Clearly not one to sit on his laurels, Rian Johnson has dived back into his own, non-GFFA career and will soon be bringing us Knives Out, and here he talks to UpRoxx about his new film, and his future with the Star Wars saga.
So I’ll word this carefully, but there’s something you do pretty early in the movie that stops the audience from trying to figure out who the murderer is, which also allows the audience to relax and have fun.
So, I love whodunits. But I also do kind of fundamentally agree with Hitchcock that with whodunits, it’s just one big buildup to a surprise. That’s the anti-Hitchcock movie. And he always thought that just doesn’t work great for a film. So, for me, you take kind of a Hitchcock approach to the meat of the movie and still have all the pleasures there of a traditional whodunit. And so the various machinations in the movie were all attempts to kind of do that.
And very briefly on his continuing adventures in Star Wars land.
Your upcoming Star Wars movies, how do they end?
[Laughs] I’ll tell you exactly how they end! An iris shot to a blue credit.
So, look, I realize how guarded you are about your upcoming Star Wars movies, but do you know exactly what they are yet? When they are set. Exactly what it will be?
I’m where I can’t say anything about it. Still completely in process with it.
Does that ruin your process if you say anything?
It’s just, I don’t know. “It’s a process” means it’s a process. So that means it could change, it could shift. There are a bunch of moving parts with it.