Three years following the release of Knives Out, writer-director Rian Johnson is back with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which picks up with Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) investigating a new murder mystery case. Glass Onion received a limited theatrical release on November 23 and will release on Netflix December 23.
As a director, Johnson is not one to do the same thing twice. And though Glass Onion is another whodunit mystery for Benoit Blanc to solve, the filmmaker finds new ways to get creative with the story. Johnson left New England behind for Glass Onion, introducing the audience to a group of friends who gather on an island in Greece for a murder mystery party that ultimately goes awry.
Johnson spoke to Screen Rant about Glass Onion, his approach to the whodunit sequel, the dynamic friendships at the core of the film, how he tackled the Knives Out sequel versus Star Wars: The Last Jedi, finding the tone for the film, and more.
Rian Johnson On Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Screen Rant: You had a lengthy amount of time to do Knives Out, but not this one. How did you approach Glass Onion?
Rian Johnson: I just kind of dove into it. It was scary because I had the idea for the first one for 10 years, and with this I was kind of starting from scratch. It's a high quality problem, but the fact that the first one was successful and I started working on this after the first one had come out, it sort of erases your memory of it being this thing that you molded into shape and made and then suddenly it becomes this gilded thing outside of your sight, and so it can mess with your head a little bit.
But like anything else, you just kind of dive in and start doing it. And a big part of my approach with this one was wanting to plant a very clear flag for the audience, but also for myself and for Daniel [Craig], that if we're going to keep making these, what's exciting about that is that each one of them is going to have their own identity and their own reason for being. And the setting is the big obvious thing with this, as opposed to cozy New England, we've got [a] glam European beach movie. But also, that it's a new cast, and a new narrative gambit, and a new set of things on its mind, and everything about it just being, let's truly refresh this for ourselves each time and hopefully for the audience.
What about Greece drew you to shoot there?
Rian Johnson: Well, I wrote this during 2020, so it was right during that first lockdown. And I think all of us just wanted to be on the beach somewhere, and so there was part of just the fantasy, the wish fulfillment. So much of this comes from my love of Agatha Christie, both her books, but also the movies I was watching when I was growing up, and Evil Under the Sun was a big one for me. Also, it's not Christie, but The Last of Sheila, the [Stephen] Sondheim movie. I don't even know if I wrote into the script that it was going to be Greece, I think I just had the glam Mediterranean Island on the mind. And then once we started scouting around, Greece made the most sense to shoot at.
Glass Onion is a big, literal glass onion. What inspired the title?
Rian Johnson: The Benoit Blanc character loves his metaphors, so I was like, "Miles Bron, Edward Norton's character, is going to have this compound." I like the metaphor of something glass that you can see through, that seems complex but actually isn't. And yeah, I literally just pulled open my music app on my phone and searched the word glass, and because I'm a Beatles fan, “Glass Onion” was the first thing that came up. And I was like, “oh, there you go.” And also what that song is about and how the song is about a mystery that isn't a mystery, and kind of playfully teasing that, it just seemed kind of right.
The first movie was a lot about old money, and this one is about new money, and specifically tech money. What brings you back to wanting to explore these dynamic, very rich, very dysfunctional characters?
Rian Johnson: On a very basic genre level, it just lends itself to a good mystery. And if you look at [it], there always has to be a power dynamic at play. A very strong, distinct power dynamic, where there's somebody at the top of the food chain, there's everybody else underneath them, and typically they get taken out, and it's why? And so that's kind of baked into the genre. Yeah, just the fact that one of the other big motivating factors in making the first one and making the series is setting a whodunit not as a period piece in England, but in America right now.
And not in a message-y way, but not being afraid to engage with the culture right here and right now. And so if you're talking about pirate power dynamics right now in America, money and the absurd chasms between the different levels of who has money and who doesn't, is going to be part of that. But the movie, to me, it wasn't. The notion of making a movie about a tech mogul doesn't seem that interesting at all to me, it's much more about lies, and it's about big lies, and it's about blatant lies being protected by self-interest, that's kind of at the heart of what I was interested in.
Glass Onion plays with the idea that friend groups can be just as dysfunctional as any family. Can you talk a little bit about that and why you chose to focus on friends rather than family this time around?
Rian Johnson: Yeah. It made sense, but it also... I don't know. Whether it's friends, whether it's family, whether it's everybody in the same small town, whether it's a church congregation, whatever it is in these, it's all sort of a metaphor for a family. Not a metaphor, but it all kind of functions as a family. It's a group of people who have an emotional bond to each other, but at this point, are kind of tied to each other regardless of how they feel about each other. And I feel like everybody can relate to that, whether it's friends that you have a codependent relationship with, or a family that you didn't choose but you love, but you still didn't choose. It feels like the dynamics are very, very similar. Friends, family, it's kind of still people you have to deal with in your life. It's messy. It's complicated.
How was it tackling this type of sequel — where it’s not directly linked to any of the previous characters save for Blanc — versus something like The Last Jedi?
Rian Johnson: It was very, very different, but that's part of what appealed to me about it. I've never had the desire to do an actual sequel to anything I've made. I love endings. That's what I love about movies; endings. And I love that movies have a start, they have a finish, they're one object that is complete. There's great serialized storytelling, especially in television and increasingly in movies, but that's not what turns me on about stories. I like self-contained, beautiful objects. Once I engaged with the fact that these movies are that, as opposed to an ongoing story, I was like, “Oh, yeah.” And we can keep making more of these as long as each one has its own reason for being.
Daniel Craig looks like he's having the time of his life playing this character.
Rian Johnson: That's the reason we're still doing this because Daniel and I have so much fun doing it together.
