Knives Out Rian Johnson

Development

Director Rian Johnson first conceived of Knives Out after the completion of his first major feature, the low budget thriller Brick (2005).[4] Rian was eager to create a contemporary whodunit mystery influenced from film adaptations of books by detective fiction writer Agatha Christie, which he enjoyed as a child.[4][5] His earliest vision of Knives Out was shaped by Alfred Hitchcock's advice regarding plot development, which argued that conventional whodunits too often relied on formulaic suspense, especially a climactic twist, to culminate the story.[6] Once he had determined the story's goal, Rian began conceiving ideas for the plot structure, the main one a framework of tonal shifts devised as a means of inciting tension in the story.[6][7] The greatest challenge for the director was modernizing a genre studios deemed too antiquated for release.[8]

Rian hoped to commit to Knives Out after the release of his science fiction thriller Looper (2012), but suspended the project once Lucasfilm hired him to direct Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017).[5][9] He embedded elements of the Knives Out story with his experience coping with the intense culture war backlash to his Star Wars work.[10] Rian began the scriptwriting by January 2018, immediately after finishing his press tour for The Last Jedi, in a process lasting six or seven months.[8][11][12] When the director showed a finished draft to friends, he recalled the response was cynical: "A few reactions were 'We like this kind of movie, but why do you want to do this?' That did give me pause, but I felt like I knew deep down inside why I wanted to do it."[12] Rian took the film's name from a Radiohead song, saying it was a good title for a murder mystery.[13]

Media coverage of Knives Out give conflicting accounts about the film's funding. One report circulated by Deadline claimed that MRC secured the script in an auction hosted by Creative Artists Agency and FilmNation to various investors at the 43rd Toronto International Film Festival.[14] This account has been disputed by longtime collaborator Ram Bergman, who maintains there was never an auction, but that MRC was always the intended financier because of their sustained success with mass market films by auteurs—directors that wield significant autonomy over the artistic vision of their projects.[15] Nevertheless, MRC financed the film's $40 million budget, plus generous backend compensation for Bergman, Rian, and Daniel Craig, per the condition of their agreement.[14] For Knives Out's commercial distribution, MRC partnered with Lionsgate after Lionsgate, seeking to rebound from a year of mediocre box office showings, purchased a partial share of the distribution rights.[16][17]

Casting

Employing an ensemble cast of established stars was one of Rian's initial demands. He also drew upon the Agatha Christie movies, and chiefly Peter Ustinov-starred projects à la Death on the Nile (1978) and Evil Under the Sun (1982), for his casting choices because he felt they possessed a sense of spectacle worth replicating.[18] The filmmakers focused on actors available in the six week interim before shooting for Knives Out began. Actors were chosen based on their ability to stand out in bit speaking parts and master an exaggerated, but not caricatured, comic performance.[18] According to Rian, the film's rapid progress readily facilitated his desired casting ambitions.[12] Most of the Knives Out ensemble were signed in October and November 2018.[a] Rian named each of the characters after musicians he enjoyed because it was a simple practice to remember—for example, Joni Mitchell, Richard Thompson, and Steely Dan's Donald Fagen.[29]

Daniel Craig came to Rian's attention for his stage work and non-James Bond film roles. Rian regarded him as a versatile actor yearning to challenge his abilities in a playful comedy role.[12][18] Craig declined due to his contractual obligations to the then-forthcoming No Time to Die (2021), which was preparing to shoot around the same time, but logistical and creative disputes postponed the film's production by three months, giving the actor enough time to accept the offer.[11][30] Once he read his mailed copy of the script, Craig agreed to join as the writing's tone and humor captivated him.[11][31] The treatment of Blanc was not a fruitful task for Rian initially; his first conception had been a Hercule Poirot clone "that was just a bunch of crazy quirks". To distinguish the character, the director outlined Blanc as a slightly pompous man with a flamboyant Southern accent, turning to Craig's ongoing feedback for more unique characterization.[6] Craig undertook speech training with a dialect coach for two to three hours per day, studying playwright Tennessee Williams and author Shelby Foote, via interview footage from C-SPAN and the Ken Burns-helmed docuseries The Civil War (1990), to model Blanc's voice.[32]

