The opening gambit of writer-director Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, his second in his series of Agatha Christie–style whodunits, is one of mischief. Tech billionaire Miles (Edward Norton) has sent each member of his gang of longtime friends a wooden puzzle box that, when unlocked, calls 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.  

Obviously, this is where the twists start. When the group arrives in Greece, they find that detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) has been invited to their annual friend gathering, too. 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), men’s-rights influencer Duke (Dave Bautista), Duke’s girlfriend Whiskey (Madelyn Cline), and scientist Lionel (Leslie Odom Jr.), all find themselves questioning one anothers’ motives. And that’s before one of them turns up dead.

No spoilers here, but one thing that does come out during Blanc’s investigation is that Miles is every bit the tech billionaire archetype: He buys fancy toys and homes, walks with overconfident swagger, and believes so much in his big ideas he’s unwilling to acknowledge when they’re bad—or dangerous. 

Johnson wrote the screenplay during the height of Covid-19 lockdowns, long before Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, but acknowledges that his movie, which lands on Netflix today, ended up being surprisingly au courant. “A friend of mine said, ‘Man, that feels like it was written this afternoon,’” Johnson notes.

But Glass Onion is a lot more than that—it’s also a really fun time. WIRED hopped on Zoom with Johnson to talk about his new film, 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 about Glass Onion is that it takes place during the Covid-19 lockdown. What was your thinking in doing it that way?

Rian Johnson: As a huge whodunit fan, growing up, so many of the ones I loved were period pieces set in England. It’s a type of genre that is specifically good at engaging with culture and society. It just felt like, “Well, OK, we wanna treat this with a very light touch, obviously, because these aren’t very serious movies and Covid is a very serious thing,” but it felt like if there’s a way to have lockdown in there, it felt right.

Right. The period is those isolated days of 2020. A few recent films have tried to engage with Covid-19, or include the pandemic in stories. How does that work in a whodunit? 

You’re building a little microcosm of society with the suspects and the power structure within the suspects. It’s this thing we all went through and we now have all these encoded signs for getting insights into these characters, like their mask choice.

You’ve said before that the Knives Out movies are not meant to go in order, that one isn’t a sequel to another. Does setting this one squarely in 2020 change that? 

So much of what I’m trying to do, because I’m starting to write the next one, is really just about trying to clear my head and think about what’s on my mind right now. Hopefully that translates in some way to what’s on all of our minds right now in terms of culture. 

What’s going into the next one? Can you say what’s on your mind? 

No. You got any ideas for me?

The downfall of Twitter? 

Downfall of Twitter. Didn’t I just do that? [Laughs]

Actually, I was going to ask you about that. Here you have this movie with a tech billionaire at the center and as it’s coming out, everyone is watching Elon Musk’s erratic takeover of Twitter. 

It’s so weird. It’s very bizarre. I hope there isn’t some secret marketing department at Netflix that’s funding this Twitter takeover. 

Right? Like this was all the plan to get everybody to watch.  

There’s a lot of general stuff about that sort of species of tech billionaire that went directly into it. But obviously, it has almost a weird relevance in exactly the current moment. A friend of mine said, “Man, that feels like it was written this afternoon.” And that’s just sort of a horrible, horrible accident, you know?

Also, didn’t you meet your wife through Film Twitter? It’s gotta be wild to think about that time versus what it’s like now. 

Where it all crashes? I mean, we met in real life and that’s actually where our relationship grew out of. But we were kind of aware of each other on Twitter, and I like to hold out hope that that can still happen.

We must. 

Maybe even more so in the midst of a dumpster fire. Who do you grab on to? Our true mettle is tested.

Speaking of these themes, Glass Onion has a lot of modern archetypes: the athleisure entrepreneur, the politician, the social media influencer. How do you choose your targets? 

On this one, once I had a tech billionaire at the top of the suspect pyramid, then the type of friends that they would have and the tenor of everything came together. Because the intent was to accurately reflect what it’s been like to have our heads in the middle of the cultural sphere for the past six years. It’s a pretty nightmarish kind of carnival, Fellini-esque inflated reality right now. 

It’s very different from Knives Out in that way. 

It’s a much more heightened tone. But any time I would think, “Oh God, should I tamp this down?” I would just open Twitter or turn on the news and realize it’s an honest reflection of what it feels like to be alive right now and paying attention to these people. It needs to be ridiculous because they are ridiculous, you know?

