[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] "On Story" is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.

[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is "On Story," a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators and filmmakers.

This week on "On Story," we're joined by Rian Johnson for a conversation on Reinventing the Classic Whodunnit in the "Knives Out" franchise.

- The reality is, I was enjoying the writing, I was enjoying the story, I was enjoying all the things that Christie, or any good writer actually puts in that pulls you through a book.

That's the kind of the magic trick of a whodunnit, I think, is it doesn't play fair and it doesn't present a puzzle for the audience to solve, but it gives the illusion after the fact that it did.

And I think that's what makes a mystery feel, quote, unquote, fair or satisfying from an audience, from the mystery perspective.

[paper crumples] [typing] [carriage returns, ding] [Narrator] This week on "On Story," we're joined by a titan of the mystery genre, Rian Johnson, for a conversation on his murder mystery franchise, "Knives Out," his meticulous writing process, and how he brings a modern twist to the classic whodunnit.

[typewriter dings] - Can we go back in time and start with when you were first writing the first "Knives Out," this was, I guess after "The Last Jedi" came out, where were you, where was your head at and why was a whodunnit or a mystery the next thing you wanted to tackle?

- I grew up as a huge Agatha Christie fan, and as a kid I read the books, but also as a kid, some of my best movie watching memories are, there was kind of a run of amazing Christie adaptations starting with Albert Finney in "Murder on the Orient Express," and then continuing with my personal favorite, Peter Ustinov in "Death on the Nile."

That run of kind of all-star whodunnits, just for me as a kid, sitting watching them with the whole family was like the most fun a movie could possibly be.

And so, a big part of it was my love of Agatha Christie was also my love of that experience and wanting to make something that had that vibe.

I had been thinking about for a while, but I also kind of fundamentally agreed with Alfred Hitchcock who kind of famously detested whodunnits, and Hitchcock's take on them was, it's a genre that's based entirely on surprise as opposed to suspense, and that was Hitchcock whole deal.

You guys probably all know this whole thing with Hitchcock, the whole, you know, suspense versus surprise, the conversation at a table.

And between two people, if you let it play out for two minutes on screen, the bomb goes off at the end of it, woo, you get one moment of surprise.

If you go down underneath the table at the beginning of the conversation, see there's a bomb ticking, then the audience is in suspense for the entire scene.

And I fundamentally agree with that.

And so, I love this genre so much and I really wanted to figure out how the people who do it well sustain an audience over the course of it.

And so I kind of came up with my own version of kind of a crack for how to do that, which was the first "Knives Out" movie.

What if we made a movie that started as an incredibly traditional whodunnit and then revealed itself after the first act to be a Hitchcock thriller, a wrong man accused, trying to get out of a nightmare situation thriller.

And then played that out to get us through what's usually a saggy second act of clue gathering and everything.

And then at the end of the movie, flipped it back and revealed it's actually been a whodunnit this whole time and the mystery is layered underneath this thriller that's driven most of the movie.

And then you get the traditional payoff of the detective giving the denouement in the library and all that good stuff.

It started with that abstract of a structural concept.

But then it, like I said, I had that for like 10 years.

It doesn't really start going until there's something personal and there's something... For me, it was the notion of family and money and politics in that very specific moment when I wrote it.

[workers whistling] [window thuds] [Actress] You killed him.

You murdered him.

- I didn't murder nobody.

- You slashed his face open.

You left him bleeding in the street like a stuffed pig, then you crushed his skull with a forklift and burned his hands off to erase the fingerprints.

[Actor] You'll never prove it.

- We have the nanny cam footage.

- Alice, turn that off now, please.

- You're under arrest.

- Why?

It's almost over.

- Now.

Please, just turn it off.

- What, they're finding out who did it and the wifi sucks in my room.

- Turn it off now.

- It's like two minutes left.

- Alice, off!

- What?

There isn't even anything bad on it.

It's just normal TV and they're just talking-- - They're talking murder on it!

- Normal TV, they're just talking.