Casting director Mary Vernieu was responsible for hiring a suitable actress to portray Marta. She and the filmmakers did not favor one particular person for the part, unlike the other Knives Out characters, and scouted based on Rian's preference for a relatively unknown actress exhibiting an underdog quality.[33][34] They considered several candidates, including Ana de Armas, whose recent work piqued Vernieu's interest enough to be suggested in the casting discussions.[33] Rian was not familiar with de Armas' repertoire save for her starring role in Blade Runner 2049 (2017).[34] He liked her acting, but believed she appeared too sensual to convincingly portray Marta.[33][34] When Rian met the actress for her audition, he was astonished by her piercing eyes.[34] De Armas nearly passed the role because she found Marta's original character description clichéd. However, she was persuaded after reading the complete script, which emphasized resilience as a fundamental attribute of Marta.[35] Another aspect that resonated with de Armas was Marta's immigrant backstory.[36]

For the self-indulgent Ransom, Rian envisioned Chris Evans after seeing him in the Broadway revival of Kenneth Lonergan's Lobby Hero, having been impressed with his performance as a contemptible villain.[11][37] Evans was known mainly for his live-action role as Captain America in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), and Rian exploited the actor's everyman persona to ignite tension between moviegoers and Ransom, saying, "You've got to see it not as baggage, but as ammunition. If there was someone in that part who the audience inherently wanted to like, that would help the arc overall."[37] Although Evans was preparing to take a hiatus after finishing his duties for Avengers: Endgame (2019), he reconsidered when the producers relayed they would film near his home in Massachusetts.[11]

The impression left by Toni Collette's Joni in the news was that she parodied Gwyneth Paltrow, but Rian and Collette assert Paltrow did not influence Colette's characterization. Collette said her biggest purpose was to find the humor in her character.[38] Christopher Plummer, in one of his final film appearances before his death in 2021,[39] described Harlan as a "stern, bright and rough-hewn" father with a crass sense of humor.[40] Michael Shannon did not audition for the role of Walt and was contracted following an arranged lunch with Rian in Brooklyn.[29] For the part of Linda, Jamie Lee Curtis sympathized with her backstory as a woman fiercely scrutinized for her privilege. She stated, "I've been an actress for a long time, and I am also the daughter of someone famous, and people have a funny way of taking away anything you do creatively and reduce it to your privilege. Linda is very defensive about the assumption that she was given anything, and I've had the same defense."[4] To prepare for her performance, Curtis immersed in activities she thought befitted her character's position as a matriarch, such as cooking meals.[4][41]

Filming

Bergman was already assembling the filmmaking crew while Rian made revisions to the script in early 2018.[4] Rian's instruction for the filmmakers was to find an estate that exuded Harlan's mystery writing sensibilities, citing the thriller Sleuth (1972) as a reference for recognizable visual elements.[42][43] Bergman toured several homes with his scouting team before centering the film's production on a pair of sprawling mansions in suburban Boston: a privately owned nineteenth-century Gothic Revival manor for exterior shots, and the Ames Mansion, a 20-room historic landmark anchoring the Borderland State Park in Easton.[43][44]

Most of the interior shots took place in the Ames Mansion, from intense confrontational scenes with Harlan and his relatives to conversational scenes of Blanc's investigation.[43] A problem that challenged the production was the logistics of the mansions, for neither had the sufficient space in the upper floors to realize Harlan's office or corresponding scenes. To rectify the issue, production designer David Crank constructed the office set, which included an adjacent hallway, on soundstages, working closely with Johnson to coordinate the movement of characters with the configuration of the homes and artificial sets.[43]

Principal photography began on October 30, 2018, under the pseudonym Morning Bell, in Maynard, Massachusetts.[45][46] Filmmakers converted vacant retail space into a laundromat in preparation for the first shoot.[47] Elsewhere in Greater Boston, filming occurred near a MBTA passenger rail station in downtown Natick, a private mid-century modern estate in Lincoln, Canton, Wellesley, Waltham, Medfield, and an unoccupied state-owned facility in Marlborough chosen for its rotund orientation.[b] The Marlborough shoot was the site for exterior scenes at the scorched medical examiner's office, involving pyrotechnics and a group of local firefighters as extras portraying an active firefighting operation.[53] Filming for the project took approximately 38 days, ending on December 20, 2018.[54][55] Knives Out qualified for a $10 million transferable tax credit on in-state costs from the Massachusetts commonwealth government.[56]

