Rian Johnson - 'Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery' [LIVE]

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0:35Good evening, everyone. Thank you for being here. I'll share with our listeners, who are obviously not getting the visuals, that we are in beautiful Newport Beach, and thrilled to be back here for a conversation tonight with the recipient of this year's Festival Director Award. This 51-year-old has been described by GQ as one of modern Hollywood's most unpredictable directors, by the New York Times as a pop culture savant with technique to spare, and by Natasha Lyonne as one of our greatest living auteurs, and I think we can all agree about that. He has written and directed seven feature films, 2005's Brick, 2008's The Brothers Bloom, 2012's Looper, 2017's Star Wars The Last Jedi, 2019's Knives Out, 2022's Glass Onion and now 2025's Wake Up Dead Man.

1:30He directed three of the greatest episodes of one of the greatest TV shows of all time. That's, of course, the AMC drama series Breaking Bad. And he has created and written or directed five episodes of the Peacock comedy series Poker Face. Recently named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World, he has also won Directors Guild and National Board of Review Awards and has been nominated for Producers Guild, Writers Guild, Golden Globe, Critics' Choice, BAFTA, Spirit, and Emmy Awards, not to mention twice for an Oscar. That was for Best Original Screenplay for the first Knives Out film and Best Adapted Screenplay for the second.

2:11And I think we're going to make it a hat trick later this year, early next year in all likelihood. That is, of course, Wake Up Dead Man, which the audience in this theater has just seen, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival back in September, and which Netflix will release in theaters on November 26th, and then on its streaming service on December 12th. And so to talk about all of the above and much more, would you please join me in welcoming Mr. Ryan Johnson.

2:46Thank you. Thank you, guys. thank you guys thank you guys for being here also also if anyone needs to go pee please do it, don't be I totally understand and Scott, thanks for being here I'm thrilled to be here, thank you I've known you for a few years but I did not really know as much about your story as I should have, I now realize from preparing for this conversation so I want to take the audience and all of us through just to set the scene. Where were you born and raised, and what did your folks do for a living? Well, I was born in Maryland. I was a kid in Colorado, but then from junior high onward, I was in San Clemente, California.

3:33Yeah. And my father was a... None of my family were in the entertainment business. My father was in the home building business. My mother, who is here tonight, Janet, there she is. yeah take a bow there she is uh raised my siblings and i in uh in denver and in beautiful san clemeni california you have been more candid than than others in saying that as a young person you were a bit of a nerd and that's now a badge of honor but let's talk about what that actually looked like how how would you describe your childhood interests and how they eventually led you to two things that were apparently separate and then found their way into merging with each other and that's filmmaking but also writing.

4:25If anyone here has weird kids who are just sitting down scribbling all day, encourage them because my parents absolutely did that with me. I was one of those kids who was just writing stories from a young age and then in junior high when I was going to Shorecliffs junior high I went to the mall, the Michigan Viejo Mall and got my first Super 8 camera and started making movies. And then I realized with my friends that you could get away with, instead of writing a book report about a book, you can make a movie about it, and they would accept that. And so my friends and I were just constantly making movies through high school.

5:03Among them, the Moose Brothers? Oh, geez, you've done your research. Can you tell, just as a quick example of apparently 100 or so short films that you made in high school just as a case study what was the moose brothers moose brothers was a claim it was incredibly clever uh it was a claymation parody of the blues brothers you would never guess that uh with cows as the uh but uh yeah and um and because we couldn't afford a camera that actually had single frames which is what you need for claymation it was more like it was definitely not anything that Guillermo would approve of but yeah okay so people who have seen the movie adaptation will recall some laughs at the expense of a gentleman who is clearly modeled on Robert McKee a screenwriting kind of guru how did you cross paths with Robert McKee well I've never met the man yeah that Nick Cage movie adaptation there's a scene in it if anyone remembers the movie where he goes to a screenwriting seminar and Brian Cox plays basically Robert McKee and just bellows at everybody and kind of but so Robert McKee is a real guy and my dad who like I said was not in the movie business but I think always wanted I know always wanted to be because he told me he always wanted to be and I think my dad was such a ham I think he would have away some years ago but um when i was in high school my dad went to one of mckee's how to write a screenplay seminars over a weekend in la i was 17 years old he knew i was into movies and so he drove me up there with him and i sat in on that seminar and literally everything i know about screenplay structure and how to write screenplays i learned in that weekend so god bless robert McKee and Brian Cox for playing him so well.