You’ve talked a bit about how Agatha Christie stories are sort of mystery tales that have other genres encased inside. How does something like that apply to this movie? 

You know, structurally, the movie's obviously doing a really specific thing. So in that way it’s kind of a thriller. Though, honestly, I think the genre this ended up being more than anything else is almost a comedic satire.

Weirdly, it also reminded me of The Big Chill, in terms of old friends who kind of go in separate directions. 

It’s funny you say that. I don’t know if you’re a Sondheim fan, but I was listening to Merrily We Roll Along while I was writing this and there’s actually a bunch of Merrily references embedded, a bunch of lyrics hidden in the script. So what you’re describing with The Big Chill, like with Merrily, this idea of a close friend kind of rotting over the course of the years, that’s absolutely baked in there. 

What other references are baked in? Are there any that people have caught yet? 

That’s the thing, because it was only in theaters for one week … 

Yes, no one has deeply analyzed it yet. 

I’m starting to meet people who have seen the movie two or three times, which is really, really fun. But even still I feel like once it actually hits Netflix and people can rewatch it, [that’ll happen]. We kind of designed it in a way to be rewatched and dissected. It was quite scary actually, because there’s a lot of stuff that is just blatantly on the screen that gives away the entire thing if you’re paying attention to it.

I’ve always thought that, as a director, you kind of live for that moment that the internet starts theorizing about your work, that moment there’s a Reddit thread. Not that you want that in your head … 

That’s delightful. ’Cause it just means that it landed. I mean, yeah, I think it would probably be a pretty terrible thing to try and write to, though. Never write for Reddit—that should be a Post-it on all of our laptop screens. [Laughs]

There’s an AI for that. 

What I’m really trying to do is just get a reaction in the moment when audiences are watching it. I’m trying to land every moment as best I can. I mean, it has been incredibly fun with Knives Out, even more so with Star Wars, just seeing these online communities kind of grab on to certain moments or certain threads throughout the thing and dissect them and pull them apart.

OK, so I’ll tell you the one thing I noticed: The number 47, the atomic number for silver, is one of the clues on the puzzle box in the beginning. Was that a wink at the 47 Society? I know writers for Star Trek used to sneak that number in, and I believe J. J. Abrams worked it into Alias too. 

This is the sort of thing I now desperately wanna take credit for, but I think it’s just a testament to the number always popping up.

One cool little thing I actually had a line of dialog for, but was cut for pacing, was that the chess move that Claire does is the fastest mate possible, which is called a Fool’s Mate. Maybe I should have left that in.

Does Netflix do director’s cuts? 

I’ve been very, very lucky in that I’ve, you know, I’ve never had a movie released that wasn’t my cut of it. I feel very much once a movie’s done, it’s done. There have been great directors who have, who have done really interesting stuff revisiting their films. I never have that instinct though. Maybe I’m just lazy.

Going back to AI, have you followed any of the people who are using things like ChatGPT to write movie scripts? 

It’s funny. My friends Craig Mazin and John August have a screenwriting podcast called Scriptnotes, and I just recorded one with them, and John brought that thing up and we started feeding it prompts. The stuff it was writing was incredibly impressive based on the prompts and based on the grammar being impeccable and it feeling like actual sentences. 

They were pretty terrible scenes and you can just tell it’s sort of a cut-and-paste. No, it’s more sophisticated than that, but it’s hard for me to tell whether that’s a function of what the thing is or whether that’s a function of the state it is in its development, and whether it’s gonna get exponentially better at it. What I’ve mostly seen is very impressive mimicry, but very interesting to see where it ends up going.

To use that metaphor from before, it’s a good shell, but there’s not much inside. 

That’s the thing. Subtext, human emotion, all of that stuff. Maybe I’m fooling myself though. Maybe that stuff is easily, easily simulated once you get into a deep enough kind of neural net. Maybe that’s just human ego thinking that that can’t be faked.

Maybe we just need to feed ChatGPT more Rian Johnson scripts. 

Oh god.

You’ve at least made your masterpieces already. 

Hell yeah. And writing’s the hard part. I mean, fine, robot. Hand me a script. I’ll go direct it. 

But for actors, too, we’ve already had folks like Bruce Willis get deepfaked into commercials. It’s wild to think an AI could make a performance of someone. 

It’s already unsettling.

Yes. 