Cinematography

Knives Out was director of photography Steve Yedlin's fifth project with Rian. The two men storyboarded their visual composition ideas ahead of the principal photography, which did not describe the onscreen universe in depth.[57] Filming used a double-camera setup with two operators, one a longstanding collaborator of Yedlin's. Yedlin described the environment on set as experimental and visually creative.[55] He shot Knives Out in standard 1.85:1 aspect ratio from Alexa Mini cameras equipped with Zeiss Master Prime lenses. The Zeiss Prime's scaling capability supported the film's use of wide-angle shots. The filmmakers believed wider camera lenses emphasized the worldbuilding by showing characters in their surroundings.[55] They also deployed Panavision's PCZ Primo 19-90 and PZW 15-40 zoom lenses as zooming was customary for Rian's oeuvre.[55] Ultimately, Yedlin and production members adopted action building techniques centered on Robert Altman's cinematic style, through a complex system of whip pans, zooming, and camera dolly movements. Panavision's Hollywood office loaned camera equipment to assist the needs of the production.[55]

Part of Knives Out's production was devoted to realizing a specialized process of color grading for the film's visual effects, based on qualitative data collected from Yedlin's field research.[55][57] The cinematographer's usual strategy prioritized a lookup table (LUT) to augment a film's visual palette, and he observed the science of photochemistry to create his color grading formula.[55] Yedlin collaborated with FotoKem to flesh out properties of halation, gate weave, and granularity.[55] To illuminate interior mansion scenes, Yedlin supplemented sets with an overhead lighting contraption designed from Arri SkyPanels and custom RGBWW strip fixtures—a class of modulated multicolor strip lights—bundled in foam sheets for light diffusion. As well, he relied on computer software and a spectrometer to gauge the sunlight's chromaticity, its specified color quality, and requisite tones to generate the textural variation produced thereof.[55]

Set design

The scriptwriting contained few details about the design of the Thrombey residence, hence the estate's clearest vision emerged from conversations that Rian, Crank and set decorator David Schlesinger had over aesthetics.[58] The design team were drawn to the Ames Mansion because the original architectural elements had been preserved, endowing sets with an aged quality.[42] Crank and Schlesinger handled the sourcing, then arrangement, of props for interior mansion sets.[58][59] They located the film's decorative items from a range of businesses, souvenir collectors, and ordinary people in Boston and New York.[58][59] The script only specified details for a few objects; for the rest, the set decorator used Harlan’s imaginary oeuvre of mysteries as inspiration for his souvenirs and knickknacks.[58] A collection of automata, doll-like mechanical devices that imitate human mannerisms, was chief among the artifacts. The automata were costly, fragile and rare to obtain, requiring thorough scouting from the producers, and additional caveats—transportation, storage, rental fees—complicated the expense.[59] Schlesinger inquired multiple museums and private collectors before contacting the Morris Museum's Murtogh D. Guinness Collection in Morristown, New Jersey, one of the world's largest automata exhibits, but the Morris Museum prohibited all non-exhibition uses of their pieces.[59] They instead directed Schlesinger and his prop-makers to a local restorer, who owned a private collection, to negotiate. Upon approval, the producers hired another local collector to undertake the automata's transportation and installation to and from set.[59] Also present among the background props were large dollhouses, crime scene dioramas, Harlan's library of books, which were designed and arranged by decade, and a stash clock.[42][43][59]

Creation of Knives Out's most significant prop, the "Wheel of Knives", a throne chair positioned in front of a ringed display of knives, daunted the art department.[59] Although the chair was conceived as a library piece, the script did not explain any correlation to the story, and Crank said developing an established cause was "a long process".[42][59] The art department abandoned early concepts until they imagined a design with an armature and a chain from which to hang the display.[59]

Music

Rian pitched Knives Out to composer Nathan Johnson—cousin and another frequent associate—as early as 2009.[60][61] Their first conversation concerned the context of music in opening scenes, and they sought a score that reflected the film's key events and drama with an abrasive classical sound.[60][62] Nathan recorded the Knives Out score with an orchestra at Abbey Road Studios in London.[63] To prepare, the composer engaged the production while principal photography was active, visiting the set to forge a premise for melodic cues and motifs. This was an uncommon experience given the standard industry practice for composers is to work in post-production, after filming has finished.[60] "Knives Out! (String Quartet in G Minor)", the opening string quartet theme and Nathan's earliest contribution, served as the impetus for the album.[62][64] Nathan and Rian were compelled by an eclectic array of their favorite symphonic movie scores for Knives Out's musical direction, such as Death on the Nile, the compositions of Bernard Herrmann, and Lawrence of Arabia (1962).[62][64] The use of an orchestra distinguishes Knives Out from other Rian-directed films, which experimented with cheaper, unconventional instruments.[60] It was also Nathan's first large scale orchestral score, being experienced solely with small ensembles.[63]

Cut Narrative Records released the soundtrack on November 27, 2019, in tandem with the film's theatrical launch.[65]