face just because Levinson and Link perfected that format with that first season of Colombo. I was fascinated by it. It was almost like I wanted to take the back of the toaster off, and see how it worked. It is a very different approach just because of the nature of that storytelling, where the game is to lay out very clearly in that first act the crime and how it was committed.
How do how-catch-ems compare with whodunits?
In some ways, it's a stronger narrative engine than the whodunit, because you're playing this game of 3D chess with the audience, where they're not trying to figure out who committed the crime, they're looking at the crime being committed, and figuring out where the weak spots are in the commission of the crime that the detective is going to notice. And so, the stronger episodes in Columbo and Poker Face are the ones where there's a weak spot for the viewer to notice, and then the killer does something to cover it up and preempt it as a clue. What you're setting up in plain sight for the audience, but trying to use your tools so that they miss it, is the weak spot, the point where Columbo or Charlie Kale is gonna nail them. You're still using the same tools, you're using misdirection, you're using a kind of Hitchcockian suspense to get them involved so that they are not picking at every little visual bit.
And when you talk about suspense, that makes me think of that amazing visual with the hot sauce in one of the films, something that really could not be captured in print.
Yes, that's an example of using the tools that you've got. It's funny, the relationship of card tricks to this type of writing, and to this type of misdirection. I was good buddies with Ricky Jay, and I was a big fan of his, not only of his magic, but of his scholarship of magic. To me, the most fascinating thing with a card trick was always that if you see a card trick performed, and then that person who just got fooled tells a friend what just happened with the trick, but tells it back in such a way that's slightly wrong, and leaves out the part that made the trick possible. That, to me, is absolutely fascinating, and a wonderful example of how you don't have to try and outsmart the audience, because they'll outsmart themselves. I actually lean very hard into that in Glass Onion, where one of the characters is describing something that happened, and I show a little flashback to it happening that way, but it's the opposite of what we just saw actually happen with our own two eyes.
For your latest film, which features a locked room murder, did you come up with the killer and their motive first, and then the method to make the crime appear impossible, or the other way around?
It was the killer and the motive first, because that's the story-driven part. I love the trappings of the genre so much, I say trappings with love, but I find that I must always make sure that I'm building a solid spine of character and story, an actual narrative engine to drive the whole thing. The crime has to serve a narrative purpose. It has to create a certain emotional impact. That's kind of job one. In this example, the details of the impossible crime itself were developed throughout the whole process and really only clicked in fairly late. It was a bit of a placeholder for a while. Boy, I'll tell you, as much I admired John Dickson Carr [the master of the impossible crime, whose masterpiece, The Hollow Man, features prominently in the plot] before I tried to write one of these goddamn things, now I worship the fact that he was able to do it over and over, and make it feel effortless and with such panache, it's extraordinary to me.
