Viraldice

It’s often the silence in the absence of vocalized emotion or explanation that speaks loudest in the works of Tsai-Ming Liang. The silence of the final loyal patrons appreciating one last movie in a dying theater in Goodbye, Dragon Inn, or the lust of two people in love for one another in Days. Through the lens of the camera and the endless emotions that can be read on the face of the best-in-career performances he routinely brings out of his actors, particularly his longtime collaborator Lee Kang-Sheng, actions speak louder than words.

So sitting down and hearing the director speak about his films and career in his own words with depth and detail is almost unusual. While the flashiness of Ginza can feel removed from the settings and content of many of the director’s work, Tsai Ming-Liang was in Tokyo and the luxurious office and shopping complex in the heart of the area to commemorate a retrospective of the Hong Kong director’s career. Ranging from his most beloved features to documentaries to rarely-screened short films, this was a vocal celebration for a man of few words.

And he was not alone. After all, could you really celebrate his feature film career without Lee Kang-Sheng, an actor who, having been scouted from the streets by Tsai Ming-Liang in the production of his TV film Boys, has collaborated and sat at the heart of every production the director has made since. The career of one is defined by the other, so any retrospective of one is also a retrospective of the other. Like two sides of the same coin, they were here in Tokyo, where he first made his mark on the international stage.

‘It was at the Tokyo International Film Festival where I was first discovered while I was still a rookie director,’ he explained, recalling the appearance of his first feature, Rebels of the Neon God, which won the Young Cinema Competition Bronze Award in 1993. Thanks to the award here Taiwanese cinema became more popular in the region and more of his later works would similarly make their bow at the event.

‘Before the debut of my first feature I’d been directing things like TV and plays. I’ve gained a lot of confidence in my work since then, but they aren’t commercial at all and aren’t easy to market, so I think the reason anyone ever saw my work back then and it was able to be seen by the world was because it won an award. I was grateful at the time, but I never thought at the time I would be getting special screenings like this.’

Part of the appeal of Tsai Ming-Liang’s work is his deliberate pace that observes its characters in and with silence. It’s an apparent feature of all his works as he lets his actors inhabit the space they exist in and live through it, rather than driving his characters along a set path where his settings become locations on a journey rather than a lived-in space. Still, it’s a style that only became more pronounced as the creator grew in confidence over the years and gained more experience, with his movies following the release of Goodbye, Dragon Inn in particular being notable for their relative silence.

For this film, the director’s love of cinema as an artistic medium and an outlet for creative expression influenced a style that has increasingly come to define his career and his work. ‘I love cinema and I love this medium, so I’m always thinking about how to take advantage of what this medium offers. When I make a film I’m usually thinking about how to for about one or two years before that, thinking about what the movie should be, what style and look it should have and will tell the best story, things like that. Not the business side of things.

‘For example, in Goodbye Dragon Inn the main character isn’t the people in the cinema but the theater itself, so I was very slow and pondering in order to express the space and unique nature of the cinema. It was that way of creating the film that brought it to the attention of so many within the film world. With the concept of the film the aim had been to create something about how art and ideas can come together in one place like this. My films are primarily driven by the image, as well, and this caused me to emphasize more on the depths found within each image, leading me to more freely try out new styles moving forwards.’

Beyond the depths of his images comes a single constant that remains through all of his films: his collaboration with Lee Kang-Sheng. Having discovered him on the street while he worked in an arcade, their mutual work together on Boys sparked an over-30 year collaboration that has seen him star in every film Ming-Liang has directed in subsequent years. ‘It felt like destiny meeting Lee Kang-Sheng,’ he admitted while talking about their relationship.

His meeting and the chances he had to observe the actor during the film of his early TV and feature works made him want to reflect his life and his own circumstances and tell stories that captured Lee’s inner monologue or gave space to portray himself most clearly on screen.

‘[While working on my first work with him] I paid a lot of attention at the time to his home situation and the circumstances he was in. After creating my first picture with him he became ill, and that illness was incorporated into the film I was making at the time. With my fifth feature, What Time is it There, the film is about a young man whose father had died, and I wanted to write about those and his feelings surrounding that. I always want to capture how feelings change over time and to capture it in Lee’s face. That’s my purpose in making films.’