There's a lot of humor in this movie. How did you set about writing that and working with the cast on the tone you wanted to portray?
Rian Johnson: I guess with this one it's a slightly different tone than the first one. It's a little bit broader just because of the nature of who it's about. But the cast also had the advantage of knowing the first movie, and so they knew at least the ballpark we were aiming for. I don't do table reads, I just kind of get together with the actors, and kind of talk about it, and then when we show up on set, it tends to click in pretty quickly. I feel like these actors are so top-notch, everyone kind of gets in the pool and instantly kind of feels each other out and feels the world that they're in. Yeah, the tone tends to click in pretty quick.
During the TIFF panel, the cast mentioned they did murder mysteries when hanging out. Were you a part of that?
Rian Johnson: Yeah, we were in Belgrade. We were all in a hotel, it's a really nice hotel in Belgrade. But it was right during the Delta surge and the numbers were really bad, and we wanted everyone to stay safe, and we obviously didn't want any shutdowns with our production, so we were very much locked into the hotel. So to blow off steam every weekend, we rented out the rooftop restaurant and we would play Mafia games. And it was a blast, man. It was so much fun.
There are so many cameos in the film. How did that come about?
Rian Johnson: I know they're not spoilers, but I want the audience to be surprised by them, so I'm trying not to talk about specifically any of them. But we did have some really fun ones. It kind of felt like the movie to do them in, just because the proximity of these characters to celebrity. It kind of felt tonally like something the movie could take without breaking. I guess that's the danger of having celebrity cameos. Suddenly, it'll feel like the reality is broken just to have a fun moment. Whereas with this it felt like, “okay, we can actually get away with layering these in here and it'll feel organic, so why not?”
Derol was one of the funniest characters, just because he popped up so randomly every once in a while.
Rian Johnson: I love it. Yeah, [Noah Segan, who plays Derol] is one of my best friends. He's been in every movie I've ever made. And I wonder if people are going to recognize him from Knives Out, because he was one of the cops in Knives Out. When I was like, "Yeah, we're just going to put Noah in as a different character." My producer was like, "People will recognize him." I'm like, "I don't think they will."
Knives Out 3 has been planned. I know you can't tease anything, but is there any idea of where you want to take Benoit Blanc next?
Rian Johnson: No. What excites me, and this is what I'm already really excited about with starting to come up with the third one, is the notion of doing something that's completely different from both this movie and the first one. The notion of with the third one truly kind of showing the wingspan of what we can do with these and how different each one of them can be tonally, and setting wise, and otherwise. So to me, it's not so much about exploring the character of Blanc, to me it's about just finding something completely different to go after. And something that's going to be exciting for Daniel and I to chew on, and hopefully it'll take audiences by surprise.
Yeah, it's fun to put him in different settings and see what happens.
Rian Johnson: Completely. Yeah. Different tones and different kinds of subgenres. That's one thing Christie did really well, is she would use the whodunit genre, but within that she would do a slasher movie with it in And Then There Were None. She would do The ABC Murders, a serial killer thriller, she would do a gothic romance, she would try different genres within the genre, and that really excites me.
You mentioned Agatha Christie before. Are there any other mystery novelists or movies that have inspired you personally working on this type of genre or this specific movie?
Rian Johnson: Well, with this one, The Last of Sheila, it's a movie that was written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins, and is a very 70s murder mystery. And it's set in a glamorous European locale. It has an all-star glam cast. It's a big, big influence on this movie. And besides just being a big musical theater and a Sondheim fan, I'm a big fan of that movie. In terms of other mystery novelists, John Dickson Carr is much more of a puzzled box creator. But his detective, Gideon Fell, is hilarious and is maybe my favorite detective in all of fiction. He's such a jerk, I love him. So he's fantastic. Dorothy Sayers. There's a vast amount of them. Actually, I'm reading The Complete Sherlock Holmes for the first time. I'm working my way through it, which I had never really read before. And it's very interesting reading it, feeling out its connection to that golden age of detective fiction. But yeah, so I'm a whodunit junkie.
You are working on future Star Wars movies. What do you look forward to when it comes to the upcoming films versus The Last Jedi?
Rian Johnson: Well, right now we don't have any timeline for that. I still talk to Kathy [Kennedy, President of Lucasfilm] really regularly about it, and right now, it's just a matter of schedule with having my hands busy with this. But I really hope I get to do them someday. And yeah, what's exciting to me is just, I don't know, I feel like if you're a Star Wars fan there's so much great stuff being made right now. But to me, what's exciting is just the notion of building a trilogy. The idea of building a contained story within that, that has a solid arc throughout it. We're all just reaching back for that feeling that we had watching that original trilogy, and taking a stab at that and showing some new things and taking in new places. I think that's the best of what Star Wars does, is when it feels like you're seeing something you've never seen before. It ain’t easy. Still, that's the gig. It beats real work.
About Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Benoit Blanc returns to peel back the layers in a new Rian Johnson whodunit. This fresh adventure finds the intrepid detective at a lavish private estate on a Greek island, but how and why he comes to be there is only the first of many puzzles. Blanc soon meets a distinctly disparate group of friends gathering at the invitation of billionaire Miles Bron for their yearly reunion. Among those on the guest list are Miles’ former business partner Andi Brand, current Connecticut governor Claire Debella, cutting-edge scientist Lionel Toussaint, fashion designer and former model Birdie Jay and her conscientious assistant Peg, and influencer Duke Cody and his sidekick girlfriend Whiskey. As in all the best murder mysteries, each character harbors their own secrets, lies and motivations. When someone turns up dead, everyone is a suspect.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery begins streaming on Netflix December 23.