7:01Totally. Can you share, you took a bit of a circuitous route to the USC School of Cinematic Arts, which has produced a lot of incredibly talented filmmakers, including George Lucas, who I know you hold in a very high regard, like a lot of us. Why was it not direct to USC School of Cinematic Arts? Well, because, I mean, you mentioned I made a ton of shorts in high school. That's kind of all I did. So my grades were really, really, really bad. So I got rejected from USC's film school. But at the time, USC was actually not that hard to get into the actual university. So I got in. I got rejected from film school.

7:41So I just went undeclared. And I knew the first two years of the undergraduate program were general ed courses. So I just took general ed courses and kept reapplying every semester and kept getting rejected, rejected, rejected. And finally, the end of my sophomore year came around. I had to declare a major, and I got rejected again. So I became an English major. At that point, I had made tons of friends who were film students, and I realized you could kind of sneak into the classes, and they wouldn't stop you anyway. So I had kind of cobbled together a film education anyway. But then the midterm application period rolled around, and I thought, ah.

8:23And so I wrote a very like obnoxious 19 year old writing like a screw you letter kind of to USC and I would not advise this. If there are any films if there are any teenagers in the audience thinking of film school, don't do this. But I submitted it and they let me in based on that. So again, bad bad idea. Don't do it. And I hope that letter has been destroyed. But so I got in a semester late and basically did the program in three semesters. I think it was during your time there, maybe slightly before, slightly after, that you were being exposed to some of the great classic movies of American cinema, including one that relates to somebody who just passed away less than a week ago.

9:11From what I understand, Annie Hall was a very important movie for you. Is that true? Yeah, I loved Annie Hall. And my family was really into movies and um that was kind of in many ways sort of a big center point of i have a big family and we're all really close and um we love two things we love movies and we love fighting about stupid shit so my granddad like showed me fellini movies and my my dad showed me like scorsese movies when i was way too young to see him and yeah then and annie hall was yeah Yeah, I mean, Annie Hall was one of the first movies I saw that felt like it had the richness of a good novel and got Diane Keaton in that movie and all her performances.

10:00Yeah, just, yeah, extraordinary.

10:05So you graduate from USC in 1996, and I believe almost immediately began working on the script that would become your first feature, Brick. You've said that it, quote, is really my attempt to capture the impact that reading Dashiell Hammett for the first time had on me, close quote. So before we talk about Brick and the odyssey that you went on to get that made, just how did you first discover Dashiell Hammett? And why do you think it responded to his work? How did it shape what you were trying to do? And thank you for the stray whoops. I like the little there was like little I appreciate it yeah so I I graduated from film school I was like just out of film school and I was basically my first movie brick was a very very weird sort of like you said it's set in the modern day then was a modern day high school and San Clemente High School and it's essentially like the Maltese Falcon set in high school and all the kids talk as if they're in the Dashiell Hammett novel.

11:20Very, very strange. But it made sense to me, I think, because through actually a film called Miller's Crossing, a Coen Brothers film that I was obsessed with, that's how I discovered Dashiell Hammett's novels. And I just blew through all of them. And there was something about the world that Hammett creates and my sort of mythologized emotional memories of high school which I was 22 and I think in life we tend to really kind of mythologize and think a lot about whatever kind of period of our lives we just came out of and so memories of high school when I was just out of college were very rich for me and there's something about the world that Hammett does which felt kind of cruel and felt very socially stratified and felt like it had all these rules to it that these social rules that no one was quite sure of except for this one guy who was the detective who could just kind of smash through all of them and it felt like sort of a fantasy of what I what a lot of us I think wish we could have done in in high school so so anyway it made it It made sense to me, so I wrote this kind of strange mashup.

