The opening game from writer-director Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Mystery of the Blades, his second in his series of Agatha Christie-esque whodunits, is one of mischief. Tech billionaire Miles (Edward Norton) has sent each member of his gang of old friends a wooden puzzle box that, when unlocked, summons them all to his Greek island to “solve the mystery of my murder.” It’s a game, of course, but not everyone wants to play it.
Obviously, here are the twists get started. When the group arrives in Greece, they discover that Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) has also been invited to their annual friends gathering. Soon old grievances come to light and Miles’ former business partner Andi (Janelle Monáe), politician Claire (Kathryn Hahn), fashion designer Birdie (Kate Hudson), Birdie’s assistant Peg (Jessica Henwick), Bautista), Duke’s girlfriend Whiskey (Madelyn Cline) ) and scientist Lionel (Leslie Odom Jr.) all question each other’s motives. And that is before one of them turns out to be dead.
No spoilers here, but one thing that emerges during Blanc’s investigation is that Miles is the archetype of the tech billionaire in every way: he buys luxury toys and houses, walks with overconfident swagger, and believes so much in his big ideas that he is unwilling to acknowledge when they are bad – or dangerous.
Johnson wrote the screenplay during the height of the Covid-19 lockdowns, long before Elon Musk took over Twitter, but acknowledges that his film, which lands on Netflix today, is ultimately surprising conscious. “A friend of mine said, ‘Man, that feels like it was written this afternoon,'” Johnson notes.
But Glass onion is much more than that – it’s also a really fun time. WIRED hopped on Zoom with Johnson to talk about his new movie, scripts written by AI, and what’s happening with his Star Wars movies. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: One of the things that initially stands out Glass onion is that it takes place during the Covid-19 lockdown. How about doing it that way?
Ryan Johnson: As a huge whodunit fan, growing up, so many of the ones I loved were historical pieces set in England. It is a type of genre that is particularly good at dealing with culture and society. It just felt like, “Well, okay, obviously we want to treat this with a very light touch, because these aren’t very serious movies and Covid is a very serious thing,” but it felt like there was a way to close there felt it good.
Right. The period is those isolated days of 2020. A few recent films have attempted to get in touch with Covid-19, or to incorporate the pandemic into stories. How does that work in a whodunit?
You build a small microcosm of society with the suspects and the power structure within the suspects. It’s this that we’ve all gone through and we’ve now got all these encoded characters to understand these characters, like their choice of masks.
You mentioned earlier that the Knives out movies are not meant to go in order, that one is not a sequel to the other. Does setting this up in 2020 change that?