- Your sister just had a friend she loves slit his throat open and she doesn't need to be hearing that right now!

Let's be sensitive.

[whispering in Spanish] - The structure of the first movie, I thought I got really excited 'cause I realized, okay, once I make that flip and the audience cares about Marta and is afraid that she's gonna get caught for this thing, that we truly care about her and that's kind of what's driving it, that turns the detective Blanc, who we like, into effectively the antagonist of the movie.

And more than that, it turns our knowledge of the genre, the knowledge that these movies always end with the killer getting caught into the antagonist of the film.

And it becomes something that in the back of our minds, we're kind of like both dreading and thinking with a ticking clock, this bomb has to go off at the end, that the killer has to get caught, and she's the one who did it and we love her and she loved him and oh no.

So that got me very, very excited that we could flip those dynamics and then emotionally engage the audience to kind of drive, you know, drive the story.

- I'm sure you're trying to figure out the best way to get this made, I'm sure you have a bit of a carte blanche from "Star Wars," but are people excited about whodunnits or are they, is this a place where you have to sell it really hard?

Or are people like, "Yeah, we've been looking for a whodunit mystery for a long time now."

- Yeah, and not just like, you know, faceless boards of studio executives, but like friends of mine who I showed the script to were like, "Yeah, this is a pretty good whodunnit, are you sure you wanna spend your "Star Wars" [chuckles] this thing on this?

This is..." And so at the time, I was kind of like, this is just something I really wanna do.

It's something I really love.

It's something I think is gonna work.

I think this is something, if we get it right, I think audiences will dig it, but I don't know.

- Was it the script or the pitch or was it Daniel Craig being on board?

Like, what was it that finally you were like, okay, get Lionsgate to be like, okay, fine, we'll give it a shot.

- No, Lionsgate read the script.

I can't remember if we had Daniel on board before or after Lionsgate, but we got Daniel very, very late.

It all happened very fast because Daniel wasn't available.

He was like top of my list, but he was making "James Bond" movies.

So there were a bunch of other very big actors that we went to for the part, and it didn't end up working out.

And finally we had kind of run out of options and I was starting to really question the script and think, oh, is this not gonna work?

And then something happened with, I forget what Bond movie he was, which one he was making, but, at the time, but there was a delay of three months and we had a tiny window that opened up.

And so we jumped on it and I like flew up to meet with Daniel.

And six weeks later we were shooting.

Because I had seen Daniel do a Chicago accent on stage with Hugh Jackman in a play that they did together.

I had seen him in many things over the years, so I knew he was a trained actor who was an incredible toolbox.

I just knew he could do anything basically.

And the first thing he and I did was, we started sending each other back and forth, like references for what should this accent be.

And that was really fun and-- - Do you remember any of those references?

- Oh yeah, yeah.

I mean, in theory, the idea of Tennessee Williams sounds great, but then we actually heard Tennessee Williams' voice and we're like, "Oh, I don't think that's it."

[audience laughs] And then, because my whole thing was I just want this to be pleasant for the audience.

I don't want... The word twangy should never come into this.

This needs to be sonorous, this needs to be soothing, and we need to... And so, the reference we actually ended up landing on was the historian Shelby Foote, who's in a lot of Ken Burns.

He's in "The Civil War," Ken Burns' documentary.

And Shelby has a very low, honeyed voice.

So that was... So when we found that, we're like, okay, this is it.

- Why are you here?

- I'm here at the behest of a client.

- Who?

- I cannot say, but let me assure you this, my presence will be ornamental.

You will find me a respectful, quiet, passive observer of the truth.

- Do you remember like the scene in the first movie or whether it was written or probably more when you're talking to Daniel Craig that you felt like locked and you're like, "Here's the performance."

Like, the one that you kind of turned to in that first movie of like, here's this character?

- There's a bit in it that I almost cut and Daniel like convinced me not to, which is the whole thing about the donut hole and the donut hole and the donut hole thing.

[audience laughs] And he's like, "Oh, I kind of like that."

