How I Wrote Knives Out — Writing Advice from Rian Johnson

This is Behind the Curtain. Today we're learning how Rian Johnson combines the whodunit and thriller genre, what the Walter White test the Ryan gives the protagonist is, and the only advice Rian Johnson thinks is worth the damn well as I started thinking about the genre I mean it's interesting Hitchcock hated whodunits famously and his whole thing about whodunits was it's a big build-up to one big surprise at the end which was a very cheap coin for him narratively and that's why he was all about suspense he's like, "give them the information early and make them lean forward in their chair" and I love whodunit and I fundamentally agree with Hitchcock so the idea approaching this was to kind of put the engine of a Hitchcock thriller in the middle of a whodunit so hopefully we get all the great stuff we still love about whodunit so we get the questioning we get kind of the old mansion and the eccentric family all the suspects and we get the great scene at the end where the detective does the Dana MA in the library and lays it all out but in the middle of it we kind of have this more suspense driven Hitchcock thriller story that centers on and the Dharma's character and so with this we do you know you can recognize we do the Columbo thing we did we basically with a couple of very crucial differences the Columbo starts with the scene where the killer does the murder and you see who it is and then it that makes it suspense not surprised that means there is no surprise you know it and you're waiting to see how Columbo is going to catch them and so we kind of do that in this movie you gotta do something that starts as whodunit turns into a Hitchcock thriller then turns back into a whodunit at the end then hopefully the feeling is that this whodunit has been hiding underneath this thriller the entire time and the thriller itself was just a bit of misdirection why the really interesting things to me was okay what if he did the Columbo thing but the audience was genuinely on the side of the quote-unquote killer if you're rooting for her to actually get away with the fact that we know you know how these things work and we know that balanc the detective always figures it out at the end and catches the the killer the very mechanics of the genre were all familiar with become the antagonist of the movie even if the detective himself is a sympathetic character that's why I have Blanc say that line to her this machine that's what it does as well I love genre you know it gives you a it gives you a game board to play on and then even just you know before I even start collaborating even for writing for myself having the boundary isn't having kind of knowing okay we're I love this kind of genre so I'm gonna try and do something that gives the audience the pure pleasure of what I love about it having bad is like the goal that then gives you yeah it gives you it gives you a field to play that gives you a chessboard to work on you know you know what I want is to eventually get to a place where we become nervous in terms of how far Martha's willing to go how to cover her tracks and is she willing to is she going to hit a place where she's willing to do things just as bad as what the family is doing in order to win at the end of the day I basically had to gave her the Walter White choice of like you know watching Jesse's girlfriend watching Jane like dying and he can do the right thing and save her or he can just be passive and do nothing and and that felt like interesting also in that moment with Martha where she's watching Fran die and she she's a nurse and she has a medical bag and she can save her but Fran has just told her I know it was you I'm gonna make you pay I mean the way that I write is I you know I write very structurally I start just kind of mapping it out and I do think in I've trained myself to think in sequences and so I draw a time line I write in the smaller moleskin notebooks and I draw a time line on one page it's just an arc line and then I split out with little you know little vertical lines and that kind of create my sequence of sequences and and split into acts basically so I do like the structure thing but those sequence I'm not at that point even thinking in terms of plot um I'm thinking in terms of story I guess we did like it's a weird how to exactly ascribe it's basically I'm thinking in terms of the audience's experience and what's drawing an audience through sequence by sequence from before each sequence what are they worried about whether they lean forward about what's the big change that happens at the end of the sequence and how does that change catapult us into the next thing that so it really is thinking as basic and fundamental as that and then plot comes next and yeah the big plot thing to figure out we're just it's stuff like the mechanics of of the morphine switch-up like how do you play that in such a way where it fits their requirements which is she has to believe she did it we have to believe she did it and I also need to be able to kind of undo it at the end in a way that makes sense the trick is to have that slight bit of silliness but at the same time you don't want it to tip over into oh come on yeah you don't you don't want to break in basically it has something in common with time travel I think in movies where it's something that doesn't really make it I mean it makes sense in terms of like the interior rules of it doesn't really make sense that someone would do this in order to you know in their the bump their grandfather off but at the same time within the telling of the story it makes perfect sense and probably more important within the genre that the audience knows the story is taking place in it makes sense this is the sort of thing people do in murder mysteries and so we buy it the only advice that I think is actually worth the dam is is to