Perhaps it’s fitting that through the interview until that point and through a lot of Tsai Ming-Liang’s answers about his work that Lee Kang-Sheng himself had sat mostly silently, like an observer over the discussion of a career that the two together have shared. The desire to work together comes from a mutual respect of the other’s abilities and deep-rooted love for the medium and its history, and it’s what drives their dual performances behind and in front of the camera.

‘When movies first began they were silent, they had no lines, and I’m personally not someone who talks all that much either,’ pondered Lee. ‘I like isolation. People often ask me if I’m lonely, but I’m not, I like it. I’m not a fan of places with lots of people mingling around and making noise. Tsai Ming-liang is the same, and he also likes the isolation, and we both prefer these quieter places and movies.

As we’ve made pictures together we’ve had these shared experiences and views, we don’t really like music, and it’s why these movies rarely have any sound and are mostly silent. In Days, Non is from Laos, we don’t understand each other’s languages, but they’re so connected there’s no need to understand their conversation, so we made a more silent and intimate feature.’

It’s a mutual understanding of their shared worldviews and work together, and the way their careers have intertwined so closely, that leaves their partnership in films and the career of Tsai Ming-liang such a unique one within modern cinema. One career wouldn’t exist without the other, and the works which sprouted from their chance meeting and partnership would never have come to be.

‘If I hadn’t met Lee Kang-sheng, the movies I make would not be the same as they are now. I probably would have made a lot more normal movies with a lot of music and dialogue. The circumstances would have been so different. But I learned from Lee his way of life, his rhythm, which had a massive influence on me and led me to making more truthful films.’

For Tsai Ming-liang, his career is an observation of one actor, and the experiences and lives he has discovered and desired to write about through his own life and observing his friend and collaborator of three decades. When Lee was ill, they created a film where he was ill that the director admitted he feels brought out the actor’s best performance.

As the sun set in the heart of Ginza, a festival celebrated the career of a director with a named retrospective, yet the reality is a decades-long refrain celebrating arguably Asian and Taiwanese cinema’s strongest collaborative partnership. It’s a collaboration neither wish to end, and they stated their plans to continue working into the future. There’s more of this world to observe, after all.

By reputation, Casablanca is the greatest American romance ever put to celluloid. There may be films more avant-garde or technically accomplished, but no film is so compulsively rewatched or intensely adored. US Senator Elizabeth Warren returns to Casablanca with her husband every New Year’s Eve, and Donald Trump even made a (losing) bid to acquire the famed upright piano that is featured in the Paris flashbacks. Casablanca has been so talked about, quoted, and repurposed to ricochet across popular culture that Gen Z’s first encounter might easily be parodies on Saturday Night Live or reruns of The Simpsons.

The problem is that Casablanca’s familiar quotability seems to have immunized it from the critical ebb and flow that has washed over landmarks such as Citizen Kane or The Godfather. Eighty years of romantic nostalgia has left it politically defanged, but in a time of resurgent authoritarian nationalism, it’s worth excavating its message: a full-throated attack on the America First isolationism that had paralyzed the United States under the looming threat of fascism.

At the age of 27, recent Cornell graduate and aspiring playwright Murray Bartlett took the summer of 1938 to travel to Vienna in the immediate aftermath of the Anschluss, where he witnessed the antisemitic Nuremberg Laws come into force in the wake of Nazi annexation. Fleeing Jewish refugees snaked from Marseilles to Morocco, on to Lisbon, then across the Atlantic on the final leg to America—a trek that eventually got scrupulously reported in the newsreel opening film sequence of Casablanca.

Burnett personally smuggled his Jewish family’s property south to Nice, where he stumbled on a smokey nightclub overlooking the Mediterranean that catered to refugees and military officials. A Black pianist from Chicago relieved the tense mood with a repertoire of popular jazz standards. Back in the United States in 1940, Burnett collaborated with writer Joan Alison to rework his observations into “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” an unproduced three-act play.

