Rian Johnson on the Spiritual Core of Wake Up Dead Man and Why Benoit Blanc Will Always Be a Mystery

With each installment in the Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) series, writer-director Rian Johnson becomes more like his fictional mystery author, Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) of Knives Out. There’s Thrombey-esque glee and expertise in the planning of the finer details of Johnson’s murder mysteries. The filmmaker behind Brick and Looper continues to make these detective stories as personal as they are mysterious.

Blanc is the eyes and the ears for the audience. This time around, the stylish sleuth heads to upstate New York to investigate the death of Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin), a fire-and-brimstone man of God. Blanc always has his unexpected Watson, and this time it’s Father Jud (Josh O’Connor). The good father and Blanc are polar opposites on the religious spectrum, but they are both seekers of the truth in the gothic murder mystery.

Recently, Johnson spoke with What’s On Netflix about the film’s relationship to faith, writing a whodunit, and what Blanc means to him as a storyteller.

The more we get to know about Blanc, such as him alluding to his childhood and parents, the more mysterious he is. How important is suggestion, keeping Blanc a mystery as well? 

Well, it is always important to me that Blanc is not the main character of these movies, or at least he hasn’t been so far. Now that I say that out loud, I want to break that rule. But so far, Blanc is not the main character of these movies. There’s always a protagonist that we’re kind of following, and Blanc is there as the detective in the whodunit. Much like [Agatha Christie’s] Poirot or Miss Marple, he reveals himself by serving that function. 

It means that we get to learn about him both through his work of solving the crime and through the relationship he forms with the central character. Each of these movies is defined by that relationship. For me, that’s the interesting way of learning about Blanc. I don’t think I would ever want to do flashbacks or a big mythology of where he came from. 

In the film, he does have a crisis of not faith but spirit. When did you land on his personal conflict for Wake Up Dead Man? 

From the very beginning, because I knew this movie was going to be about faith. The central character is a father, Jud, who is genuinely trying to be a good Christian. The movie serves as him on one side and then another character on the other. You need that dramatic tension. In the first act, it’s Wicks, and that’s kind of big and obvious because Wicks is a big, beastly ogre of an antagonist. But then for the rest of the movie, it’s Jud and Blanc. 

I also wanted to have a relationship between two people who we both love, who are on opposite sides of this fence, and still are at the end of the movie. It’s not like Blanc has had a conversion. They still believe opposite things about the church, but they can love each other, and form this friendship and bond to a common purpose of making the world a little better by the end. 

Picture Credit: Netflix

Do you begin these murder mysteries with character or plot? When do these themes come into play? 

Typically, it’s a strange thing where the two things grow together. For me, it can only start when the mystery elements I’m writing are present. It’s not like I come up with the thing I actually want to talk about and then put those elements over it. 

It only really works if the thing that I want to talk about and the genre are talking to each other and informing each other. It’s two gears clicking together: the mystery of faith and the nature of mystery stories that Blanc solves. There’s the notion of human grace versus “us against them,” the build-the-walls kind of tribalism. There’s the notion of the work of the detective as a judgmental, wrathful God — his purpose is to come down and find the guilty, punish them, clear the innocent, and separate the chaff from the wheat. 

For me, the thing that actually fuels it in terms of the use of genre is not using genre as a mode of transportation for the thing I want to talk about. The thing I want to talk about is embodied in the genre or conflicts with it in a way that’s interesting, or has overlap with it in a way that heightens both of them. 

How much is Blanc a vessel for you to explore whatever you’re dealing with or wondering about the world when you sit down to write?

I can’t imagine taking on the task of writing anything without it being fueled by trying to dig at something that is on my mind or on my heart at that moment. I think that’s where it all comes from. With these movies, absolutely, but it’s kind of with everything: with a Star Wars movie, whether it was my first movie, Brick. It always has to start with something that’s itching inside you that you want to dig into and get at.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. (L-R) Josh O’Connor and Josh Brolin in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. Cr. John Wilson/Netflix © 2025

How much do you, [costume designer] Jenny Eagan, and Daniel Craig talk about how much Blanc presents himself to the world? How important is presentation to him? 