12:30It was so strange, it took the rest of my 20s, basically, trying to get it made. I was going to ask, so many of us saw and really loved the film once it got made, but what was the resistance from 97 when you started writing it to 05 when it finally got done and went to Sundance? What were you hearing, and what were you doing to sustain yourself during those years? It was disappointing that the film wasn't like people weren't throwing money at it. It wasn't surprising, though, from my description of it. It was a very strange film, as strange as it is on the screen. You can just imagine reading it on the page.

13:11It's very execution-dependent, I guess, would be the words. And I was a first-time filmmaker. I didn't have any connections in the film business at all. I didn't have many social skills. so I wasn't great at networking and doing the hustle and doing the thing you're supposed to do. So it was kind of just a very long, slow build of getting the script literally to anyone who would read it. Steve Yedlin, who's been my best friend since I was 17, since we met on the student film set, he's my cinematographer for all of my films, including this one. Steve was... Steve! Yeah. Was that Steve's mom? Is Steve's mom here?

13:55He was actually working on sets out of school, which I wasn't, you know, I couldn't even get work on sets, but he was working on sets, so he would carry a few copies of the script with them, and if he spotted a producer he liked, he would try and get them to read the script. So it was a lot of that. Eventually, I mean, anyone in here who's ever, you know, tried to get something made, you know it's the hardest thing in the world is getting someone to actually write a check for you to make your first movie. And so it was just a lot of failure. And finally, I met my producer to this day on all my movies, Rom Bergman, who is also here.

14:33Everybody's here. Take a go.

14:38And Rom didn't find the money for it. I'll tell you how we found the money. But Rom kind of unlocked the key to getting it made which is another thing that um i feel like i've been talking about this for a while but this is this is something that i think anyone out there who's who's a young filmmaker who's who's looking down the barrel of game their first thing made i think the first thing the the way that we all start going about it is we get our script to a friend of a friend who's like a producer and they break the script down and they tell you okay you will need three million dollars to make this script and then you think I will need three million dollars to make this script and you never get three million dollars it's and that but that becomes the goal you think I have to get over that ledge I have to find someone to put that amount into it Rom just said to me look this is this I believe this could be really really good but I I think it's something you have to have total control over if if somehow you did get someone to give you a bigger budget for it you actually wouldn't want that because then they would want they would get scared and they would want to kind of take control away from you so so what we do is we figure out how much money we can get our hands on that's our budget and then we figure out how to make the movie for that and so that's exactly what we did um we kind of did the classic thing of just getting friends and family to invest in it and we got a couple hundred thousand dollars and we i read 450 is that right what it was every time rom tells the story the number goes down goes down so um but yeah it was not it was not much at the time yeah and just to follow up because you and rom have done everything together since then and have a production company since 2019 together just i don't want to gloss over how did you two actually find each other it was luck it was really like like a lot of things it was like a lot of a lot of work and then luck at the right moment um another producer had had the script and just got it to Ram and I met with him and I just that's the luckiest day of my life because I think Ram is the reason that I'm still making movies honestly to have a partner that knows the business and can navigate those waters which I am frankly terrible at and someone that you trust completely we both absolutely trust each other and that's especially in this industry that's a really really beautiful, really rare thing.

17:07And I'll just note, so Ram, Steve, who you mentioned, your cinematographer, both everything since Brick, so right out of the gate, you've worked on everything together. Your composer, Nathan Johnson, who is your cousin, has done everything except The Last Jedi with you. Except Star Wars. We let that John Williams guy. We give him a shot. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who became your leading man also also my cousin joe's not he's not i wish i wish he's i had those except wake up dead man right he's been in every one of them he's in wake up dead man oh yeah yeah did anyone hear joe's voice baseball announcer oh he's calling the he's calling the baseball games yeah that's joe yeah and i think also all but one for another actor noah noah segan who plays the pizza guy in this and he's yeah, he's a good buddy.

