Knives Out director Rian Johnson on revamping the whodunnit for the modern era
- Johnson did not play by the rules by having a conventional ending and instead made it a ‘whydunit’, with droll social commentary throughout
- Star-studded cast including Daniel Craig and Chris Evans also had a great time making it, which shows in their performances
While the concept of genre has lost favour among some artists, others adamantly embrace it.
Filmmaker Rian Johnson considers himself to be the latter sort, pointing to his latest project as proof. Knives Out , released internationally this week, is a whodunit revamped for the modern era.
“I’ve always loved genre and working in it. I find it gives me freedom, weirdly, an opportunity to work within that space. One of the obvious things genre gives you is a shared grammar with the audience,” the writer-director says.
“It gives you a chessboard to play on with the audience. They know when you’re playing by the rules. They know when you’re breaking them.”
With Knives Out, Johnson broke the rules on multiple levels – perhaps not unexpectedly, given the inventive storytelling of his last feature, Star Wars: The Last Jedi . Not only did he subvert expectations of the genre by embedding reveals throughout, as opposed to a whopper at the end – which he described as “putting the engine of a Hitchcock thriller into a traditional whodunit” – but he also defied industry trends by writing his own mystery.