Rian Johnson on ‘Poker Face’ Finale, Next ‘Knives Out’ and ‘Last Jedi’

This post contains spoilers for the Season Two finale of Poker Face, now streaming on Peacock. 

The second season of Poker Face nearly ends on a cliffhanger. Towards the end of the finale — appropriately titled “The End of the Road” — the show’s human lie detector heroine, Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne), is stuck in her beloved 1969 Plymouth Barracuda with master assassin the Iguana (Patti Harrison), heading for a gorge with the FBI in pursuit. The Barracuda goes over the edge, and there’s a Thelma & Louise-style freeze-frame implying that hero and villain are about to plummet to their deaths. But then the frame rewinds and we see that Charlie escaped at the last moment. We later learn that the Iguana might have survived as well. 

The future of the acclaimed retro mystery series isn’t quite as precarious as Charlie’s seemed in that freeze-frame, but Peacock has yet to order a third season. And both Lyonne and the series’ creator, Rian Johnson, don’t lack for other projects, including Wake Up Dead Man, the third film in Johnson’s Knives Out series, starring Daniel Craig as eccentric master sleuth Benoit Blanc, due out in December. 

In a wide-ranging Zoom conversation last week, Johnson spoke with Rolling Stone about how this season of Poker Face ended, and what might happen in the event of a Peacock renewal. He also reflected on memorable moments of his career as a writer-director, from the Benoit Blanc films to Looper to Star Wars: The Last Jedi.  

The last time we spoke, it was about the decision earlier this season to let Charlie stop being a fugitive. This season ends with her on the run again, this time from the FBI, after she unwittingly helped an assassin murder a federal witness. Why did you decide to go back to that setup?
From the start, it’s not like I had that ending mapped out when I started writing the season. I very much resisted the idea of putting a big season-wide arc on the wall. I just wanted to blue-sky individual episodic ideas, just to get the writers room, a few of whom were from last season, and a few of whom were new, in the right headspace. Just remembering that the engine of the show is episodic. So in that way, the arc of the whole thing emerged organically. The decision to put her back on the run again wasn’t because her being in one place wasn’t working. I thought it was, and that we could keep going like this for a while. But it seemed interesting and fun. For me, part of the way that I see the serialized dusting that we give each season is just to keep things interesting. It puts us in a spot where, if we find ourselves in another writers room again for the show, I don’t know what we do next, and that’s fine. 

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After you produced the first season, you seemed excited by the idea of doing this show for as long as you and Natasha could. In that more recent interview, when I asked if you still felt that way, you seemed more worn out from the experience of Season Two. Where do you stand right now on doing more seasons, and where does Peacock stand?
I just got back from vacation yesterday. We haven’t really started the conversations. If it all makes sense and all comes together, I do love doing the show, and I have a blast doing it, and I feel like I could keep doing it together. But there are a lot of different factors. I’m not the brash young man that I once was!

Patti Harrison’s character, Alex, is introduced as Charlie’s plucky sidekick, who Charlie likes because she never tells lies. Then she turns out to be the world’s greatest assassin and the only person who can successfully lie to Charlie. Where did that idea come from?
Part of the fun of this season, and where a lot of these things came from, was starting to kick the tires on different, for lack of a better word, tropes, and what would this trope or that trope look like in the context of the show? We did a two-parter, which was a challenge, because we felt they both had to be genuine Poker Face episodes. Giving Charlie a sidekick, or a Watson, was one of those. That was something we’d been talking about for a while. We dipped our toe in with the Steve Buscemi character, but that’s a little more of a framing device. Then it was Laura Deeley, who wrote the finale, who pitched the idea of, “What if it’s a Watson who turns out to be a Moriarty?” Because the other thing we’ve always been kicking around is, if there’s somebody out there who Charlie’s gift doesn’t work on, what would that look like? It was fun in an old-school TV finale way, a swing to take.