18:03So your movie gets into Sundance, was awarded a special jury prize for originality of Vision, went on again, let's say whatever, approximately$450 ,000 was the budget, grosses $4 million. Did it gross that? I'll take it. Okay, we'll check but I mean, it did very well. And suddenly, Rian Johnson is somebody who people are talking about. What was that moment like for you and how then did you end up going to something that had even been percolating in your mind before Brick which was the Brothers Bloom the story of these two con artist brothers out for one last kind of grift together ended up being made with Mark Ruffalo and Adrian Brody and Rachel Weisz in 2008 but how do you go from Brick to that both just literally how did that happen but also in terms of scale and size because in this case now i believe the budget was 20 million dollars which is a big way up from however many hundred thousand dollars the the prior one was yeah i mean so we took brick to sundance and focus features bought it and then they wanted to um we went down the road with them in terms of brothers bloom we ended up making it with um end game with with uh jim stern at end game i mean i guess first of all the thing is is and i'm very very actually grateful for this that sort of the culture of um franchise movies big franchise movies kind of snapping up young genre directors of sundance didn't exist then it's not that i you know kind of you know went and just did my own thing.

19:45I think if at that point I had been offered Aardvark Man 8, I would have taken it in a heartbeat, I think. But that wasn't a thing. So it really was just you write the next movie and you make it. Because I had been broke in LA in my 20s trying to get brick made, I had never traveled. And so I kind of wrote a globetrotting conman adventure to travel. It also kind of has that second movie thing of just, I was trying to, I was like I get to make another one! And I just tried to jam everything I love in life into one movie. And it was a beautiful experience making it. We were kind of like a traveling carnival, basically, like going around Eastern Europe with these movie stars making this movie.

20:28And it was romantic, and it was a wonderful experience. And nobody saw it. And it lost all of the money you just described. Well, so, yeah,$20 million was the budget. The gross was approximately$5. $5. $5, yeah. five million but nevertheless how did you feel like not great well were you but like were you uh were you worried i was more than worried i was i was you know if i if i hadn't had rom bergman by my side and jim stern at endgame who financed uh financed uh brothers bloom um i would have i rightly should have been locked away in a deep cell of directors jail uh for that but rom was just like, okay, figure out what's next and write it.

21:16And I had had this idea for kind of a genre, for kind of a hard genre movie that was a time travel thing. And I also was very much freaked out of did I just make something that I love and was very important to me, but did I just totally blow it? And so I kind of got back to work, and I really put the screws to myself to write a really tight time travel action movie that also had tons of stuff I cared about, but that I knew was going to really deliver the goods for an audience. And Rom and Jim Stern kind of financed it, and we kind of patched, we got Bruce Willis in it, and then once you have Bruce Willis with a gun on your poster, you can get some foreign financing, and we were able to cobble together, and we made Looper.

22:04Great, another great one. and how far back was even the kernel of the idea for Looper? Because I read that this one also goes maybe even before brick. Yeah, way before brick. So when Steve and I were trying to get brick made, we realized we hit a point where we were just losing our minds because we couldn't get the thing made. And we also realized we had been thinking of nothing but money and how do we get the money for this. And we hadn't made anything in a while, so we started just making shorts again. and I made a short called The Psychology of Dream Analysis that was just shot on video over a few weekends and it really got me excited and so I wrote Looper as a short just to shoot.

22:46I think I'd planned to go with a couple of buddies down to San Pedro and just shoot it down there. I think I might have it posted on my website with the original short that I wrote with the feature. I have all my scripts up on my website. You can get them for free if you want. I've already made them so I wouldn't advise making them and so I wrote this like two page short never made it but I always kind of had it in the back of my head so that's what I developed into the future. I believe that what I'm about to ask you about happened during the four years between the release of Brothers Bloom in 2008 and the release of Looper in 2012 but it might have been some of this might have been right after Looper came out but I want to talk about how you wound up becoming involved with what is already discussed as maybe the greatest television series of all time certainly uh one of the top four or five and that is breaking bad how how'd you first hear about it well i vince gilligan um who created breaking bad and who is a a genius and also didn't inspire benoit blanc but didn't not inspire because vince has a has an accent kind of like this he's the gentlest kind of guy in the world and um so he had seen brick and just liked it and got in touch actually when he got in touch i was off making the brothers bloom so i wasn't able to i think he had asked me if i'd do something in the second season and i wasn't able to but thank god he kept my number in his rolodex and came back in season three and um yeah and offered me the the bottle episode of uh it was called fly and it was a kind of a very distinct episode that was just really brian cranston aaron paul in one room and one lab for the whole thing and it was um just incredible again to work in that concentrated way with those two incredible actors and yeah and okay so fly that episode was 2010 you then come back in 2012 for 51 but then the one that is going to be discussed till uh the end of time and again there are people that think this is maybe the greatest episode the greatest hour of television in the history of television which is pretty high praise but it's worthy of it is the 2013 episode which forgive me if I mispronounce it, but Ozymandias.