And I'm like, "Oh, okay, all right, give it a shot."

And so, I remember being at the monitor when he like got, he like gets down on his knees and he's doing it and the closeup where he's doing it, I was like, "Oh, okay, good.

We're good.

We have a movie, I think."

- I spoke in the car about the hole at the center of this donut and what you and Harlan did that fateful night seems at first glance to fill that hole perfectly.

A donut hole in a donut's hole.

But we must look a little closer.

And when we do, we see the donut hole has a hole in its center.

It is not a donut hole, but a smaller donut with its own hole.

And our donut is not whole at all!

- Blanc, look, I understand that this is amusing for you.

- Why was I hired?

[typewriter dings] - Well, I kind of wanna go more into the nuts and bolts of really, what a mystery, what it takes to write a mystery.

- Well, yeah, I think you think you're trying to figure out who did it.

And I think the best writers like Christie give you the illusion that you're trying to figure out who did it and then that's the pleasure of it.

And I think that's what makes a mystery feel, quote, unquote, fair or satisfying from an audience from the mystery perspective is if after the fact or on a second watch, they can go through and feel that the things were fairly set up, even if the reality is there's no possible way on a first viewing you could be expected to put these pieces together.

It's almost like reverse engineering a pathway back through that.

I don't think that's a problem because I deeply believe that even if you did lay out all the things in a way that could be followed and put together by the audience, that would be so boring.

That would be... The reality is an audience is never gonna be entertained by clue-gathering and deduction and puzzle-solving.

You can't present them with a crossword puzzle.

You have to give them a rollercoaster ride.

- You're still doing a game of 3D chess in my mind.

There's so many different layers of everything you're doing 'cause it's not just the suspects, but it's like who knows which suspects and then it's clues and it's who knows which clues.

And then it's like, what does the audience... There's just like so much.

- Yeah.

[laughs] Yeah, it's a lot.

[audience laughs] - Sorry.

- Yeah, it is, it's not for the faint of heart, this genre.

So much of the game is tracking all these things that you're talking about.

And that is stuff that is so much easier to see when you're zoomed back in that way.

Once you get it on the page and it becomes dialogue and it becomes the mechanics of scenes, in some ways, suddenly you're down in the middle of the forest as opposed to in a helicopter looking at the topography of the map.

For instance, you know, the actors, whenever actors will come up to me and start talking about, start asking about, okay, but in this scene, I'm playing it this way, but I actually am like doing this and that.

But I'll generally, my answer to them will always be just, I've done all that work in the background so that what you should be able to do is just play the dynamics of the scene as they're on the page.

And that should pull it through.

If you, just like any other scene in any other type of genre, don't be doing math in your head, just play the scene truthfully as it lies on the page.

[Blanc] That's a pleasant thing to say, isn't it?

Kenoak.

I awoke amid Kenoak.

[chuckles] That's funny.

- All these leaves and mud, they're really gonna do a number on my boots.

- Mud.

Has it rained the past week?

No, stay there!

[leaves crunching] - What?

- Whoa.

Okay, we got footprints here, so I want... Marta, stop.

- What?

What?

- Marta, stay there.

- What?

- No, Marta.

Stay there, Marta.

- Did I hear-- - No, no.

- Did you call me?

- All right, all right.

Excuse me.

- Even an additional layer I didn't even think about and probably is helpful because of your experience with actors, yet, Agatha Christie didn't necessarily have to do that.

'Cause in addition to making a mystery, you're trying to make sure it's something that shows up on screen well.

How much does the actual visual language of cinema play into this in addition to just like crafting something that feels solid?

- Well, I would flip it, I would say job one is what you just described.

Job one is making sure it's visually engaged and that the actors have something great to play and that they've got great words and that they're, and you're, you know, driving it in all the ways the movie needs to be driven.

In addition, you're putting a mystery along and kind of almost underneath all that stuff.

[typewriter dings] - When I was watching "Wake Up Dead Man," I was thinking about misdirection.