Just five days after the Pearl Harbor attacks, Warner Bros. producer Hal Willis discovered the play on his desk and snatched it up at the then-unheard price of $20,000. He assigned sibling team Julius and Philip Epstein to mold it into a screenplay, with Michael Curtiz slated to direct. Taken together, these formative circumstances drive home the point that romance may adorn the film, but its backbone is the plight of refugees displaced by political violence.

Set in the French-controlled port city of Morocco just beyond the authority of the Vichy puppet government, the story centers on a romantic love triangle between immaculately tailored, chain-smoking saloon keeper Rick (Humphrey Bogart), his enigmatic ex-lover Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), and her heroic if stolid husband, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), an escapee of a Nazi concentration camp and leader of the Czechoslovak resistance. Rick faces a dilemma. He’s acquired two letters of transit that could whisk the Laszlos beyond the reach of Gestapo officer, Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt), but doing so would irrevocably sunder his romance with Ilsa.

In its wartime era, Casablanca was a dissident plea to the American public to alter course. In the early stages of WWII, a Gallup poll revealed an astonishing 90% of Americans favored isolationism to avoid the fast-ballooning conflict across the Atlantic. But Warner Bros. execs regarded America First isolationism as a stunning betrayal of humanitarian obligations and a greenlight to fascism. Brothers Harry and Jack Warner threw their support behind the Anti-Nazi League and began churning out anti-isolationist motion pictures, such as Confessions of a Nazi Spy. The blowback was so powerful that Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota, a leader of the America First organization, convened a hearing to upbraid them with accusations of warmongering. Under a barrage of questioning, Harry replied indignantly, “I am ready to give myself and all of my personal resources to aid in the defeat of the Nazi menace to the American people.”

Harry kept true to his word in Casablanca. Rick moves from burnt-out cynicism and political isolationism—“I stick my neck out for nobody”—to shooting down a Nazi officer and earning Victor’s gratitude for abandoning his misanthropic neutrality: “Welcome back to the fight. This time, I know our side will win.”

Casablanca is unmoored from the America First ethos in other ways. Just as Rick has rebuffed Victor’s pleas for the letters of transit, German soldiers burst into song with “Die Wacht am Rhein,” taunting refugees from the German war machine. In response, Rick nods approval to the band to launch into a stirring rendition of “La Marseillaise.”

The French National Anthem acts as the film’s patriotic ballast. It congeals refugees who have fled from dozens of countries and warzones behind a common cultural touchstone, silencing the bellicose nationalism of the Germans but also answering head-on the America First position that moral obligations are neatly trammeled by national borders. Authoritarian regimes do not stop at national boundaries, and, as the chorus of voices affirms, neither does the determination to throw off the yoke of tyranny.

The cast literally represented the transnational coalition of refugees that were pleading against America First isolationism. Nearly all of the roughly 75 actors who appeared on screen were refugees or immigrants, hailing from more than 30 nations, and of the 14 who earned screen credit, only three were born in the US: Humphrey Bogart, Dooley Wilson, and Joy Page. Ingrid Bergman was Swedish, Paul Henreid was Austro-Hungarian; Peter Lorne, portraying Ugarte, was a German-speaking émigré from Slovakia; and most interestingly, Conrad Veidt, portraying Nazi villain Major Strasser, was a German refugee who’d been detained by and then fled from the Third Reich after it rose to power in 1933. The composition of the cast was itself evidence that the carnage being visited on Europe was washing up on American shores and could not be ignored or contained.

Casablanca would later become congenial to future generations of Americans in part because it rejected a key feature of the America First sensibility: its deep-seated racism. The intimacy depicted between a Black pianist and a white saloon keeper who knock back drinks together and bind their fates in friendship would have been nearly unthinkable in early 1940s America. Tom Doherty, a cultural historian at Brandeis University, notes that Casablanca doubles as both a geographical and imaginative space: “Casablanca cajoled Americans to realize their higher aspirations, not just by confronting fascism abroad but by imagining a community that had toppled racial hierarchies.”

From our vantage point in 2022, Casablanca’s message seems not to be breaking through. Nativist isolationism has rippled across the globe over the last decade. Prime Minister Narendra Modi rose to power on a wave of Hindu nationalism scapegoating Muslims. The Swedish right has muscled its way into parliament by pinning blame on immigrants. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has seized on the Great Replacement conspiracy theory to consolidate domestic support. Meanwhile, back in the United States, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has announced he’ll choke resources to Ukraine to hoard them at home, thereby aligning foreign policy with Steve Bannon’s far-right vision of America First.

