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Q&A with Rian Johnson, Janelle Monáe, and Ram Bergman

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Glass Onion.

When did you first conceive of this film?
Rian Johnson: The idea for this film came very very early, even when we were still making the first one, Daniel [Craig] and I, on-set, we didn’t want to jinx it — because we didn’t know whether the first one would be something people would want to see — but we said to ourselves, if this does alright… it would be really fun to keep this party going! Just because we were having such a good time with each other. And, the only thing I really knew was that I didn’t want it to be… if we were going to keep making these, I wanted to go back to the source of the inspiration for all of this, which for me is my love of Agatha Christie’s work. So I knew — as opposed to continuing on the story of the first one, or bringing back the characters from the first one — I wanted to do what Agatha Christie did with her books, which is, she took big, wild, different swings every single time. I think there’s sometimes a perception of her work that she kind of told the same story over and over, but anyone who really knows her books knows that the opposite is true: she mixed genres. Besides just changing the setting and the characters and the type of murder, she did basically a proto-slasher movie with And Then There Were None. She did gothic romance with Endless Night. She did serial killer thriller with The A.B.C. Murders. She was all over the place, in the best way! And so, that was the only thing I kind of knew, was that let’s keep making these, and let’s give them each their own reason for being, and let them each stand on their own, the way that Christie’s books did.

I want it to be a rollercoaster ride, not a crossword puzzle, for the audience

As a producer, how do you take the vision that Rian just articulated and try to execute it? 
Ram Bergman: It’s all in this man’s head! He’s the one who comes up with it. My job is just to facilitate, make it a reality. But it all comes from his brain.

Can you talk about how you came to the project?
Janelle Monáe: I think I just… manifested it, working with Rian! I had seen a film of his called Looper, have you guys seen Looper? Yes! And I was blown away. I thought to myself… “if I ever get an opportunity to work with this guy… I have to do it.” I went down a whole rabbit hole: I watched Brick, which was, you know, a high school version of a ‘whodunit,’ something innovative in that space, and then he kept it up with everything he had done up to the first Knives Out, which I loved! I was a big fan of that film. So I had already said “yes,” and then I read the script, saw the twists… looked at the character, and I was like, “hell yes!” And then they said, “we’ll be shooting in Greece… might you be available?” And I said, “f*ck yes! Get me on the first flight out! Off my couch!” So it was just a no-brainer, and then Daniel Craig… obviously who is so iconic in this role… was so gracious for inviting me to be a part of this. The whole cast, there was nothing about this role — which I got to have an opportunity to have so much fun with — that wasn’t appealing. I mean, Rian wrote this character to be so mysterious, so layered… so fun! Humorous. You have those big emotional moments… and there was action. It was a dream, as an actor, to be able to portray this role.

How did Covid impact the production?
RB: Honestly, my job was to make sure that Janelle, and Rian, and everybody else had fun… that they continued to be able to make the movie, in spite of the pandemic, and that none of them got positive covid test results! That was my goal. Because if one of them got it… we would be f*cked. We would have to be shut down for a few weeks… and blah blah blah. So, luckily, they had fun and none of them tested positive. So, I did my job.

JM: That’s very true. Ram, I think you should also tell them that you hired a spy, for each of us… I swear, even when I would step outside for a breath of fresh air… someone would appear out of nowhere who would say, “get back in that room! Get back in there!” But… we thank you for that. Thank  you.

RB: It’s all true!

How do you begin to write a story like this, with so many turns?
RJ: Well, I start… I write really structurally. So I’ll spend the first 80% of the process outlining. And I just work in little moleskin notebooks, and I need to be able to work the whole story out until I have the structure of it, and I have it really outlined, completely, scene by scene. I end up with the whole roadmap. And only then, at the very end, do I sit down and actually typing. And, I mean, the intricacies of the mystery are one thing— but anyone here who’s a writer knows that the real work goes into making the experience of watching it… I want it to be a rollercoaster ride, not a crossword puzzle, for the audience. The object is to make the audience have so much fun, they forget they’re supposed to be solving something. And that’s where the majority of the work goes, just the basic story work: what’s driving the audience’s interest? What’s keeping them engaged? What do they care about? How do we make the ending satisfying, above and beyond just the reveal of ‘whodunit?’ It’s just the basic stuff that, you know, you bang your head against the wall with for any other type of script. It’s the same stuff with something like this.