Even the best kind of deepfakes are still pasted on top of a human being who’s giving performance, right? It feels like we’re still a ways off, but I don’t know, in a lab somewhere this is probably already happening.

Do you think that even if it’s a perfect fake, do you think that something generated by a computer would have the same draw to an audience as them knowing that there’s a human being behind it? I honestly don’t know. 

I don't know either. I interviewed Diego Luna recently about Andor and I was asking him about it and he said, “If a director feels something, then someone else out there will, too.” I don’t know if machines can do that. 

I guess that is the big question, right? It feels like in our traditional understanding of what you can program and what you can’t, he’s right. 

I don’t know if this is me projecting magical thinking onto what this stuff actually is, but it does feel there’s almost like this odd—sort of like in the ’50s with sci-fi—feeling of anything is possible going forward. In which case it feels a little bit like, even though we haven’t seen proof of concept of it yet, the possibility is out there kind of lingering in the air. That’s what’s actually scary-slash-exciting, you know?

Yes. I think it also depends on if you’re using AI to recreate an actual person, or just a CGI robot. 

Yeah. I don’t know, man. Skynet is coming. [Laugh] 

I have a friend who’s very, very, very deep into that world and into the debates behind AI and what the actual dangers of it are to society. Not the Terminator stuff, but like where the actual threats could come from. For everything that’s exciting about it, and for our little piddling concerns about “Are they gonna write my script for me?”, the actual dangers on the horizon of it are actual extinction-level dangers.

Are you someone who thinks about that? Like “Alexa is listening to me …”

I mean, just from our Instagram ads, we all know everything is listening all the time. But I also feel like there’s only so much. I mean, just to get through our regular day requires all my bandwidth. 

Growing up as a kid during the height of the Cold War and just the abstract idea that nuclear bombs could fall on our heads at any moment, you just live in a state of denial constantly. With all of this new technology, there’s just a human survival instinct that you just have to let go and go on with your day. 

When you first start working on a movie, you diagram it out in a Moleskine notebook. Does that kind of take you back to the basics in a similar way? 

I started using these [waves notebook] before the technology was at the point where I could do that kind of stuff on a device. It’s more just habit than anything else. 

Muscle memory. 

There’s a cabin up near Lake Arrowhead that I’ve been Airbnb-ing for, geez, years and years. There’s nothing special about it, but I’ve done so much writing there at this point.

You have Sondheim already on the Spotify playlist. 

Actually, when I wrote Glass Onion, I had the LCD Soundsystem album Sound of Silver on a loop, to the point where I texted James Murphy after and was like, “I’m giving you a special thanks.” And he's like “OK.” [Laughs] 

Glass Onion should get a credit on the next LCD Soundsystem record. 

I should hope so. I feel I’m owed one. Angela, make it happen.

I have to ask about Star Wars, is there a status update on the trilogy you were going to make? 

There’s no status. Right now I’m just focused on the mystery movies. That’s kind of taken up my whole creative sphere at the moment.

Are they still in the works?

I still have conversations with the folks at Lucasfilm and with Kathy [Kennedy] and it’s my hope that we can still do ’em.

A couple years ago, you brought Knives Out to WIRED25 and we asked about diversity in your casting for Star Wars: Episode VIII—The Last Jedi, and you’d said, “if someone is responding to diversity negatively, fuck ’em.” Earlier this year, Obi-Wan Kenobi star Moses Ingram started getting racist messages from fans. I’m wondering if you heard echoes between those two incidents. 

It’s all the same. There was a phase where the common wisdom was Don’t feed the trolls. Ignore it. That’s not true. You gotta shut it down, like a body fighting an infection. It was very heartening to see the huge outpouring of very vocal, This is not who this fan base is. And shoving it out. 

It’s just so depressing. But if there’s any kind of hopeful glimmer, it’s the notion that these fan bases are getting wise and realizing, No, we gotta punch these people out. 

It does feel like a shift. Ewan McGregor issued a statement pretty quick saying that this doesn’t represent the fandom. And like you said at WIRED25, 99 percent of the fandom isn’t trolls. 

Well, and also, that 1 percent tries to do this shell game where they say, “Anyone who doesn’t like the movie is a racist.” That’s a bad faith argument. It’s so clear. We’re not talking about whether you like something or whether you don’t, we're talking about whether you’re toxic and abusive online and whether you’re an odious sexist racist. 

