Knives Out Sequel: Director
Rian Johnson on VFX and Edit

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.

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.

I spoke with Johnson about making the film and his love of post and VFX.

This one has way more visual effects 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 visual effects. 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, and he is very good at dealing with all the technical aspects of editing, and managing effects turnovers and so on.

Can you talk about working with Bob Ducsay on the edit?
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 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.”

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