Noah Isenberg, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of We’ll Always Have Casablanca, told me that the aspirational spirit of Casablanca is a counterblast to divisive xenophobic politics.

“Donald Trump ripped at the fabric of democracy—capitalizing on a global pandemic to sow fear and division, stoking contempt for Syrian refugees, and launching a coup to cling to power when he lost the election,” Isenberg said. “He truly represents the inverse of everything Casablanca stands for—namely, subordinating personal interests for the greater good. But Casablanca reminds us that no matter how dispirited we’ve become by the corruption around us, we always have the power to rise to the occasion and exert ourselves in defense of freedom and equality.”

Casablanca, it turns out, has all the trappings of a schmaltzy romance, but its clarion call to become our best selves at times of grave political peril has never been timelier.

Domestic workers live at the fringes of other people’s realities, devoting their bodies and souls to rather thankless jobs. Often they are from developing nations, leaving their faraway homes just to make a living, and it is typical that they have children of their own too, whom they rarely see as they take care of their employer’s kids. In Nanny, first time feature filmmaker Nikyatu Jusu takes the spotlight and shines it on this unexplored sect of society, creating a beautiful yet chilling tale surrounding identity, love, and motherhood peppered along with terror, tension, and African mythology.

Aisha (Anna Diop) is an undocumented Senegalese immigrant who starts a new job as the nanny for an affluent Manhattan family in hopes of saving up enough money to bring her own young son over to the United States. She then begins to experience supernatural disturbances that force her to deal with her guilt over leaving her son behind in pursuit of a better life for them. 

Jusu’s choice of utilizing the supernatural through African mythology brings a new touch to a genre rife with arbitrary ghosts and ghoulish creatures. There are even moments of hesitancy in their presence — is Aisha in danger, or is she simply being guided? The understated beauty blanketing the film is another aspect that sets it apart, this artistry brought in by cinematographer Rina Yang, whose balance of vivid primary colours and soft tones makes it not only an emotional experience but a visually stunning one too.

Diop astounds as Aisha, her portrayal of a person who must constantly live at an internal crossroads subtle yet constantly varied — she is not only just “the help” but a woman too. Diop’s performance brings a wonderful depth to the character and carries the weight of the film nearly effortlessly. Michelle Monaghan’s role as her employer Amy may be understandably minor, but she also provides a contrast essential for the narrative.

While Nanny does make full use of its atmosphere and tension, Jusu tends to play loosely with the pace, creating narrative lulls here and there that leave a bit too much breathing space. Additionally, although the film has been labelled a “horror”, expectations for physical frights should be brought down low. Nanny may contain horror elements, but these are far from being the frontrunner in this story. The supernatural permeates throughout the narrative but takes a backseat — resulting in a lack of jump-scares and calling for perhaps something even more terrifying: self-reflection.

The film’s focus on the life of a domestic worker is an emotionally fraught experience — materializing perhaps just a fraction of what it would be like in their shoes. With its sprinkling of fear and unique imagery, it frames the personal conflict of Aisha in picturesque moments that provoke gasps and further thought. Nanny is strong showing of Jusu’s promise and prowess as a director, making her future endeavours (notably her newly announced Night of the Living Dead sequel) something to look out for.

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It’s approaching two decades since Rian Johnson announced himself as one of genre cinema’s most intriguing young talents. His debut feature, Brick, a high-stakes high school noir with a clockwork plot and killer script, set the tone for what was to come – not least its opening shot of a dead body lying face down in the dirt.

Aside from a sojourn in a galaxy far, far away, Johnson’s film career has remained grounded in murder and mystery ever since, from the swizzling exploits of The Brothers Bloom, to the time-skipping thrills of Looper, to the yarn-spinning larks of Knives Out. Never one to repeat the same trick twice, Johnson is back with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, another slickly constructed whodunit that expands the world of his previous film while reacquainting us with Cajun crime solver extraordinaire, Benoit Blanc.