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Why did you want to cast Patti for this?
Besides being someone who I think is hilarious and a good actor who I’ve wanted to work with for a while, Patti has a good combination: She’s very appealing, but she draws you in while simultaneously making you feel like she doesn’t give a fuck. To be drawn in by that Watson character, you don’t want the audience to get the feeling that Charlie’s being played. Patti has a genuine coolness, but also feels like she’s cooler than you. I thought that would be an interesting combo that might help that part out.

Whose idea was it to riff on the Thelma & Louise ending, with Charlie’s car going off the cliff in a freeze-frame, and then rewinding to show that Charlie got out just in time?
That was Laura and I. Laura and I basically broke this episode three quarters of the way through the process of shooting the season. It was just delirious late at night on Zoom. I might have said the words “Thelma & Louise” first, and we ran with it. It’s something that I’ve wanted to figure out if we could get into the show from the start: the car flying off the ramp on the Universal Studios backlot and then freeze-framing halfway in the air and going to commercial. It’s something that delights me to no end, and so finessing that in the edit to get it exactly right was something I took great delight in.

It seems like you felt more free to be silly this season with things like the freeze-frame, the alligator episode, and the gym episode with the breast milk. How did you license yourself to go to those places?
You’re right, that is very much distinct to the season. And I don’t know if we’ll do that if we keep making the show this way. I think you can tell from talking to me that the show is very much follow your bliss. I just felt like I wanted to have fun this season, and be a little bit sillier. And maybe an audience does, too. You push and pull, and you see if you go too far, and this and that. I didn’t want to delve into heavy questions about the nature of truth, even though the show inevitably has some elements of that. I wanted to just have fun, and I trusted that instinct, that maybe at least some of the audience would go with that as well.

You gave Justin Theroux a lot more to do in his episode than you did with his cameo in The Last Jedi.
I love him as an actor, man. I was very disappointed I didn’t get to be on the set when Justin was working. He’s someone I’ve wanted to work more with, and hopefully will in the future. He’s got that leading-man energy that, for that part, was just super-fun, this very scary, almost James Bond villain, or Mission: Impossible. 

Is there any more that you shot with him for Last Jedi than you used? 
That is it! That’s all! [Laughs.] That was the whole concept from the very start. 

In two out of three consecutive episodes, you killed off Melanie Lynskey, who Natasha has known forever, and then Melanie’s husband Jason Ritter. Were they a package deal? Did you have one on set and realized that the other would be good for the later episode?
It feels weird to say it’s a coincidence, but it’s a coincidence. But it’s kind of not, because Natasha knows Jason as well. It’s kind of reaching out to friends. But it wasn’t at all that we got to one through the other.

One of your guest stars this season told me that most of the casting process is just Natasha going through the contacts in her phone, calling people, and asking if they’re free the following week.
Process-wise, we don’t line up a big chart at the beginning of the season. We’re casting week to week. It’s a combination thing, where sometimes we go through [casting directors] Mary Vernieu and Bret Howe, and do it officially. But there are a lot of things where it’s just crazy text threads with Natasha and I and the showrunner and producer. Because we were shooting in New York, there were just people she runs into at the Bowery, and starts small-talking with and texts me, and goes, “Hey, so-and-so wants to be in an episode and can they show up next week?” That sense of chaos, to me, that’s really, really fun.

The first two Benoit Blanc films have very different tones, which isn’t always the norm for a series with a continuing character. What made you want to do that?
What it comes down to, whether it’s in the movies or in the show, I feel like the experience I have making it is hopefully something that will get through and communicate to the audience. In other words, if I feel like I’m repeating the same thing, or turning the crank on the handle and turning out more of what I did last time, I’m not good enough to hide that from the audience. So what I end up chasing is the experience of each of these things. It’s not necessarily where I’m going to flip and do a totally different tone, but after three years of working on something that has a particular tone, it’s like you’ve been eating the same thing for lunch every day for three years. I’m more excited about doing something that feels new. That’s similar with the show. It’s not so much a conscious decision. In order to keep it exciting for myself, I don’t want to repeat myself. 

Tonally, how would you describe Wake Up Dead Man?
It’s incredibly different from Glass Onion. We put out a teaser trailer a month ago. It’s much more a Gothic, much more grounded tone. It’s more similar to the first one in that way. It kind of gets back to the real origins of the genre, which, predating [Agatha] Christie, go back to [Edgar Allen] Poe. 