25:15That's it. Yeah. And just to remind people, first of all, Vince himself has called it the best episode we ever had. And this is the one where I guess we could say that sort of Walt sees the consequences of what he's been doing. Is that a way to put it without giving too many specifics? Yeah. It's where all the shit goes. The shit hits the fan. Yeah. I just directed the episode. Moira Wally Beckett not only wrote the brilliant script for it, but also is the reason I got to direct it, because she and Sam Catlin had written Fly, and then Sam had written the second one I did, and then Moira had written this one, and Vince let her basically pick what director she could have for it, because we had really gone along.

26:04She did me a solid and brought me in, but it's Moira's script, and more than that, it's the entire writing staff, it's Vince, and because that episode has the power, it does, because it really is the culmination of all of the seasons leading up to it in this incredible way. I just, I felt honestly like slightly confused that I was like, you sure Vince doesn't want to direct this one? You sure? I felt very, very lucky, and all I did was try and, yeah, try and get it on the screen as clearly as possible. When you saw it, was it, I mean, obviously you made it, but when you saw it, when you saw the, or when it was finished, when you saw the reaction to it, when you, I guess like, is that something that if you can step outside of yourself a little bit and just be objective about it, is it one of the things you're also just proudest of?

26:55I mean, it is pretty special. I am tremendously proud to have gotten to ride that bus for that stop. Again, though, I feel like a lottery winner more than phenomenally proud of it and just of everyone's work. But for me, I can step out of myself more than any of my movies, definitely, because, like I said, it's the actors, it's the writers, it's Vince's work up on the screen. I just got to do the fun part. And is it, I mean, the fact that you, all three of those Breaking Bad episodes, you directed but did not write. However, every feature film you've made, all seven, you have written and directed.

27:36Is there a major difference for the way you feel about, is it just the fact that TV and film are so different, that that arrangement that you feel differently about for TV versus film? or are you, you know, what I'm saying, like, is it essential to you that you, if you're going to direct something even as a film, that you want it to be something that you've written? Well, it's, I mean, just to be handed a Breaking Bad script that's that good and just get to really, like I said, do the fun part to direct it, it's heaven. It's heaven. It would be, yeah, because writing. You said you hate writing.

28:08I hate writing. Anyone that writes hates writing. It's the least fun part of the whole process by far. And so, but I guess the difference for me is when you direct TV, it's three, four weeks tops of work. Whereas if you do a feature, it's several years of your life. And so for me personally, what I really invest in when I do a feature is the germ of the idea coming from something inside me that I want to explore. And it's a much bigger journey. So it's hard for me to imagine, as nice as it would be, it's hard to imagine doing a feature. that I didn't write. Yeah. Well, and also, it feels like there is a very personal connection in some way to the stories of each of the films that you've made.

28:56I mean, with Brick, for instance, not only have you said it sort of reflects things that you might have liked to have attitudinally had during high school, just being a sort of person, but you literally shot it at the high school that you went to. So you... Shot it at San Clemente High. Right? And then in the case of Looper, I think what you've said is that it was sort of the father-son dynamic between, even though they're the same person, Bruce and Joe. Yeah, that's, I mean, yeah, the whole movie is kind of a big inflated way of amplifying the emotional thing of a kid sitting across from his dad and saying, I'm not going to turn into you.

29:37And then it's what sci-fi does well is it takes very, very human, recognizable situations and then projects them in a slightly skewed way on a massive wall and makes them feel bigger than life and huge. That's what I love about great sci-fi. And with Looper in terms of, you know, saying that having a father son come face to face, that literally happens in the diner. Right. and one of the things that has to happen, as I recall in that scene, but certainly just overall in the film, is there has to be a logic that everybody sort of accepts when you're dealing with fantastical things, but that is what the story is grounded in.

