By Iain Blair
Director/writer Rian Johnson’s 2019 Knives Out was a retro-fresh murder mystery that blended classic elements with campy comedy and ingenious whodunit. The sequel, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, is an even more ambitious thriller/mystery that once again stars Daniel Craig as detective Benoit Blanc.
Writer/director Rian Johnson
Glass Onion swaps the first film’s wintry Massachusetts setting for a sunny Greek island and features a new cast of characters that includes a pompous tech billionaire (Edward Norton), his assistant (Ethan Hawke) and some old friends, all summoned to a luxury villa with an ostentatious, onion-shaped glass atrium perched on top.
Sequels to big hits are notoriously tricky, and Johnson agrees. “It was a little scary after so many people liked the first one, and then trying to live up to it. You don’t want to disappoint people.”
I recently spoke with Johnson — who got an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay — about making the film and his love of post and visual effects.
This one has way more VFX than the first.
It’s a much bigger movie with a lot more complicated VFX, but luckily my longtime editor and collaborator, Bob Ducsay (ACE), is very experienced with VFX. Apart from us doing Star Wars: The Last Jedi together, he’s done a number of big movies with a lot of VFX, such as Godzilla and Catch Me If You Can. He is very good at dealing with all the technical aspects of editing and managing effects turnovers and so on.
We started early on, but we weren’t that crunched for time, so it wasn’t one of those horrible situations where you have to pick your takes before the movie even comes into focus in post. But we did start turning over VFX shots pretty early on.
Did you do much previz?
We didn’t because there weren’t any sequences that were so complicated or completely effects-driven that we had to previz them. Most of the VFX were to do with set extensions and background elements, like the Glass Onion or the glass dock that comes out of the sea. I like to storyboard all my shots, so I just never got used to using previz as a tool.
How tough was the shoot in Greece?
I wrote this in 2020 during the lockdown, so setting it on a Greek island was very appealing (laughs). We shot on the mainland for the parts supposed to be on the island and shot on Spetses for the parts supposed to be on the mainland. It was wonderful and gorgeous but also quite challenging, mainly because it was summer and very hot, especially for the actors in their costumes, and also because of all the logistics.
Tell us about post. Where did you do it?
We cut it here in LA at my T-Street offices and did most of the post here. Then we did all the sound up at Skywalker. This is the third film I’ve done up there. Josh Gold was our supervising sound designer and editor, and it was a great experience again.
Glass Onion marks editor Bob Ducsay’s fourth film with you. How do you collaborate, and what were the main editing challenges?
Bob came out to the shoot with us in Greece and then Belgrade, so he was on-location the whole time and doing the assembly as we shot. That’s so helpful because he has such a great story sense. He can let me know not only if we missed an insert shot and so on, but also something as story-specific as, “this character’s perspective is underrepresented in this scene.”
Because I’ve been involved with him since the early stages of the script and we’ve discussed the story so much, he’s really tuned in to what’s important for the overall movie, and he saved my butt quite a few times by pointing out stuff on-location. Then we took the assembly back to LA, and balancing all the different tones and finding the right pace was the big challenge, along with keeping the story moving. It was particularly challenging on this, as it’s this complex jigsaw puzzle and everything is there for a reason. We ended up culling quite a bit during the edit, but it’s difficult, as you still have to play fair with the audience and have all the mystery elements make sense.
I really love the whole post process, especially the editing. Often you make a lot of structural changes in the edit and move stuff around, but when it’s a mystery like this, there’s not a lot of structural reorganizing you can do in the edit. All the elements are pretty much set.
In the end it’s really a matter of trusting your gut and then screening it for small groups of friends and family and asking if anything really annoyed them. (Laughs)
Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig
Can you talk about working with visual effects supervisor Giles Harding?
Like Bob, Giles was on this project from start to finish and on-set for the whole shoot. He was a dynamo and had so much energy. It was a deceptively complicated shoot that needed a lot of VFX for the Greek locations and for all the sets we built, including the interior of the Glass Onion and atrium space. We used greenscreen to create that, but it also needed set extensions because our big set only went up to the balcony — there was no top level.
Then for the big finale sequence with the fire, Weta came on board and took care of all that. We also had a lot of other vendors, including Lola, Buf, DNeg and Accenture Song, who all did various stuff. I really enjoy working with VFX and all the companies. Obviously, my most extensive VFX work was in Star Wars, and it’s entirely different, as you’re creating the total geography of shots. This was more about coordinating all the VFX with our production designer and then executing them in a very realistic way so they’re all seamless.
Can you talk about the importance of music and sound to you.
It’s so important. I grew up being such a huge fan of the Coen brothers and all their sound work and how integrated it was as a story element. That always inspired me, and I’m extremely involved with all the sound and working with the team at Skywalker down to a very granular level.
For the score, I worked very closely with Nathan Johnson, who’s my cousin. We’ve been making movies together since we were 10 years old, and he’s done all my movies. He’s one of the first people I start talking to, even when I’m writing the script, and he also comes on-location with us and spends time on-set, which is very unusual. He’ll absorb the atmosphere, and we’ll discuss ideas, and it’s very similar to the way I collaborate with Bob. He’s involved with the whole story process from very early on. We wanted a big score, romantic and lush, like a Nino Rota score, and he did a great job.
Rian Johnson
What about the DI? Who was the colorist, and how closely did you work with them and the DP?
We did it at FotoKem with colorist Phil Beckner. We shot this on the ARRI Alexa, and DP Steve Yedlin (ASC), who’s done all my projects, is a genius with color science. He’s not only made his own LUTs but his own film emulation processes and all the grain, and he actually programmed a lot of the guts that made this look so filmic to me.
As for working with Steve and the colorist, when we first began doing the DI, I tried sitting in on sessions, but I quickly found it to be quite useless and even counterproductive because it all started looking the same to me. So I found it most useful for me to treat it like a film-grading session, where I let them do their thing, and then I come in with fresh eyes and give notes and do that a couple of times.
Did the film turn out the way you first envisioned it?
It exceeded what I imagined as I was writing it. The most exciting thing for me is when you bring in all the collaborators, especially in post, who elevate every aspect of the project.
Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.
