A version of this story about “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” first appeared in the Guild & Critics Awards/Documentaries issue of awards magazine TheWrap.
Many people have complained about the paltry week-long theatrical release of Rian Johnson’s “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” a comedy that turned out to be a massive crowd-pleaser when it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival this year. . After opening in theaters just before Thanksgiving, the film has been pulled after its week-long “Pre-Trailer Event” and will hit the streaming service on December 23.
You can count writer-director Johnson as one who was disappointed by the brief theatrical run, though he did put a positive spin on the unusually wide (if brief) release in a recent interview with TheWrap.
“Look, I would have loved to have as big and long a theater run as we could have,” Johnson said. “But I am grateful to Netflix for stepping out of their comfort zone and even making this version. And the fact that we’re at the AMC, Regal and Cinemark networks, which is something they’ve never done before, and they’re spending money to promote the theatrical release, I hope that’s a first step. It’s a great thing to walk down the hall like that with the chains, and I hope we can do more in the future.”
“I mean, the reality is, I’m sure most people discovered ‘Knives Out’ by watching it at home with their families, and I’m sure most people will discover this the same way.” He paused. “But it’s a great experience to see him in the theater.”
The idea for a sequel came up during the filming of “Knives Out,” which starred Daniel Craig as an eccentric but brilliant detective investigating a family murder. “While doing the first one, Daniel and I were having such a great time that we started talking about how we didn’t know if this was going to work, but if it did work, it would be fun to keep doing these,” Johnson said. “And when the public responded to the first one, it wasn’t even a conversation. We started doing it.” (It didn’t hurt that Netflix paid more than $450 million for the rights to two sequels.)
The film finds Craig’s deliciously cunning detective heading to a private island populated with social media influencers, politicians, former supermodels, YouTube stars and other assorted failed hopefuls, played by a charming ensemble including Janelle Monáe, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Kate Hudson, Dave Bautista, and, on screen in a video chat, Stephen Sondheim and Angela Lansbury in their final film appearances. It is, to put it mildly, a hoot, in which a planned weekend of murder-mystery performance turns into outright bloodshed.
At the center is Edward Norton’s Miles Bron, a ridiculous tech billionaire with far more money than sense. When Johnson sat down to write the sequel, he was looking for a powerful, slightly malevolent, and fundamentally funny figure at the center of the story, and he found the right kind of person faster than it took Elon Musk to fire the board of directors. Twitter. directors
“I needed someone at the top of the power pyramid,” he said. “Both a character and an actor that was going to have gravity to keep the solar system around him, and they also built up the resentment so that all the characters wanted to kill him off.”
The river. “It just made sense, although the opportunity ended up being a bit tricky. Because the minute I started thinking about anyone in real life, it got so boring.”
So no, Miles Bron, played by Edward Norton with the gleeful certainty of having enough money to hang the Mona Lisa in your living room, is not Musk or anyone else you read about. “It’s much more about the power structures that are formed and the big dumb lies that are told and endorsed because it’s in the interest of the people,” he said. “But every time we watched the news we were like, ‘Oh, God. I guess we’re making a documentary.’”
Johnson’s initial idea was to follow Agatha Christie’s lead and change everything but the detective at the center of the mystery. “I know audiences come to sequels expecting a continuation of what they got last time, so I wanted to set a very clear flag that we’re doing something different,” he said. “The intention is never to subvert or flip anything, but you do want to let the air out of the balloon anywhere you can. It’s a fun game that you can play with the audience, as opposed to a trick you’re playing with the audience.”
However, before he could write the jokes or even flesh out the characters, Johnson needed a tight mystery plot. “I write in little Moleskine notebooks and spend the first 80% of my time outlining,” he said. “If I spend eight months on a script, seven of those months will be the outline and the plot. I need to have the whole roadmap in place before I sit down and start writing.”
One of the models for “Glass Onion” was the 1973 all-star mystery thriller “The Last of Sheila,” written by Sondheim Anthony Perkins. Sondheim once said that he needed to know the secrets of the characters before he knew who those characters were, and Johnson agreed.
“What he said resonates with me because I think you have to start with the story, and then the characters are built based on the needs of the story,” he said. “That’s the way I work in any genre, but it’s even more important in this one specifically.”
At the same time, he added, he needed to give each of his actors enough work. “Knowing that you’re going to make a great ensemble, you want each character to have her moment and her reason to show up and be there. And you can’t make a three-hour movie. It’s a matter of trying to balance it out, and that process continues right up to the edit. But it’s hard when every actor in this movie could easily carry an entire movie. That balancing game is the hardest part.”
It’s also tricky in a movie that was shot during COVID in Budapest and on the Greek island of Spetses: dealing with the fact that the cast spent much of their time just sitting around talking.
“There are a lot of scenes with eight or nine people sitting in a big room talking to each other,” Johnson said. “It sounds silly, but figuring out where to put the camera and how to cover those scenes was honestly the biggest challenge. I went back and looked at directors who are masters of staging and blocking: Spielberg, who is the master today, or older Hollywood movies where they had big dialogue scenes with multiple people in the frame and created a nice shape. and a dramatic dynamic in the form of staging. The hardest part was dealing with the sheer number of characters in the frame at any given time.”
At the risk of venturing into spoiler territory, “Glass Onion” also has a lovely scene that almost sweeps the rug out from under the entire movie at the beginning. “Anything to let the air out of the balloon,” he said with a laugh. “The intention is always to get to the pure pleasure of the murder mystery genre for me. The intention is never to subvert or turn anything around, but to get at what I love about murder mysteries.
“We’re all very familiar with the genre, so one scene in particular is a good example of doing something that almost speaks to the audience and says, ‘Okay, this expectation you had of what’s going to be, we’re not to do that. But if you stick with us, it will pay off in a way that will be very satisfying. It just won’t be what you expect. And that, I think, is a fun game to play with the audience, rather than a gimmick to play with the audience.”
Read more from the Guild & Critics/Documentary Awards edition here.
