Rian Johnson has written some incredible movies. Movies like Brick and Looper are still incredibly popular with cinephiles. His two previous movies starring Daniel Craig as Bernoit Blanc, Knives Out and Glass Onion, have been complex murder mysteries while also subverting genre tropes in interesting ways. Perhaps all his previous work set the bar high, as Johnson says his new Benoit Blanc story, Wake Up Dead Man, is the hardest script he’s ever written.
Writing any sort of mystery story has to be difficult. The entire idea is to come up with a story that, while it could be figured out by the audience, is also difficult enough that it is unlikely to be solved before the end. However, Rian Johnson tells Empire that part of what made Wake Up Dead Man so difficult to write was its subject matter, due to his own religious upbringing. He said…
This was definitely the hardest script I’ve ever written. I grew up very Christian — not just raised going to church, but with a belief in God, and a relationship with Christ being incredibly central to the way I framed everything in the world around me. And I’m not anymore. I have lots of people in my life that I love that still are [religious], and there are things about that time that I still really treasure. I have a lot of complicated feelings about it.
The Wake Up Dead Man trailer shows us that the murder victim will be Monsignor Wicks, played by Josh Brolin, who is seemingly killed while inside a locked room. That premise alone is the sort of thing that would make most mystery writers sweat, but it was more about the religious elements of the story that caused Johnson to spend months simply thinking about the movie before he even started to write it.
The fact that the story surrounds a church isn't simply a setting. To hear Johnson tell it, the movie will deal with religion and faith in a major way, and while Johnson isn’t religious himself anymore, he still wanted to approach all of it in a way that gave the proper respect to the subject matter. He continued…
That’s the real reason the script was so hard to write. It’s something I do take really seriously. I wanted to explore it in a really honest way, while also not being facile about it, or — God forbid — moralistic or irreverent.
Perhaps the deeper themes of Wake Up Dead Man are part of the reason that the Knives Out sequel is the most straightforward mystery of the trilogy. It looks like Rian Johnson gave himself quite a challenge with the new movie. We’ll all see whether or not he succeeded when the film hits theaters for a brief run next month, ahead of it being made available with a Netflix subscription in December.
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