After directing the final episode of the saga Star Wars, The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson has revived a genre that was thought to be dead: the mystery film, in the style of Death on the Nile or Bloodhound. At daggers drawn, released in theaters in 2019 just before the pandemic, almost convinced that entertainment cinema did not need superheroes to survive. Today, Detective Benoit Blanc’s second investigation, still played by Daniel Craig, is released on Netflix. The director, who, for the moment, is exclusively dedicated to this series of investigations, looks back on the unexpected meeting he organized between Agatha Christie and the world of tech.
“Glass Onion” differs from “A loggerheads” by its scope – the means implemented, the themes addressed…
By its scale and by its tone. The tone matches the scale of the film. From the moment I put a tech billionaire at the center of the plot, the film became bigger, if only because it is located on a private island. It was getting bigger because it’s a luxury vacation movie, but also because it’s a satirical comedy. I love that each of these films finds its own tone and scale. The next one may be more modest and darker.
Does recent news make you feel like you’ve been prophetic when it comes to tech billionaires?
I wrote the movie in 2020, and it’s not about any particular billionaire. The film is not very subtle, it talks about the big lies and the power structures through which people who want to preserve their interests reinforce these big lies. The idea was to take the mystery film genre, which has so often taken the form of costume film, and make it a very contemporary film. Glass Onion, it’s a way of crying out in the face of the carnivalesque unreason of the last five or six years, in the face of the stupidity that we have seen among the powerful, and in the face of all these huge, stupid lies, which we have taken for a game of 3d chess.
And you made it look very opulent by recreating this Greek island…
I wanted to orient myself towards a sub-genre of mystery film, the big exotic production, Death on the Nile (John Guillermin, 1978), Murder in the sun (Guy Hamilton, 1982) or The Dangerous Invitations (Herbert Ross, 1973) – I particularly like this last film. One of the appeals of this subgenre is going on vacation with the characters. I wrote during the pandemic and thought to myself, “This is where I would like to be. »
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