What’s interesting is that Daniel is the star of these films, but Benoit isn’t the main character. Marta is our POV in the first film, and by the end of Glass Onion, Helen is clearly the protagonist.
It’s something that all good whodunnits do. In a lot of Christie’s books, she did this as well: There’s a protagonist who’s not the detective. Ultimately, these types of movies have to be driven by the same engine. You have to care about a character getting or not getting what they want. The detective is more akin to the shark in Jaws, more of a godlike presence in the movie. It’s very hard to sell emotional stakes regarding the detectives themselves.

Having now made three of these films, how are you feeling about the future of them? Is it like Poker Face, where you want to keep doing them as long as Daniel is interested?
I feel great! Because I have genuinely taken a swing each time that I didn’t think would work. Ultimately, that’s the thing you’re trying to avoid. The second you feel like you know how to do this, that leads nowhere good. So I feel fantastic. And with the movies, we can keep doing that. I don’t have something in my head right now. You kind of burn the ship into the sea each time and ask yourself, “How will I make anything ever again?” But I would keep doing them as long as I can.

These films and Poker Face have all been terrific, but have you gotten the urge to take a break from these series and do something stand-alone? 
[Holds up a notebook.] I have kind of a stand-alone thing that I’m working on as the next thing. It’s not a product of me being sick of murder mysteries. It’s just a part of me that felt it would be nice to do something different next. So I’m writing something that’s not really in the mystery-mystery genre, and just a standalone thing to do.

Blanc is a tribute to Agatha Christie, among many influences. We’ve talked about Poker Face being a tribute to Columbo. When you come up with an idea that’s a throwback, how do you know when you’re bringing enough of an original spin to it that it’s not just you doing karaoke?
What you just described is hopefully the outcome. But that’s not the question I start with. The way that I start is, I do generally have some notion of a genre or a style that would be fun to do. The idea is not that I’m looking at how to freshen it up. I’m looking at something I’m angry about, or thinking about, or wrestling with. Something I’m deeply caring about, and I can dive deeply into using this other thing as a delivery device. It’s when the gears come together that the process actually starts. That ultimately is my answer. It’s the only way I know how to do it. If it’s coming from a personal place, and really genuinely wanting to explore something beyond the style of the genre, then that’s the way to make it fresh. 

In terms of the thing you’re angry about, the first two Blanc films deal a lot with income inequality, and how rich people take advantage of people who don’t have anything. Was that an intention with the series?
It just kind of happened each time. Stating for me what that thing is, I would never want to just say that, because it would sound very boring. I think what you’re describing is true, but it’s not the thing that got the film going for me. It has to be something personal, and I don’t think I could sit down in the abstract, get angry, and write about the abstract notion of class divide in society.

Have you ever gotten down the road in the development process and realized that what you were doing was too much pastiche and not enough that was new?
I’ve never hit that wall exactly that way. But right after I made Looper, I spent several years trying to crack this sci-fi idea that I had. Ultimately could not make it work. I never really got those gears I described to connect. So it just felt like a high concept that didn’t have any innards. But elements of that ended up working their way into the thing that I’m developing next. So, everything comes around.

Three years passed between Brick and The Brothers Bloom, four years after that until Looper, five years from Looper to Last Jedi. Were there reasons for those big gaps? 
One of the things I’m trying to get better at is to just write faster. With Star Wars, it was a different thing. I had started exploring my own stuff, and then Star Wars came around, and the prep and writing period was long. But with Bloom and Looper, I’m just a slow writer, just taking several years to write a script. I don’t do that anymore. I think that’s a good thing. Getting less precious about the process and getting a bit more “sit down and do it” has been healthy. And also, as you get older, you realize time is the most valuable commodity, and who knows how long I’ll be able to get things made, so I should take advantage of it while I can. 