not get your head wrapped up in how do I break in how do I make a career how do i what do I do to get an agent what do I do to get into the industry that that really is putting the cart before the horse I really I really believe that your only job is to work on your voice and to work on just make as many movies as you can don't get precious don't worry about making them look professional don't worry about shooting with great equipment don't worry about any of that shoot with your phone use your friends as actors anything you do just make them make them make them make a make them and develop get better and better at telling a story with a camera and I really believe that like if you develop that and you get to the point where you're making interesting stuff and putting it out there that's the stuff that then attracts the industry to you in some shape or form the story for me was about using each one of these characters is a different facet to explore honestly kind of you know in myself more than anything else both privilege and also the more fundamental thing than that which is kind of just that basic human thing of when something you believe is yours is threaded what how do you react to it and that kind of giving a very clear spotlight as to the moral compass of every one of us and there's something about the murder mystery genre that is uniquely suited to looking at class I think because the murder mystery by its very nature it creates a little microcosm of society this contained group and then through all the suspects you're getting a cross-section of that society from the high to the low and then investigating the relationship with the top of the power pyramid and so because of that is something that by its very structure in nature is ideally suited to investigating class now what's interesting to me is the whodunit is usually done in the context of a a period piece because it's usually an Agatha Christie thing so it's usually diskin from our present time and be it's usually in Britain because again it's usually an Agatha Christie adaptation and so the idea of taking this thing that was a great x-ray machine of that stuff and applying it to America and 2018 seemed like that could in addition to be very being very entertaining also kind of yield some interesting things because I grew up reading anger the Christie because I'm just a whodunit junkie also I didn't have to go and do any real specific research for this it was more about just kind of investigating my own lifetime love with a genre and trying to kind of boil that down to its essence I guess there's a lot of math that goes into figuring out like all the connections and all the plotting and everything but I mean the analogy I always make is you know the work really goes into making sure that for the audience it feels like a roller coaster ride not a math problem and so making it feel simple even if it's complex and making a feel like one thing flows into another and you're having this ride that that that's it's where most of the work goes into even if your wall looks like you know the serial killers wall you have to make sure the audience actually can stay oriented throughout the whole thing really what's satisfying is not the sense that you could solve it although I guess technically you could but what's satisfying is that at the ends every single payoff is something that you recognize it's almost like a recognition game and so in that big explanation at the ends every single thing he lays out is something we can flashback to and show that we did set up and there's something very satisfying about that so I was thinking more about that and less about how do I build this thing where the audience you know has a chance of like solving it you know a much more useful place to write is not thinking in some other way of where the audience's head is going to be but really entirely thinking through the eyes of the characters that we're seeing the story through so I think I would go a little crazy if I started doing all the math of what is the audience gonna be thinking it's much more okay what does martha thinking I got a couple like trusted friends that I'd show it to every time my producer is someone I show it to and then just right there friends really you know people that you can like get that will really be honest with you because you want brutality in that fit you don't want brutality but you need brutality in that phase you know and then it's just working it over and over and over again and just trying to you know just simplify simplify and just but you know it sounds like you're ready you know it's it's like it the tough balance is always you get notes from people and you realize trying to parse out with a very small sample size what what notes you want to what notes you need to you need to get in there and do changes for and what notes are you know either personal preferences or quirks or how the person was feeling that that that's the part that like I feel like you never quite figure out you always kind of just got to do your best dinner hey this is Nehemiah Jordan the creator of behind the curtain if you'd like to stay up to date with the channel as well as see extra screenwriting related content go ahead and follow me on twitter the link will be in the description thanks so much for watching and I'll see you guys then you

Channel: Behind the Curtain

Views: 275,523

Keywords: behind the curtain, Rian Johnson, Agatha Christie, Detective, Chris Evans, Ana De Armas, Knives Out, Knives Out movie, How Knives Out Switches Genres (Twice), knives out trailer, rian johnson interview, rian johnson writing advice, Mystery, Crime, Daniel Craig, knives out review, bad guys iphone, knives out director, knives out scene, knives out explained, ending explained, knives out breakdown, rian johnson star wars

Id: Jd4XUCIqoFU

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 28 2020