Janelle, can you talk about how the fashion in the film helped inform your character, especially since you were playing multiple people?
JM: Yes— shout out to Jenny Eagan, our wonderful costume designer. She was just… really so collaborative. She had great ideas, and I think after talking to Rian, and them talking, and we had a talk… and I feel like, at that first fitting, I just thought, “Ah— there’s Andi. Ah ha! There’s Helen… oh, there’s Helen being Andi…” You just have those little things in the costume that make such a difference: the dress that I had on, the type of fabric (it actually wasn’t a dress yet at that point), and I just thought it said so much about who she was. We got into the Grecian thing… there’s so much we haven’t even talked about, just in terms of the names of the characters! Helen… Cassandra… that whole Greek mythology angle. And it’s a lot. To answer your question, the clothes had to talk before I talked. Because a lot of those initial scenes with Andi, she actually didn’t talk. So the way her glasses looked, the dress that she had on… you felt like this was a person who was put together, but also hiding something. And her clothes were her mask. Helen’s sweater when she’s talking to [Benoit] Blanc… it’s so frumpy, and the t-shirts and all of that… and, it moves with her. Yeah, so: I think the clothes… Jenny Eagan, Rian, me… bam!

Q&A with Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Daniel Craig, and Rian Johnson

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Can you talk about writing this film and bringing these characters to life?
Rian Johnson: It all started with me loving Agatha Christie growing up. I always wanted to do a “who done it.” I thought it would be really interesting; I’m a “who done it” junkie. I watch all of them that come out. I love them all. Usually when you see them today, they’re period pieces, because they’re usually Christie adaptations. The idea of doing a “who done it” set in America in 2019, and really using that to plug into America in 2019 and to draw the characters the way Christie drew the characters from British society when she was writing, to draw that out of today and right now, seemed really interesting. Tonally, you need really good actors to ride that line of going as big as we did with this movie and still having it feel grounded to work as a movie and not tip over into parody. That’s why you hire the best actors on the planet and then it all sorts itself out.

make it feel like a roller coaster ride and not a crossword puzzle

Don, can you talk about the characters and how all of their misanthropy is tempered by some sort of internal pain?
Don Johnson: Well all of them except for my character, who does nothing happily. He’s kind of the personification of the entitled family vibe. It was fun for me to do, because I have never played a character like that before, I loved how obsequious he was and how deferential he was to Jamie Lee’s character. It was fun.

Daniel, can you talk about your character and the way he carries himself and his accent?
Daniel Craig: I was just lucky to get a script that was as richly and as well drawn out as this one. I read it and I saw it. I think it has a lot to do with Rian and I sharing a love for “who done it” films. I grew up watching the same movies as he did and watched them religiously over and over again. I kind of understood the language that Rian was using. So we looked it up and it was a gentle southern language. I inhabited the character immediately in one reading, I talked about this the other day, about as actors and how arrogant we are, we go and change this and that during our first read-through, as though we know for sure… but that did not happen when I read this script. I just read it and said to myself, “I know who this is.” I want to play it. I sort of then picked a few people, Tennesse Williams, his voice has a high pitched accent and was not very suited. Then I landed on Shelby Foote, the historian, who has this beautiful Mississippi rolling accent. He speaks slowly, but has this incredible speed of thought. He talks about things with authority and I nailed it with a great accent coach. We sat for a few hours a day for months on end. Then when we got to set, and Jenny our costume designer, whom I’ve worked with before and is great to work with, gave me the physical material and we paired the two together.

Did you have to change anything in the language so that the characters and the house functioned in the plot together?
RJ: These guys clicked into it really easily. The only thing we would adjust on set were expository scenes. I wanted to be really tuned in if the actors could not follow the through line of what was happening in any given scene. I wanted to make sure every scene was clear to everybody, because I figured if it was clear to you guys then it would be clear to the audience. That’s where ninety percent of the work on a script like this goes into is making it feel easy for the audience, making it feel like a roller coaster ride and not a crossword puzzle at the end of the day. That was the main way we did tweaks on set.

Knowing that you’re in a “Who Done It,” do you play up to that and twirl your spiritual mustache a bit?
Jamie Lee Curtis: When I first had a phone call with Rian, the only questions I had were about tone. I had done a few different types of things, I just wanted to know where he was on the scale of tone. Because it does not matter where he is. I’ll go to whatever place he wanted. He said he wanted it to be heightened reality. Very much real, but with a slight accent of heightened reality. For me as an actor, the only question is how to tell the truth. It doesn’t matter to me, I don’t care what it is. Also I’m just like Don, I’m not a fan of the genre, I don’t care about the genre, I don’t watch those movies. There are other movies that I enjoy very much, but I’m not a particular fan of this genre, but it doesn’t matter. That is the beauty of this collaborative medium. It doesn’t matter if I’m a fan or not. As an actor, it’s simply my job to tell the truth. If you’re telling the truth through Linda’s point of view, she’s in grief. She loved her father. I think she may be the only one in the family who really loved him and she lost him. That was my truth, and the rest of it was just dross as we say. It was just hilarious.