What is your media consumption like at home? How much do your tastes overlap with Karina’s [Johnson is married to film critic Karina Longworth, host of the Hollywood history podcast You Must Remember This] and how much are the choices one for you, and then one for her?
We overlap a lot. Karina and I, we only watch stuff that we overlap with together. I’ve definitely learned the stuff that she’s not into, not to sit down and try to make the case for it. One of the keys to a happy marriage is to watch that stuff on my own. But with Karina’s podcast, it’s amazing for me. Every night, when she’s in research mode, it’s like film school. 

What are the kinds of things you’ve learned to watch without her?
She’s not a big genre person. So anything very sci-fi or fantasy, or anything that’s too nerdy, I watch on my own.

A lot of successful directors start out with a film noir, because it’s easy to do on a small budget. Is that how Brick came about?
I don’t know that I was smart enough to make that calculation, although it worked out. Brick ended up being first. When I wrote it, I had just really gotten into Dashiell Hammett’s books. I was in my early twenties, and memories of high school were looming large. So the emotional memory of high school, combined with the raw power of these books I tried to get made for the next seven years, and wrote several other things, but none of them were that good. So I kept coming back to Brick, and that ended up being the first one. 

With Brothers Bloom, you’re working with a bigger budget, bigger stars — Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel Weisz. What was that experience like?
That was one of the best experiences of my life. I had been broke and stuck in L.A. throughout my twenties, so I wrote a big adventure in order to have a big adventure. And I loved con-man movies. It was me trying to fit a tomato into a matchbox — “OK, I get to make another movie,” and trying to fit everything into that. It was an incredibly romantic experience. We were a traveling circus ,rolling around eastern Europe with these lovely movie stars making this crazy, insane thing. And then nobody saw it, really. And I should have been in movie jail for a long time. But my producer, Ram Bergman, figured out how we could get Looper made. 

What do you take out of the experience of having a great time making a movie that then gets ignored?
What I took out of that moment was panic: “Ah, shit, did I just blow it? Am I going to be able to make something again?” What it maybe translated into with Looper, was, I really wanted to put the screws to myself, discipline-wise. I wanted to go back to more of a hard genre thing. I had this story based on this short that I had written, and I had this emotional thing that was resonant with me. I spent a lot of time rewriting it. In the writing phase, it was the opposite of being indulgent. 

Bruce Willis, before he got sick, had a reputation of being strong-willed in his interactions with his directors. What was he like with you?
The way that we got Looper made was Bruce said yes. We had Bruce Willis with a gun in a sci-fi movie. That got us our financing. I had heard all the stories, too. And then he showed up on set, and I have never had a better experience with an actor. He was lovely, he worked his ass off on it. He really, really worked hard. He wouldn’t even go back to his trailer in between takes. He hung out on set. We never moved faster on set than when we were shooting with Bruce. It was the opposite of this image of him. I’m not saying the other stuff isn’t true. But I got very, very lucky. And I just had wonderful memories.

With Last Jedi, there was a popular conception that you and J.J. Abrams didn’t really talk, which is why certain ideas get undone from one movie to the next. What was your actual level of communication with him?  
We communicated. We met and I spent days with him and was able to get into his head and all the choices he had made. That having been said, I communicated and I went and made the movie. And he was in the middle of Force Awakens. Ultimately, I feel like the choices in it, none of them were born out of an intent to “undo” anything. They were all borne out of the opposite intent of, how do I take this story that J.J. wrote, that I really loved, and these characters he created that I really loved, and take them to the next step? Kathy [Kennedy, the president of Lucasfilm] said, “We’re looking at someone to do the Empire [Strikes Back] of this series.” I took that assignment very seriously. Maybe more seriously than someone would have liked. I guess to me that didn’t mean making something that just had nods to Empire — that meant trying to genuinely do what Empire did. 

But just to use an example, Force Awakens sets up Snoke as the big villain of the new trilogy, with a mysterious backstory. And then midway through Last Jedi, Kylo Ren slices him in two and takes over the First Order.
That was, in reading J.J.’s script, and watching the dailies, and seeing the power of Adam Driver’s character. The interrogation scene in the first movie, between Rey and Kylo, was so incredibly powerful. Seeing this complicated villain that’s been created, I was just so compelled by that. This is all a matter of perspective and phrasing, but to me, I didn’t easily dispense with Snoke. I took great pains to use him in the most dramatically impactful way I could, which was to then take Kylo’s character to the next level and set him up as well as I possibly could. I guess it all comes down to your point of view. I thought, “This is such a compelling and complicated villain. This is this is who it makes sense going forward to build around.”

