Rian Johnson admits he felt apprehensive at first about the huge twist in the second installment of his whodunit franchise as he's worried it would not work.
- Jan 4, 2023
AceShowbiz - Rian Johnson had to be "dragged kicking and screaming" to the big twist in "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery". There is a mid-movie reveal in Netflix's new Benoit Blanc adventure - which stars Daniel Craig as the detective - involving Janelle Monae's character Andi, who has actually been murdered with Monae playing her identical twin sister Helen posing as her sibling to find her killer.
"I guess the primary thing was, it can't just be seeing it from a different angle. It has to be enough of a basic perspective shift that there's a new tension that's introduced in the repeat of all the different scenes," Johnson told The Wrap. "This is what led to the idea of twins. By the process, I was dragged kicking and screaming to identical twins. I didn't want to do it, it seemed like a horrible trope."
The 49-year-old director admitted he tried to consider whether or not the audience would accept the twist, and he thinks the placement of the reveal makes it work. He added, "[I thought] 'Will the audience ever forgive me for this?' I think we get away with it because it's not like a reveal at the end – it's a complication in the middle that leads to a deepening of the stakes and the story."
His comments come as the director has also responded to fans calling for a "Knives Out" crossover with The Muppets. He said, "It's a joke that I thought was pretty brilliant, and I ended up giving (it) some serious thought. As much as I take the murder mystery genre seriously, I take the genre of a Muppet movie seriously."
He believes that Craig's sleuth could clash with the sensibilities of Jim Henson's characters. He explained, "I think those two things have very different rules. You can either have a Benoit Blanc mystery that has Muppets in it, but they'll feel out of place. Or you can have a Muppet movie that Benoit Blanc is in, but it'll feel like a Muppet movie."
