Rian Johnson, the filmmaker behind Star Wars: The Last Jedi and the Knives Out franchise, has spoken to Louis Chilton at the Independent about the ‘war’ between fans and the fate of his new Star Wars trilogy.
“I always want to make this clear: it’s not like I’ve gone through a living hell or something,” Johnson says, chipperly. “I’ve had the kind of experience that you only dream about as a filmmaker. I was in my twenties when the prequels came out.” (The George Lucas-directed prequel trilogy, beginning with 1999’s The Phantom Menace, was, and in many quarters still is, reviled by many fans of the franchise.) “I mean, you talk about wars between Star Wars fans… We experienced our own. That [the prequels] was World War I, and this [The Last Jedi] was World War II.”
“But,” he adds, “I feel like I’ve had such a wonderful, lovely, positive experience with the fans during the course of it. That’s left me a bigger Star Wars fan than I ever was, which is really something, because I grew up with it as the bedrock of my childhood.”
After the whiplash of The Last Jedi, Johnson started work on what he hoped would be a sure-fire crowd-pleaser: Knives Out. The film was an ensemble piece starring a glut of famous faces, Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, Christopher Plummer and Toni Collette among them. The undisputed standout, though, was Craig’s character, an absurd and memorable eccentric who seemed to stroll right into the pantheon of great screen sleuths. “When I first started writing the Benoit Blanc character, I very much had in my head, ‘Let’s write a really iconic detective’ – and that led nowhere good,” Johnson recalls. “Because I just started writing all these ridiculous quirks. ‘What if he had an eye patch? What if he wears a certain hat all the time?’ And I realised at some point it was just stupid.”
Read the interview in full here and watch Poker Face in the UK on Sky and Now.
Image: Getty Images