LWLies: Glass Onion is not a direct continuation of Knives Out. You have Daniel Craig returning as Benoit Blanc, but it’s a new story, new cast. Was it always the idea not to do a direct sequel?

Johnson: Yeah, that was always the intention, even before we knew we were going to keep making these movies. The notion was, if we can make more, then they should be like mystery novels. Each one should have a new cast of characters, its own setting, its own unique tone, and most importantly its own reason for being. It’s the way Agatha Christie would do it.

And what about Daniel? He’s become almost like your Poirot figure.

I’ve been lucky to have had good relationships with a bunch of different actors over the years. But it’s rare that you end up being in the same lifeboat as someone like Daniel Craig. Thank god we like each other, because this could turn into a Hitchcock lifeboat very fast if we didn’t. But we get along very well, and we’re both excited by the notion of each of these movies taking us by surprise and hopefully taking the audience by surprise. So for many, many reasons, I’m happy I’m in this boat with him.

Daniel had this long stint playing James Bond, and he was the only actor afforded the freedom to flesh out the character’s backstory. It’s not quite the same thing in Glass Onion, but it definitely feels like you’re building out Blanc’s character more, giving us a glimpse into his private life.

Y’know, it’s fun to tease, to give little hints here and there… Christie did that with Poirot and Miss Marple. But I think a little goes a long way. The last thing I want to do is start building up some deep backstory about Benoit Blanc. The point of these movies is the mystery behind each story. I’m not trying to figure out ways to keep it fresh by introducing his father… blah, blah, blah. The way I approach it, you can truly have every story be driven by completely fresh winds, and Blanc can play his role in the mystery in his own unique way.

He’s always going to be the detective.

Yes, but oddly enough, the detective is not the protagonist of the murder mystery. It’s important to remember that. That’s the potential trap, because obviously he anchors the mystery in the same way Poirot anchors it in Christie’s novels, but from a screenwriting perspective if you start thinking of Blanc as the protagonist then you’re kinda dead in the water.

The way he’s styled here is amazing; he’s got this Monsieur Hulot thing going on. Is that how you approached it, what would Benoit Blanc wear on holiday?

That was all Daniel. He very much leaned into the [Jacques] Tati aesthetic, and he’s got a bit of a Cary-Grant-in-To-Catch-a-Thief vibe as well, including the high-waisted, wide-leg cream trousers. You really have to be Cary Grant or Daniel Craig to pull those off – I would end up looking like Peter Ustinov. Daniel worked with [costume designer] Jenny [Eagan] a lot, but it was his idea to go down the Hulot route. My thing was like, wherever Blanc goes, he has to look fabulous.

I love the idea that Blanc never takes his shirt off… not even in the pool.

No, he’s not going to show his nipples [laughs].

In Knives Out, Ana de Armas’ Marta becomes Blanc’s reluctant partner in solving the case. You do something similar here by having him pair up with someone unexpectedly.

And also, just in technical terms, the audience knows there’s never going to be a true threat against Blanc. They know the detective is not going to die; the detective is not going to get arrested; the detective is not going to make bad life choices. So, they need somebody who they care about, who they can become invested in, who’s not Blanc. I hope we can find a way to keep doing that going forward.

You’ve said that Knives Out was written on and off over a 10-year period. What was the time frame for this one?

It wasn’t 10 years, let me tell you. It was very quick. I started it from scratch after the success of the first one, because even though in the abstract I thought it would be fun to do more of these, I did not have a drawer full of ideas. It’s the same right now, I’m starting to gather ideas for the third one. Obviously time is a nice luxury to have, but one advantage of writing over a shorter period is that, if you’re setting it in the here and now, it allows you to write about whatever is going on. With Knives Out, that came towards the end. But it’s still a nerve-racking process. Actually it’s fucking terrifying. Especially with this one, because people liked the first one, so the expectations are higher. You’ve just got to get stuck into it and try to do your best.

The smoking gun of this film is a cocktail napkin with a billion dollar idea scribbled on it. Do you have something similar at the start of the writing process?

