You wouldn’t say Rian Johnson comes across as one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. No criticism is implied. It takes some strength of character to remain something like a normal guy when you’ve been through the Star Wars mill. But, quiet, polite, lacking in flash, he seems the same guy I met 20 years ago for Brick, his low-budget breakthrough.
“We were children then,” the American film-maker says, chuckling.
After that Johnson had a flop with the off-centre comedy The Brothers Bloom and a hit with slick time-travel romp Looper. That ultimately led to him writing and directing Star Wars: The Last Jedi, from 2017.
We meet as he launches the third film in the Knives Out series. Wake Up Dead Man, again starring Daniel Craig as the eccentric detective Benoit Blanc, provides Netflix with a sure-fire Christmas hit.
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All well and good. But I wonder if he ever longs for a quieter life. A life without people griping on social media about his Star Wars choices. A life where entertainment giants aren’t relying on him for big opening weekends.
“I don’t know – not particularly, I guess,” he says in his unexcited way. “First of all, the kind of attention directors and writers get is very different from the kind that actors get. So I have it relatively easy.
“You know, when people approach me, they are usually film students or what have you. Any trade-off in terms of anonymity that came with Star Wars was worth it for the experience of making a Star Wars movie. That was maybe the best experience in my life.”
Let me ask a stupid question. When he was promoting Brick, a neonoir that cost about $450,000 to make, did he have any notion he’d someday end up where he is today?
“Oh, God, no,” he splutters. “I couldn’t quite imagine getting the next movie made back then. I would be terrified to meet somebody who made movies who felt confident. Ha ha!”
At any rate, he seems to have managed the pressure very smoothly. For all the honour of shooting the second of the Star Wars sequels, Johnson is now probably best known for those Knives Out films. The first landed to great hurrahs at Toronto International Film Festival in 2019. Glass Onion, set on a luxury island, was equally celebrated three years later.
Now Blanc, mad southern drawl intact, investigates a murder in a Catholic church. Potential suspects (or murderees or assistants) include Andrew Scott, Daryl McCormack, Jeremy Renner, Glenn Close and Josh O’Connor.
Johnson is happy to acknowledge the influence of the star-studded adaptations of Agatha Christie novels such as Murder on the Orient Express, from 1974, and Death on the Nile, from 1978.
“So many of the murder mysteries I saw growing up were period pieces that were set in an idealised version of Britain,” he says. “There was the realisation that that’s actually not what Agatha Christie was doing. She was writing to her time and place. She was never writing period pieces.
“What got me very excited was the idea of doing this genre I deeply love and setting it unapologetically in the present moment. And, in this case, setting it very much in America in 2025.”
That is interesting. Johnson was raised in Denver and then southern California. One of the key characters in Wake Up Dead Man is the near-messianic priest played by Josh Brolin. Religion is now fiercely political in the United States. There is nothing (ahem) preachy about the new film, but one is pointed towards new schools of evangelical tension.
“I don’t think it’s very subtle in that regard,” he says, mischievously. “I grew up very Christian. I wasn’t Catholic. I was Protestant. I was what in America we would call evangelical. But my faith was very personal. It wasn’t that I was dragged to church. I really saw the world around me through the lens of my relationship with Christ.
“I also was a child right in the middle of 1980s America, Reagan-era America. It was a real moment for the evangelical Christian movement, as it merged with a certain brand of American politics. It’s something that is, if anything, even more present today.”
Does he still have a spiritual investment in the church?
“I’m no longer religious at all,” he says. “But it’s something that’s still very personal for me. The last thing I wanted to do was make a film that felt didactic or finger-waggy. I wanted to make a movie that was not going to shy away from talking about the intersection of faith and society and politics.”
It’s interesting that Johnson doesn’t go to Donald Trump here. The Brolin character, when in full rant, inevitably calls up reminders of the orange elephant in the room. We speak as the American president’s plans to put “100 per cent tariffs” on films not made in the US land back in the news. Much of Wake Up Dead Man was shot at Warner Bros Studios Leavesden, in Watford, on the outskirts of London. We don’t really know what Trump is up to, but such productions could be affected by any such policy.
“We’ll deal with it as it happens,” the director says. “The reality is, if you pay attention to every single crazy thing that pops up as a headline that comes out of his mouth, you won’t have time to eat breakfast in the morning.”
The tariff “would be a horrible, very difficult thing and would be very destructive to an industry that’s already taken quite a few body-blows within the last five years. I also have no idea how that would possibly happen. So, for the moment, keep calm and carry on.”
He’ll be hoping they don’t put a tariff on large performances. Few in recent years have been quite so enormous as Craig’s Benoit Blanc. He moves with a sporting swagger. The gestures are broad. And the accent is something else. Albert Finney’s Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express is, by comparison, restrained. Did Johnson have any trouble talking his star up to that level of bravura?
“No, Daniel never requires encouragement to go big,” Johnson says, laughing. “But, at the same time, he can go big because he’s such a damn fine actor. That’s my favourite kind of actor.
“I would put Glenn Close in the same category. She can go very big and broad, but you never feel like she’s leaving planet Earth. It always feels grounded in some kind of interior truth that keeps an audience with them.
“And in that way, I think, in this film in particular, just because of what the movie is about, Blanc is a little bit more grounded. He is a little bit less of southern-fried ham.”
If there were any doubt that Johnson was an addict of classically formed mysteries, one need only look towards Poker Face, his delightful TV show. The project is (or, maybe, was) so in debt to Columbo, the great 1970s cop show with Peter Falk, that we can probably call it a full-on homage.
The credits are delivered in a similar font. As in the earlier show, we see the crime committed before our befuddled hero – here a nomadic Natasha Lyonne – sets out to bring him or her to justice. That’s the so-called howcatchem (as opposed to whodunit) format.
[ Why Natasha Lyonne’s Poker Face is the new ColumboOpens in new window ]
“I do remember Columbo as a kid,” Johnson says. “A lot of the TV I was watching in the 1980s was reruns. It was more Magnum PI and The A-Team. I was watching them during the day as they recycled through on reruns.
“Columbo was actually a little grown-up for me. It was during the pandemic that, like a lot of people, I binge-watched the whole thing. I was already a Peter Falk fan from Cassavetes films and other sources. So I kind of became absolutely obsessed also with that howcatchem format.”
We go on to talk about our shared taste for properly episodic TV.
“I missed the junk-food aspect of being able to sit down and watch an episode of Murder, She Wrote and not have to think, It’s not going to take eight episodes for them to solve this f**ing mystery.”
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Shortly after we speak, Peacock, NBCUniversal’s US streaming service, decides not to renew Poker Face for a third season. Deadline reports that Johnson is attempting to interest other networks with a new version, featuring Peter Dinklage. I am reminded of something he said earlier about the uncertainty of this business.
“You always feel, like, ‘Let me do one more and I’ll get it right.’ Ha ha!”
I think he’ll be fine.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is on Netflix from Friday, December 12th