And I know we've talked about the sheet and how not everything is not laid out, but at the same time, do you know how like when you see like a really good magic trick and you find out how it's done, you're like, "Oh, but that's so obvious.

How did I not think about that?"

And that came through in "Wake Up Dead Man" with the, what do you, the room to the side.

There are times, especially in this movie, but in the other past movies too, where when you find the answer you're like, "Well, why didn't I think about that?"

But like, and you propose different things and different ideas that keep your brain on something else.

And when you... Like, I was watching it and being like, am I just like a total rube?

Like, is it really easy to fool the audience?

- I think it's impossible to fool the audience.

I think that... I think what you can do though is present the audience with an emotional narrative to follow.

You're never going to fool the audience in terms of trying to, you know, present one solution that could be it, where it's actually that solution.

And also, that's... If you do any of that work, even if you pull it off, it's wasted 'cause the reality is a smart audience who's sitting down to watch one of these movies knows it's a whodunnit and is going to bring their own theories five times a minute to that first act that are weirder and wackier than anything you could come up with.

They're gonna create their own red herrings.

They're gonna go down their own logic wormholes of, "Oh, maybe it's this, maybe it's that," better than you could ever feed them.

And the instant you feed them something, they're gonna know it's not it anyway.

For example, the first "Knives Out," the scene where we quote, unquote, reveal that Marta, you know, gave the wrong dose to Harlan and accidentally killed him.

- You had a long day.

[crickets chirping] You wanna do drugs?

- You mean the good stuff?

- Yeah.

- [chuckles] Oh, come and send me to Lala Land.

- Just a tiny bit, okay?

- Why did I wait till my mid 80s to become a morphine user?

What a schmuck.

What a nud-nig.

[laughs] This stuff is the best.

- Oh my God.

- Is there a problem?

- This is what I just gave you a hundred milligrams of.

I messed up.

- You gave me a hundred milligrams of the good stuff.

- To me, what makes that scene tick is not misdirecting the audience with, you know, where the bag is and is it open?

Could someone else have tampered with it, blah-dee-blah, is there a label on it?

Some whatever, when she picked it up.

All that stuff is layered in there.

But to me, the only misdirection that is worth it in that entire thing is the fact that you're emotionally engaged with two characters who love each other, who we like, and one of them has just found out that she's responsible for the death of the other and is gutted by it.

The fact that there's an emotional engagement between them is what the audience then, it's impossible not to be carried along that river and to accept that narrative because you're engaged with it on a level that is not intellectual, but that is emotional.

And so that I think is ultimately the best that you can do.

[typewriter dings] - One of the things that I loved about the old Agatha Christie movies is that's how star-studded, like how many people just like, you just can't believe that that cast list of Connery and Faye Dunaway and like all the... It's crazy and so much fun.

And I know you were like, I'm sure you were like, "I need to have something like that."

But in order to do that, you need to have a lot of characters and each character needs to have a reason to be there.

- Yeah, that's a very good question because that is maybe like the hardest part of writing one of these is the fact that especially as a movie, I think as it's almost a form that in that way is much more well-suited to a novel just because you have the time to kind of lay the groundwork for all these characters.

It's, the first acts of these things are just brutal, man.

They're just so hard because trying to efficiently set up a big enough group of characters and have them all kind of have, like you said very well, a real reason for being there.

My approach to it is like with "Wake Up Dead Man," the whole thing is kind of about religion, it's kind of about faith and it's, which is something, that's the whole reason I wanted to write it.

I have a very personal connection to that.

I grew up very religious and very Christian, not just going to church, but I framed my whole world through my relationship with Christ when I was a teenager through my mid 20s.

And I'm not a believer anymore.

And so, I have a lot of very complicated relationships with faith, both in the personal sense, and also religion in the bigger sense, especially right now.

[tense music] [Jud] Here we go.

It was a 3:00 PM service.

Just the regulars.

There was a strange tension in the air.

I can't recall the homily, but it felt different.

