The movie that changed Rian Johnson’s life: “Redefined what film was capable of”
It’s not an easy trick to make the genre of ‘whodunnit’ cool and slick and take it out of the realms of the shows your Mum and Dad have on the kitchen TV when you go round to see them, like Midsummer Murders and Poirot, but Rian Johnson managed it with Knives Out back in 2019 and is about to make it three times in a row.
That’s because the latest twisty, “there’s a body in the house and a cast of suspicious characters knocking about’ installment in Johnson’s franchise is about to hit the big screen (and Netflix shortly afterwards) in the form of Wake up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery – and noise is that this one might actually be the best one so far.
Daniel Craig returns as the very deep southern, impeccably tailored detective Benoit Blanc, along with another presumably incredibly expensively assembled cast including the likes of Mila Kunis, Josh Brolin and Jeremy Renner, promising the usual mish-mash of characters all acting like they haven’t done a murder when any of them conceivably could have done said murder and indeed one of them actually has.
Johnson isn’t what you’d call a household name outside of film-making circles, probably because although he hit the big leagues in a massive way when he took the reins on the billion-dollar grossing Star Wars: The Last Jedi in 2017, he’s mostly worked on word-of-mouth hits like the Joseph Gordon-Levitt time travel movie Looper and episodes of TV, albeit TV that’s about as good as it gets in Breaking Bad.
Looper was the second time Johnson had worked with Gordon-Levitt, the first being his directorial debut, and the film that got him noticed, 2005’s Brick, which was a neo-noir mystery set in a California high school, with a loner trying to find his missing ex-girlfriend taken by a shady drug-dealing gang.
It was written and directed by Johnson, who had been inspired by his love of the traditional, ‘hard-boiled’ American detective stories, and although he was ignored for many years trying to get the film made he eventually pulled enough cash together from friends and family to enable production to go ahead. It ended up bringing in ten times the initial budget and put the first-time director squarely in Hollywood’s sights.
But it was a much more light-hearted affair that made him want to direct films in the first place, namely Woody Allen’s 1977 classic Annie Hall with Diane Keaton, who sadly died this year.
Johnson told author Robert K Elder: “In terms of filmmaking, I’d put it up there with (Fellini’s) 8½ in terms of a film that personally redefined for me what film was capable of… This was a film that broke so many rules in terms of film narrative, and it moved me in a way that very few other films have moved me. That’s something that, I pray to God, if I am able to keep making movies, I can only hope, 20 years down the line, maybe I’ll be able to approach.”
Annie Hall is a Manhattan-set romantic comedy that swept the board at the Oscars and is now regarded as one of the finest films ever made, despite the reputation of the man responsible for writing, directing and starring in it. The two leads, Keaton and Allen both picked up Academy awards and the film won Best Picture too, but be warned, if you don’t like Woody Allen, or Woody Allen nervously over-analysing literally everything while trying to woo women who are physically and intellectually way out of his league, then you’ll hate it, although it isn’t as pretentious as Manhattan. Johnson likes it a lot, however, which is up to him.
He concluded, “It’s magical to me. To this day, I can watch the film and try to analyse it and try to figure out how this little movie works, and it’s almost impossible. I just end up getting lost. It’s not the sort of thing that I can analyse. For me, watching the film is like a kid watching a magic trick.”