30:22How much time did you have to spend kind of almost interrogating your own ideas or hashing them out to make sure that somebody couldn't easily poke holes in the logic within the story. You know what I'm saying? Like that this could happen within the story. And just structurally, I think you've talked about referencing other movies to arrive at a structure that would allow that to work in Looper. Yeah, I mean, the reality is I think anyone can probably poke holes in Looper, I think. But in any movie that has time travel in it, I guess that's step number one, I think, personally. is my take on writing time travel movies is step one is recognizing that time travel makes no sense and that it's really closer to like spells in Harry Potter than it is to some kind of scientific kind of the word science should get nowhere near time travel and so your job as a when you're writing it is to make sure that it makes narrative sense and intuitive sense for the audience the example I always like to point at point to is I think one of the best time travel movies ever made which is back to the future and that script is flawless I think I think that's a Lubitsch level script it's just a Swiss watch it has something in it that is so blatantly stupid and makes no sense at all which is the Polaroid photograph which you know it's this photograph of Marty and his brother and sister and the notion is if a parent doesn't get together they're going to vanish and the polaroid photograph starts they start disappearing like their arm starts fading away the more it's getting close to that and his sister starts disappearing no big zero big zero sense that there's no but it makes absolute perfect story narrative sense and gives you an and it gives the audience such a great ticking timeline and a projection of kind of what the stakes are.

32:25And because of that, I didn't even question it as a kid in terms of logic or whatever. It makes no sense, and it makes absolute perfect sense. And I think that's kind of the brass ring that you're reaching for when you're dealing with time travel, is something that makes story sense for the audience in a really intuitive way. So that's an example of a movie that had time travel. Another movie that apparently you really referenced while working on Looper, which I am maybe densely not seeing the exact connection yet, but maybe you'll lay it out for us. Witness? Witness. Witness, yeah. The Harrison Ford film, Witness.

33:07It's such a great movie. That was a movie I studied specifically for Looper, and the thing is if you think about the structure of that movie, it will instantly make sense to you because it starts as a noir in the city, sets up these kind of murderous noir stakes, and then the second half of the movie takes place on a farm in the middle of nowhere where our hero is hiding out, and yet the movie loses no momentum or tension in that back half, and it was like a magic trick to me. And so I diagrammed, I went through and paused the DVD and kind of wrote down what happens at every minute and diagrammed out and realized, okay, they keep cutting back to the city at these different intervals, and they do this, and they do this to keep it present.

33:51I really studied that film, because that's basically the exact same structure as Looper. And it's also all about protecting this kid, and so it's a single mom and this kid, and so, yeah, anyway, yeah. No, it's great. I just copied The Witness, basically. And why wouldn't I? Why not? And it worked out well. Looper's great and did well, and Looper came out in 2012. your next feature did not come out until 2017, which we'll talk about what that was in a moment. But I think there was something else that you went down the road pretty far on after Looper that didn't ultimately come to fruition. What was that?

34:29Yeah, that was like a sci-fi thing that I was working on right after Looper. And I think I honestly kind of, I don't know, because Looper did feel, especially after Brothers Bloom, it felt like Looper kind of did well. and there is this weird thing where when you're making something, you really have your hands in the dirt and you're making it, and it's this thing all you and your friends are making, and then you put it down in the world, and especially if it's well-received, I think there's, and especially when you're first, you know, when I was, I was, you know, when I was first, still relatively early in my career, then I, I don't know, it suddenly becomes this thing that's outside of you, and you forget how you did it, I think.

35:09That sounds weird, but, And so I think I kind of freaked myself out. And I had this very high concept idea for a sci-fi thing. And the reality is I could never crack it. I could never get to the heart of it. And I kind of spun my wheels for a couple of years and never ended up getting a script done. And then was saved by Kathy Kennedy. Well, so what that, of course, brings us to is Star Wars. But how do we go from you having always, I think, had the position, not interested in franchise filmmaking. There had apparently been other people who, logically enough, approached you to do that. And the answer was no.