The anger felt less calculated, more unhinged.

[dramatic music] As always, after the homily, Wicks was spent, emotionally and physically, and needed some time to recover.

He would duck into the small storage closet just to the side of the sanctuary so he'd be outta sight.

- Every single one of the characters is me expressing a different fragment of my relationship with faith.

And that does a couple of things.

First of all, beyond just external things of, oh, this person's a cellist and this person's a sci-fi writer, it gives them each, as you put it, a reason to be there.

It gives them each a different perspective and a different way they're coming at the central theme, but also connects them all to that central theme.

The other thing it does, which I think is essential, especially when you're writing characters who have some degree of despicableness to them, is it starts you as a writer from a place of empathy.

And it starts you, the essence of each one of those characters, is what you connect to in them.

Even the ones who are going to be the quote, unquote, bad guys or whatever.

In that way, I mean, you guys know this as writers, you gotta, it's similar to acting, like you have to find your way into everyone, every character.

[typewriter dings] - I sense anger and I sense cynicism in part of what you're writing along with the resolution and along with empathy too.

So can you talk about how you use that empathy towards your character to kind of mirror your own experience?

- You have to find the living, beating heart at the center of it.

You have to find the thing that you're angry about or that drives a thing you're conflicted about, the thing questioning in yourself, and you have to make sure that that's at the heart of one of these.

Otherwise, that stuff becomes really empty really quickly.

It was such a personal topic to me.

And Father Jud is played by Josh O'Connor, is kind of the main character in it.

And then Blanc, when Blanc enters the story, he and Jud, much like in the other movies, kind of form effectively a team and team up.

And they have absolutely opposite views of religion.

Father Jud is very... His goal is to be Christlike.

And he very, very much wants to help people.

And he believes that Christianity and Christ can do that deeply.

Blanc is exactly the opposite and is very cynical about the church.

And I started off the relationship with like a nice long dialogue scene in the church just between the two of them where they get into it and they talk it out between them.

- Well... [chuckles] Isn't this something?

- Right?

It's hard to be in here and not feel His presence.

- Whose?

Oh, God.

Oh yeah, right.

[laughs] Yeah.

- You're not a Catholic.

- No, very much not, no.

[chuckles] Proud heretic.

I kneel at the altar of the rational.

- Uh-huh.

You weren't raised in the faith?

- My mother is... Was very, very religious, you know?

- Were you close with her?

- No.

When I was a boy, we... But it's- - Complicated?

- It's complicated.

- Family?

- Yeah, that's right.

- And I think the reason I felt okay getting into that is because it's not like I identify with one or the other and I'm loading the dice or trying to compensate or whatever.

I have both of those perspectives in me and they're both very deep and very true.

And so I think that's always the best thing you can do as a writer to have these two things you believe and then let them fight on the page, I think.

You know, and then let them reconcile by the end and kind of find common ground.

- I know you're not writing the fourth one yet, but you do see a world where... Do you see a world where Blanc can come back, where mysteries can come back?

And as you're doing this, are you thinking about progressing Blanc as a character or is he more of a Poirot kind of static figure as the mysteries around him evolve?

- Yeah, I mean, I would be... I feel very, very... I just feel so energized after making this movie, and I would be so thrilled if I could, you know, with Daniel and I, if he stays excited, if people keep digging them, I can see coming back and for the rest of my life being very happy making more of these.

'Cause I think in the context of each movie and in "Wake Up Dead Man" in particular, you do learn quite a bit about him.

He has a real journey.

Just like with Poirot, Poirot always does too in each book.

But for me, my intent with these is, I like Blanc as a detective.

I like the story to be the story of the mystery and Blanc to be revealed through his function in the mystery.

[typewriter dings] [Narrator] You've been watching Reinventing the Classic Whodunnit: A Conversation with Rian Johnson on "On Story."

"On Story" is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story Project, that also includes the On Story radio program, podcast, book series, and the On Story archive, accessible through the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

To find out more about On Story and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.

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