Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery director Rian Johnson discusses framing, costuming, and blocking choices and how they each serve to introduce a character in the movie.
Rian Johnson's Glass Onion has proven to be a darling of the holiday season, becoming a hugely streamed movie. With that comes a hunger to know more about the movie, so Johnson did a breakdown of a Knives Out 2 scene, in this case, the opening where all of the guests meet on the pier before they leave for their trip to Miles Bron's (Edward Norton) private island.
Starting with a breakdown of the costumes and how each character was dressed, Johnson first notes that Glass Onion has moved away from the browns and knits of Knives Out's New England setting into the bright blues, yellows, and linens of a summer in Greece. In the Vanity Fair video, he notes that Daniel Craig chose to dress this iteration of Benoit Blanc based on the famed French director Jacques Tati (especially the frumpy, small hats) and Cary Grant in To Catch A Thief (an Alfred Hitchcock movie set in the French Riviera with Grant in an array of classic menswear). Kathryn Hahn, the least glamorous of Bron's friends, got an outfit of nothing but shades of beige, and Leslie Odom, Jr. got comfortable clothing and, being a scientist, the most practical Covid mask of the group. All of these choices serve to illustrate who each of the suspects is.
Once Kate Hudson arrives, her character is dressed in a flamboyant magenta pantsuit (with a mesh joke of a facemask), with her plainly dressed assistant played by Jessica Henwick hanging out in the background the entire time. Johnson then moves on to the blocking, which consists of a series of reverses from Blanc's point of view looking at the group, and the group looking back toward Blanc. The way the golf cart is angled and Henwick stands in the background was designed to emphasize Hudson, whose forward blocking guides the scene and provides the impetus for any camera movements as she steps up to Han and Odom, Jr., filling in the space. Reaction shots from Blanc show which of the people there he recognizes.
Noting small things the actors did, like Henwick stretching in the background, Hahn nervously smelling herself after seeing Hudson's glamorous entrance, and Blanc stepping further forward with each guest that he recognizes, Johnson then explains how the scene was originally much longer, each person conversing while inserts of Dave Bautista riding his motorcycle along the coast brought the character closer to the group. Noting how it hurt the pacing, Johnson talked about how they tossed a bunch of footage they’d shot that added nothing to the story. Instead, Bautista's arrival breaks the reverse shots, with the camera zooming past the golf cart and up and over the piled-up luggage as he skids to a halt, firing a gun like any American on a vacation. Wrapping up the segment, the vacation Rian Johnson created in Glass Onion turns out to be far from relaxing.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is streaming on Netflix.
Source: Vanity Fair/YouTube