Rian Johnson is already working on a third instalment of the Knives Out murder mystery franchise. This comes a mere month after the release of Glass Onion, his much-celebrated sequel to the original Knives Out film.
Johnson will soon unveil his TV series Poker Face, which stars Russian Doll actor Natasha Lyonne. He’s also apparently working on the long-awaited Star Wars trilogy he’s had floating around his head. Despite the heavy workload, it seems the third Knives Out film is still top of the director’s to-do list.
“I’m making the next [Benoit Blanc movie] next,” he told Empire, “because it’s the most exciting thing right now to me. That’s served me really well. I feel like any movie I’m making, I need to be making it because I can’t imagine doing anything else. I’m jumping into the next Benoit Blanc next because I can’t think about another story.”
Johnson is still piecing said story together. “I’ve got a big cloud of ideas, but it hasn’t all snapped into focus yet,” he continued. “It’s exciting, though, and it’s very, very different from this one. That’s what I’m excited about.”
Explaining how a Knives Out story comes together, the director and writer said his job is to create an emotionally engaging narrative rather than a film littered with purposeless plot twists. “I start structurally,” he revealed “I start working in notebooks. I don’t start with a crime, I start with the structure of the story, and what the audience’s journey is actually going to be through the story. Which has to do with the crime, but more than that, it has to do with who we care about and why.”
He concluded: “That’s great, as opposed to, ‘Let’s come up with a great murder’, where you’ll drive yourself insane trying to do it,” he says. Bring on the next case.” We look forward to it. Johnson recently teased the third Knives Out film in an exclusive interview in which he discusses his desire to “hop right into” the project. You can read more about that here.
