Rian Johnson’s screenplays for both “Knives Out” and “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” move like a Swiss timepiece — smooth on the surface while their many moving parts work in concert just out of view. Johnson and his collaborators have previously discussed his process where, appropriately, so much of the planning takes place in the writer-director’s mind before he pours it out on the page. But there was one scene on which he tells Variety he labored the most, because it was the one where the entire film shifted.
“The scene between Blanc and Helen on Blanc’s New York apartment balcony is the lynchpin of the movie,” Johnson says. “It’s the scene where we reveal the structure of the entire film, showing our hand, and also where we introduce the main character, Helen.”
Johnson called that scene “a beast.” “It had so many moving parts,” he explains. “The scene has to not only orient the audience as it flips what they think they’ve been watching on its head, but it also has to introduce a new character and have us like her, get on her side, and then clearly define her mission that will carry the second half of the movie.” After almost an hour of the movie, where the audience has been watching his ensemble spar and interact, he knew that it would be a huge risk to the momentum of his story by completely changing direction.
“All of this [happens] in a long static conversation at a table at the exact midpoint of the movie, where the danger of the pace flagging is at its highest,” he says. “I was rewriting that scene up to the last moment, and then shaping it drastically in the edit.”
Prior to the scene, Johnson has introduced his characters only in relation to one another — first through their collaboration on Miles Bron’s elaborately designed puzzle box invitation, and then as they reunite, in some cases uneasily, on Bron’s private island. Until then, viewers relate to them largely in the same way that does his stalwart detective Benoit Blanc — with amusement that leads to curiosity since, in what’s expected to be a murder mystery, there’s no murder.
“The challenge before the scene is that the audience does not have an emotional proxy in this group of horrible murder mystery suspects,” Johnson says. “Blanc is the nearest thing we have, and he has to carry the water in that first half. In a big way I’m relying on the audience’s trust as the track is laid, and in the promise of the genre that a murder is coming, just be patient.”
Knowing that this sequence would disrupt the intrigue propelling the story forward — with an aim to amplify it once viewers know what’s really going on — required some skillful juggling in the editing room, even after meticulously conceiving it on the page. “The challenge immediately following the scene is that the moment we get Helen and Blanc’s mission we want to get right back to the island, but we still have some backstory exposition to get through,” he says. “Pacing those scenes up and driving them forward with a music driven montage style helped.”
The payoff to the scene is self-evident as not only is the real crime unveiled, but it explains and re-frames all that we’ve seen up to that point. But it ultimately underscores the bifurcated approach that Johnson took to his “Knives Out” sequel,” which not only needed to tell a new and interesting story, but one that distinguished itself — in form and content — from its predecessor.
“The story comes first. It’s a strange distinction between the ‘story’ and the ‘mystery,’ but I think it’s an important one,” Johnson says. “‘Glass Onion’ is the story of a woman avenging her sister’s death, and the mystery is woven out of that. The characters are created and sculpted based on the needs of that story, to give a rich tapestry not just of suspects but of obstacles to Helen reaching her goal.”
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2023-02-19 18:00:00Z
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