Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion nearly shattered “a hundred times a day”
Directing a whodunit sounds like a nightmare. Thankfully, Rian Johnson knows what he's doing
Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion is exactly knotty whodunit Knives Out fans expect from the man who created both Benoit Blanc and porgs. Just as he did with the first film, Johnson makes the reveals, the fake-outs, and the mystery seem effortless. The thing glides, but it takes a lot of work to make it look so easy. We can only imagine how it felt every time Johnson shared the script with someone, hoping they didn’t point out some inconsistency that caused the whole thing to unravel. Luckily, we don’t have to imagine. In his chat for Variety’s “Directors On Directors” series, Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski asked him what that was like.
Kosinski: The plot of Glass Onion is a puzzle. Does someone ever bring up a flaw in the logic that requires you, on the fly, to rethink?
Johnson: A hundred times a day, you’ll see an actor coming towards you, and you’ll see in their eye they have a question. On a whodunit, every single time that happens, it’s the scariest five seconds, because you think they’re going to ask the question that reveals the inconsistency where this whole thing unravels. Partway through shooting Glass Onion,” there was one thing — I think Daniel caught it. It was mostly terrifying because of the idea that I know I could fix this, but, oh shit, did I miss something else? And Daniel would somehow lose faith in me and be like …
Kosinski: “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
Johnson: “He bleeds!” Yeah.
As difficult as it sounds to keep the movie’s logic in place, at least Johnson could work on the ground, where gravity isn’t constantly threatening to kill your stars and crew. Kosinski had to bear that burden, and he was left with 800 hours of footage. “We would usually do two or three camera setups on Top Gun,” Kosinski said. “But there were days — the aerial days — where we had 26 or 27 cameras going. Which, for my editor, Eddie Hamilton, almost gave him a nervous breakdown. I think we had 813 hours of footage at the end of the movie that we had to cut into two.”
Eight hundred thirteen hours of footage sounds way worse than making sure Benoit Blanc doesn’t figure out the mystery before production ends. Not that it’s a competition.