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Although it lasted only a week, writer-director Rian Johnson won the battle for wide theatrical distribution of Netflix’s Glass Onion: Knives Out Mystery. Nevertheless, he lost another one directly related to it.
It turns out that Johnson prefers the title “Glass Onion” over the subtitle for his mystery-thriller starring Daniel Craig.
“I’ve tried hard to make them self-contained,” Johnson told The Atlantic, pointing to Glass Onion and its forerunner, Knives Out, which was released in 2019.
“Honestly, I’m pissed off that we have A Knives Out Mystery in the title. You know? I want it to just be called Glass Onion. I get it, and I want everyone who liked the first movie to know this is next in the series, but also, the whole appeal to me is it’s a new novel off the shelf every time. But there’s a gravity of a thousand suns toward serialized storytelling.”
Installment
Johnson also talks about the 2017 Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi, and how difficult it is to wrap up a movie that’s part of a larger story.
“Look, in terms of the Star Wars movie I did, I tried to give it a hell of an ending,” he says.
“I love endings so much that even doing the middle chapter of the trilogy. I tried to give it an ending. A good ending that recontextualizes everything that came before it and makes it a beautiful object unto itself — that’s what makes a movie a movie.
“It feels like there’s less and less of that. This whole poisonous idea of creating [intellectual property] has completely seeped into the bedrock of storytelling. Everyone is just thinking, How do we keep milking it? I love an ending where you burn the Viking boat into the sea.”
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Movie Breakdown
The cast and creator of Glass Onion: Knives Out Mysteries have a lot of mysteries, but this is a lucky one. Because a great crime thriller needs a mystery.
Though they are, of course, well-trained to remain silent on the film’s key plot details, we try to get the majority of the actors and writer/director Rian Johnson to discuss all those in an EW Around the Table.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, the sequel to 2019’s Knives Out, sees a group of old friends with unresolved grudges visit Miles Bronn’s (Edward Norton) private island for a weekend of murder mystery games.
It was intentional that some of the synopsis descriptions were taken directly from the news. Johnson has frequently singled out the writings of Agatha Christie as an influence on his growing series.
“So much of our perception of her is that it’s period pieces, and it’s through this hazy, gauzy nostalgia of the past,” the Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery creator said.
“But she was writing to exactly her time and place.
“So, when we have characters who are influencers, who are Instagram models, who are beleaguered assistants, who are rockstar scientists, who are fashionistas, who are politicians pissing everybody off on both sides of the aisle, who are tech billionaires — all of these are the people that Agatha Christie would be writing about right now.”
Glass Onion Cast Discussion
The entire cast was open and honest with EW about the people they looked up to for character inspiration, including influential people from Los Angeles, a diverse group of tech leaders, and the inventor of the SuperSoaker.
However, for Kate Hudson, who portrays Birdie Jay – a model, we can learn everything we want to know about the characters from their initial group introduction, which takes place while they are waiting to board a yacht in the Mediterranean.
“The great reference in this is how we all wear masks,” Hudson says, pointing out to the movie’s inclusion of the COVID pandemic in its plot (while perhaps also leaning a little on the meta side).
“You got Lionel (Leslie Odom Jr.), [the scientist] showing up double-masked. I’m showing up with, like, a lace or mesh mask. Claire (Kathryn Hahn) is showing up with it hanging down like a chin strap. Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) has a very chic and tight mask.”
Bron, the millionaire owner of private islands, may have drawn inspiration from a wide range of people, while Johnson maintains that variety was substantial.
“If I thought about anybody to base this on specifically, it got very boring very quickly,” Johnson said. “It had to be an amalgam. It had to be more about the character and relationship to the power structure.”
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Norton Take on Miles
Even more unexpectedly, Norton compares Miles and his technique to Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, played by Marlon Brando.
“To be able to take the best of the worst qualities from so many of these people and put them all into one guy was the fun in it,” he elaborated.
“Sometimes when you look at certain characters that we love, a lot of times what someone’s doing is taking something that actually is a little bit too heightened and pulling it down into being believable.
“If you really look at what Tennessee Williams is writing with Stanley Kowalski, on paper, it’s almost too much masculinity. But somehow it ends up representing something great. Miles is the Kowalski of tech douchebags.”
Furthermore, Odom makes fun of the fact that he kept so many secrets, leaving him to wrestle with serious ethical dilemmas.
“Lionel’s hiding everything he feels about Miles,” he reflects. “All that was buried — the guilt that we have. These people have been pushed out of line of their integrity by Miles. We had a lot of fun. But there were real-world stakes.”
Even with all on the table, there are still plenty of surprises in Glass Onion. You can do so starting today with a unique one-week theater engagement before the mystery film debuts on Netflix on December 23.