That movie has some of my absolute favorite moments, visuals, and sequences in all of Star Wars. The throne room fight. The Holdo Maneuver. Luke brushing the dust off his shoulder. What was it like for you, as someone who loved Star Wars, to get to play in that sandbox for a little while and get to make things like that?
It was insane. I feel like it’s hard to even describe how the process was, and getting to work with all those folks at ILM [Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas’ visual effects company], getting to have access to the archive. Everything from it, top to bottom. If you’re a Star Wars fan, it was the dream you imagine it would be. There was no, “Yes, but…” to it. It was just magical.

There was talk for a while of you being involved with the third movie. And then you weren’t. What was the timeline on that relative to you working on Last Jedi? Was that decision made before that film was done or after?
I think we must have been wrapping up. But also, to be clear, we had never put our names in the hat. We never were anticipating doing a third one. It was nothing we were pitching ourselves for, and [Kennedy] made the decision. 

The reason I ask is that some people have suggested you thought you might get to do both, and when you discovered that you wouldn’t, you decided to squeeze every idea you ever had for Star Wars into this one film.
No, absolutely not. The reality is, if I thought I was doing both of them, I would have ended it the same way. From the very start, the assignment was doing [film number] eight, and another director would do nine. I didn’t know it would be J.J. But the whole thing was being the middle leg of the race. 

Where did the idea for doing the Holdo Maneuver come from?
It came from A New Hope. It was always in my head, when Han tells Luke that without the right calculations they could fly into a star, “and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?” I thought, “Well, if that’s physically possible, what would that look like?” It seemed like something that was low-hanging fruit to me in a way. But I knew that if we were going to use it, we have to use it in a very big way; this can’t be a casual thing that happens this week. We should build the whole Return of the Jedi-esque three plotlines converging thing around this moment.

In Rise of Skywalker, there’s a scene where someone asks why they don’t just do the Holdo Maneuver with an unmanned ship, and someone else says that’s a million-to-one shot that will never work again. There are a few other things like that in the film, including undoing the idea that Rey was a nobody, and instead is Palpatine’s granddaughter. When you saw the movie, or when you learned that they were doing some of those things, how did you feel about that?
When I saw the movie, I had a great time watching it. Again, this is all about point of view. I never approach this as, like, a territory I’m carving out for my thing. In my perspective, J.J. did the same thing with the third that I did with the second, which is not digging it up and undoing — just telling the story the way that was most compelling going forward. That means not just validating what came before, but recontextualizing it and evolving and changing as the story moves forward. I didn’t feel resentful in some way. But you’re talking about a movie made by my friends, with my friends in it. I sit down to watch a movie, and it’s a Star Wars movie. It’s all stuff I love. I’m not the one to come to for a hard-hitting critique. You can go to YouTube for that. 

Speaking of which, Last Jedi was a big hit. It was critically acclaimed at the time. But because there is some subset of some unknown size that is really, really mad online about it, that then becomes the dominant narrative about the movie. What do you remember as that backlash was happening? How did that feel for you to be witnessing it?
In the moment, it’s a complicated chain of reactions to it. It never feels good to have anybody coming after you on the Internet, and especially coming after you saying things that I think I very much do not agree with about a thing I made and put a lot of heart and soul into. But at the same time, having grown up a Star Wars fan ultimately let me contextualize it and feel at peace with it in many different ways. Just remembering, going back on one level to arguing on the playground about Star Wars as a kid. And I was in college when the prequels came out. My friends and I were Prequel Hate Central. Everyone was ruthless at the time. And of course now the prequels are embraced. I’m not saying that as a facile, “Oh, things will flip around in 20 years, you’ll see!” It’s more that this push and pull, and this hatred to stuff that seems new, this is all part of being a Star Wars fan. Culture-war garbage aside, I think that essential part of it is a healthy part.