You’re also currently working on Poker Face for Peacock. It’s part of the new trend in streaming of weekly releases. Does the murder-of-the-week format lend itself to that? 

Yeah, there were a lot of discussions about it behind-the-scenes. They’re gonna drop like a good number of them at first and then do the rest of them week-to-week. Honestly, I do think that doing week-to-week helps keep it in the conversation longer.

Yes. 

It’ll be fun because people will be able to talk about the new one every week. But I want people to be able to kind of skip around if they hear an episode’s good and wanna skip to it. It is the type of show where you can actually do that.

Oh, so each episode is a standalone? 

It was a hugely conscious choice, and it was something that I had no idea was gonna seem so radical to all the people we were pitching it to. [Laughs] The streaming serialized narrative has just become the gravity of a thousand suns to the point where everyone’s collective memory has been erased. That was not the mode of storytelling that kept people watching television for the vast history of TV. So it was not only a choice, it was a choice we really had to kind of fight for. It was tough finding a champion in Peacock that was willing to take a bet on it. 

Relatedly, how important was it to you that Glass Onion be released in theaters, even if only for a week? 

It’s very, very important to me. And with the Benoit Blanc movies, what’s fun about making them is really trying to do the Hitchcock thing of playing the audience like a piano. So just standing in the back of theaters and watching Glass Onion play with crowds, it’s been such an exhilarating experience. It’s like a drug. 

It’s such a weird time right now because I’m just starting to work on writing the next mystery movie, and it’ll be a few years before it comes out and god only knows what the landscape’s gonna look like at that point. I feel like trying to guess where we’re gonna be next is maybe a fool’s errand.

I was going to ask if you have predictions for the future of movies. 

My hope is theatrical. My hope is that however it happens, that theatrical will find a way to come back and kind of solidify and find its form in the culture. I feel like it’s something that people still want.

It’s wild, with the new Avatar movie coming out, to think about what it was like when the first one came out with the huge box office. 

But we did see that with Top Gun: Maverick, with the new Black Panther. These big spectacles people will definitely come out for, but the bigger question is the smaller films and the movies that are more geared toward adult audiences, and finding the place of those in terms of the theatrical landscape.

Going back to Glass Onion for a second, can you tell me about those murder-mystery dinners you had with the cast? 

What happened was we were in Belgrade, we were shooting, and the Delta surge was happening. The numbers were horrible and we wanted to keep everybody safe. And if we got a positive test with one of our main actors and had to shut down for a few weeks, we would’ve been absolutely screwed. So we were being very locked down and very safe. Which meant we were all trapped in this very nice hotel together in Belgrade. So yeah, it was really just to blow off steam. We would rent out the rooftop restaurant bar, and just take it over with the cast and get really drunk and play Mafia. [Laughs]

Who were the pros? 

I don’t think it’ll surprise anyone that Edward Norton is very good at Mafia, but Kate and Leslie actually took it very, very seriously. Daniel couldn’t give a fuck. He was just enjoying getting drunk and hanging out with everyone.

Does he just start tending bar? 

Yeah, he just becomes a DJ at some point in the night. Janelle would show up in full costume, like a full Sherlock Holmes cape. It did definitely forge a kind of drama camp environment with the whole cast.

What does Daniel Craig play when he DJs? 

It’s a good mix of like, dad rock and the type of stuff you would expect a cool guy from England would play. One thing we all learned, though, is that he does not like jazz. Leslie tried to put on some jazz and Daniel was like “Hm, not my thing.”  

Very un-Bond of him. 

But also Janelle would take over at some point, and then it would be a party. 

Speaking of Janelle, I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, but she really has to carry the movie in some ways. 

It’s a role that requires quite a lot of her and it’s a role that also required a lot of calibration and a lot of deep planning and thought, and she came in and just worked her ass off, man. It’s just kind of amazing to the point where I’m still watching the movie and discovering little nuances she put into it that kind of accentuate the different aspects of the part. 

Was it written with Janelle in mind? 

I try not to write with actors in mind generally, because that ends up breaking your heart if they’re not available. It all comes down to just a gut feeling and then you make the movie and you can’t imagine anyone else in that role. I feel like she just stepped in and owned it. As a fan of her music, she has that Bowie thing where she is making music, but she’s also making narratives and creating characters. She’s very much a storyteller. And this role kind of required that as well. So yeah, I feel pretty lucky that we got to ride this bus with Janelle Monáe.