Very important. I think that’s one of the things Daniel landed on quickly: Blanc likes to dress, he likes clothes, likes presentation. That’s something that’s a little bit drawn from the writing of Poirot, who was always fastidious. There’s a detail Christie has about Poirot: he would wear shoes that were too tight. He thought they looked good even though they were torture to walk in. Someone says to him, “But surely, Poirot, it’s better to feel good than to look good,” and Poirot scoffs at this sentiment. I think that’s Blanc. 

You can kind of gauge where he’s at in life from the clothes he wears. In the first movie, he looks good, but it’s a little bit more like he rushed there and packed one outfit, basically his work outfit. In the second movie, you can tell he is excited to be on vacation and really goes for it in a Jacque Tati, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday type way. And then in the third movie, he’s wearing these distinctly cut suits and got his hair a little longer. You can tell he’s in the next phase of his life, but he likes to dress, he likes his appearance.

Do you often think about what his life is between these stories?

I don’t really think about that except as it applies to when he’s in these stories. I like for myself to keep Blanc a little bit mysterious. I like not having him completely figured out. It keeps it fresh. The notion that with each movie I’m learning new things about Blanc, but more than that, as a writer, it means that those things that I learn are going to be applicable to the story that we’re telling.

What cigars does Blanc smoke?

Oh, God. Well, actually on set, in terms of the props, they’re probably not great ones, but Blanc, much like me, gets Cubans whenever he can. He smokes longer, thin cigars. I always find that aesthetically pleasing.

Author John Dickson Carr’s “The Hollow Man” is a big reference in the film. When did you discover his detective fiction? 

It was only a few years ago, and that’s the exciting thing: the Golden Age of detective fiction has so many different paths and byways and avenues. It was only a few years ago that Otto Penzler, who is kind of a legend in the mystery publishing world and runs The Mysterious Bookshop in Tribeca in New York, had an imprint that’s basically the Criterion Collection for Golden Age mystery novels. 

He finds out-of-print Golden Age mystery novels from the twenties, thirties, forties — you name it — and he puts out beautiful new editions of them. It’s through that that I first read Carr. It was just a few years ago, so that was the other exciting thing about writing this movie: there was the freshness of that discovery for me of having found this new author that I really enjoyed.

Was there anything in particular about Carr’s atmosphere and language that really inspired Wake Up Dead Man?

He very much writes in that kind of gothic tone. He specializes in the locked-door mystery or the impossible crime. He’s a master at it. He’s just a damn good writer. I’d say in most of his books, he leads with the actual drama. Sometimes the puzzle can get pushed to the forefront, but in his best books, he leads with terror and with human vulnerability. 

He’s also very funny. Detective Gideon Fell, who’s my favorite of his detectives, is based on real-life author G.K. Chesterton, whom Carr admired. He’s a hilarious and wonderful character. Also, mentioning G.K. Chesterton, the Father Brown mysteries were a very big influence on this movie.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. (L-R) Andrew Scott, Jeremy Renner, Cailee Spaeny, Kerry Washington, Thomas Haden Church, Glenn Close and Daryl McCormack in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. Cr. John Wilson/Netflix © 2025

You write colorful, dialogue-heavy scenes, but there’s still so much space to read between lines in these murder mysteries. What is that process like in rewriting, knowing when to speak and when to breathe? 

On the page, the temptation is to fill it all up with words. I think that’s something that all writers I know. For myself, I need to figure out the discipline with, remembering that particularly with these films, there’s so much information to convey. And so, that’s a constant thing that you have to keep reminding yourself of: allow moments to breathe, allow moments of different types of information for the audience, visual in addition to oral. 

It is a constant back and forth. You’ve nailed it: a lot of it happens in the rewriting. The first ten drafts are sometimes way too wordy, and then by draft 20, you’ve kind of whittled it down to something. And then when I sit down with the actors and rehearse, inevitably I end up cutting even more words out as we put it on its feet. 

When you say the words out loud, you realize, “Oh, we can eliminate this sentence. It’s kind of repetitive.” And then in the edit, I cut out even more lines. The whole thing is kind of a process of seeing how little you can get away with.