What happened with the other Star Wars trilogy there were talks of you doing?
Nothing really happened with it. We had a great time working together, and they said, “Let’s keep doing it.” I said, “Great!” I would kick ideas around with Kathy. The short version is Knives Out happened. I went off and made Knives Out, and was off to the races, busy making murder mysteries. It’s the sort of thing if, down the line, there’s an opportunity to do it, or do something else in Star Wars, I would be thrilled. But right now I’m just doing my own stuff, and pretty happy.

How far did you get in terms of an idea? Was there a whole thing mapped out, at least for what the first of those would be?
It was all very conceptual. I made Knives Out fairly quickly after. There was never any outline or treatment or anything. 

Are there certain kinds of movies that you have not yet made that you would like to make?
Yeah, absolutely. I would love to do a musical at some point. I am a big musical fan. Any kind of movie I haven’t made yet, I would like to make. It’s little bit of one book opening another. It’s not like I have a drawer full of genre ideas. It’s really whatever I’m into at the moment, feeding whatever comes next. 

Years before you made Poker Face, you directed a few hours of TV as a hired gun, including a Terriers episode, and three Breaking Bad episodes, one of which — “Ozymandias,” the one that begins with Walt, Jesse, and Hank in the desert with the neo-Nazis — is considered by many to be the best episode of dramatic TV ever made. What was that like? 
It was bliss. To not have to write? To just be handed a great script by Moira Walley-Beckett, or Sam Catlin? Leslye Headland wrote the Terriers episode I did. I genuinely loved it, but I was also being handed some of the best scripts ever written for television. 

What was your reaction when you first read the “Ozymandias” script?
“Holy shit!” Both in terms of what happens in the script, but also, “Are you sure Vince [Gilligan, Breaking Bad creator and sometime director] doesn’t want to do this one?” I was very shocked. I felt like I had been handed a massive amount of responsibility. I knew what this was in terms of the series, and I really wanted to get it right for them. 

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We could talk all day about all the things that happen in that one, so let’s stick to one sequence. What do you remember about the scenes at Walt’s house — both the fight with Skylar and then him driving away with the baby?  
I planned it out very, very carefully, because of the stunt work, and blocked it out with everybody. We had talked it out with Moira, the big emotional beats that we wanted to hit. The big moment for me is when Skylar says, “No.” The moment of getting the blocking right so she’s stopping Walter Jr. and putting her hand out, or reaching for the knife instead of the phone. They were born out of things on the page that jumped out as, “Those are big things, and I want to carve them out.” On a TV schedule, you have to really pick your battles. So there aren’t things you can find on the day you have to show up thinking, “We’re going to take the time to set the camera to 48 frames a second and get this little moment.” But I remember having a lot of fun with the stunt stuff, I remember a lot of laughter and fun when we were shooting that. You kind of have to, when you’re doing something that heavy. But the opposite of that is, when you’re outside, there were some logistics with the car. The big thing was the moment with Anna [Gunn, who played Skylar] when she comes out and has her breakdown. That, for me, was just incredible to see Anna get to that place, and accomplish it. There was a freak hailstorm when we were shooting that, and we had to wait for the hail to end before we could shoot this thing. And Anna was in a holding room, on ice, which is hard for an actor. And she had to build herself back up. It’s one of those rare things where, as a director, to witness an artist do that, and see the finished result of it, it was amazing.

Since then, you made Last Jedi, three Knives Out films, two seasons of Poker Face. Did any opportunities like that come to you that you had to turn down because you were doing these other things? Did Vince and Peter [Gould] want you to direct a Better Call Saul?  
Saul. I was really bummed. I was just too busy. There was a moment where my buddies Dan [Weiss] and Dave [Benioff] were doing Game of Thrones. They usually shoot those in blocks, so it’s a commitment of six months or something. But there was one stand-alone episode, and there was a moment where I was like, “Oh, could that work?” And then it didn’t. There’s heartbreaks that come along now and then. But again, who knows long long I’ll be able to do what I’m doing?