Rian Johnson Says ‘Wake Up Dead Man’ Is His Most Personal ‘Knives Out’ Film Yet: ‘It’s About Faith’

Award-winning film writer and director Rian Johnson spoke with ChurchLeaders about how his latest film, “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” was birthed out of his own faith journey.

“Wake Up Dead Man” is the third installment in Johnson’s “Knives Out” franchise. Like the previous two, this film features an all-star cast that includes the return of Daniel Craig’s (“Skyfall,” “Munich”) character Benoit Blanc. Actors new to the franchise include Josh Brolin (“Goonies,” “No Country for Old Men,” “Avengers: Endgame”), Josh O’Connor (“Challengers”), Glenn Close (“Fatal Attraction,” “Guardians of the Galaxy”), Mila Kunis (“Bad Moms,” “Black Swan,” “Date Night”), Jeremy Renner (“The Avengers,” “The Hurt Locker,” “The Town”), Jeffrey Wright (“The Batman,” “Casino Royale”), and Thomas Haden Church (“Spider-Man 3,” “Wings”).

The film’s synopsis reads as follows:

Benoit Blanc (Craig) returns for his most dangerous case yet in the third and darkest chapter of Rian Johnson’s murder mystery opus. When young priest Jud Duplenticy (O’Connor) is sent to assist charismatic firebrand Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Brolin), it’s clear that all is not well in the pews. Wicks’s modest-but-devoted flock includes devout church lady Martha Delacroix (Close), circumspect groundskeeper Samson Holt (Church), tightly-wound lawyer Vera Draven, Esq. (Kerry Washington), aspiring politician Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack), town doctor Nat Sharp (Renner), best-selling author Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), and concert cellist Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny). After a sudden and seemingly impossible murder rocks the town, the lack of an obvious suspect prompts local police chief Geraldine Scott (Kunis) to join forces with renowned detective Benoit Blanc to unravel a mystery that defies all logic.

“I wanted with this third one, especially after ‘Glass Onion’—which we had so much fun doing and it’s kind of a big broad vacation comedy—I wanted to ground it a little bit more,” Johnson told ChurchLeaders. “My way into that was to make it personal, and that’s why it’s about faith. It’s something that’s really personal to me.”

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Johnson shared that he grew up as a “very, very” Protestant evangelical Christian. “I was very deeply Christian myself through childhood, teenage years, into my early and mid-20s,” he said. “I was a youth group kid, basically. That was my world growing up. My relationship with Christ is what I framed the world around me through. It’s really who I was.”

“And then in my 20s, I kind of fell away from the faith,” Johnson continued. “I’m not a believer anymore. So it’s something that I had a lot of complicated feelings about and a lot of things I wanted to dig into for myself.”

Johnson explained that this movie is his “attempt to really take a multifaceted look at this topic for myself and one that I hope has a generous spirit and is coming from a place of truly wanting to talk about this as opposed to at it.”

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“I wanted the movie to have a generous spirit, but I also didn’t want it to feel like it was tiptoeing around trying not to offend anybody,” he added. “I wanted it to feel like a genuine, honest conversation.”