I do! Years ago, I started working in these little Moleskine books [Johnson holds one up to the camera; it’s filled with text and annotated sketches]. Ninety per cent of the process is just in these things. It’s mostly coming up with the structure of the movie and how it’s gonna tick. But that happens alongside what is almost an entirely separate process, which is thinking in terms of characters and themes and the emotion driving it. There’s almost like two tracks running parallel to each other that interlock at some point.

You’ve opted for a more exotic location this time. Was that always the plan? You said you started writing during lockdown… I can see the appeal of a Greek island.

We all wanted to be on a Greek island, right? It was a combination of things, but I definitely wanted to give the audience clear road signs that this was going to be its own thing. So thinking of a setting that was as different as possible from Knives Out seemed like a good idea. Y’know, Knives Out was this cosy family drama, which is what people often associate Christie’s novels with, but when I was a kid and started getting into this genre, it was stuff like Evil Under the Sun and Death on the Nile, these big glamorous vacation movies.

Herbert Ross’ 1973 film The Last of Sheila is clearly a big influence on Glass Onion.

For sure. Again, just for the glamour of it, the fun of it… The Last of Sheila has the most ’70s cast of all time. I love it so much. Dyan Cannon in that movie, oh my god.

Speaking of The Last of Sheila, there’s a Stephen Sondheim connection there too. He co-wrote the film with Anthony Perkins, and he was well-known in theatre circles for his love of games and puzzles. And in Knives Out there’s the scene where Blanc is singing ‘Losing My Mind’ in his car. Could you talk about Sondheim’s influence on your work?

Sondheim’s my guy. I’m a big musical theatre fan, and his work has meant a lot to me over the years. But yes, he’s someone who crosses over into the murder mystery world as well. I don’t know if this is apocryphal or not, but there’s a story that the main character in Anthony Shaffer’s play ‘Sleuth’ was modelled on Sondheim, and the working title was apparently ‘Who’s Afraid of Stephen Sondheim?’.

In my movie there are some cameos which I’d prefer to keep a secret for your readers, but we do have Sondheim in a scene briefly. He had seen Knives Out and had appreciated the little nod, so we just took a swing and somehow we managed to get him on a Zoom call for 15 minutes, and I got to meet one of my heroes. He was very game in recording his little cameo.

Sondheim was famous for holding his own murder mystery parties for his friends. Who would you invite to your dream murder mystery party?

Ah, jeez. Sondheim, obviously [laughs]. I’ll tell you a story: When we were making the movie, we shot the first half in Greece and the second half in Belgrade. That’s where all of our stage work and all of our sets were. It was at the height of the Delta wave, so we were in our production bubble, and we were staying in a very nice hotel, but we were going a little stir crazy. So on weekends we would rent out the rooftop bar and the whole cast would get together for our own murder mystery parties. Janelle [Monáe] would show up in full costume – literally a Sherlock Holmes cape and pipe, false moustache, the works – and she would have created a whole character with a backstory and she would stay in character all night. Which is all to say that I would definitely invite Janelle. And I would invite Dave Bautista, because he was uniquely terrible at it. I know I could beat him [laughs].

In the film there’s this literal ‘glass onion’ which is described as infinitely complex but with a clear centre. I’m aware you borrowed the title from the Beatles’ song, which is famously self-satirising; it’s John Lennon poking fun at himself and people who would overanalyse the band’s lyrics. Does the title have multiple meanings for you?

It absolutely does. Most of them are laid bare in the movie. It’s what you said but also in relation to The Beatles, it’s that thing of people thinking they were playing 3D chess when, in reality, they were in the studio making shit up and seeing how it would sound, which plays into the movie as well. And also, y’know, the song is just a complete banger.

There’s also a lovely moment, which is ultimately played for laughs, where Edward Norton’s character strums ‘Blackbird’. Do you have a favourite off ‘The White Album’?

‘Glass Onion’ is definitely up there. To me, ‘Dear Prudence’ is the best song ever written. But ‘Glass Onion’ has always been a personal favourite, too. It’s so interesting, because when I started showing the script to friends, I didn’t think the concept of a Beatles deep cut existed, but I was amazed by how many people didn’t recognise the song or didn’t know it. I guess it’s one of the more obscure ones in their catalogue. It’s not ‘Let It Be’.

Maybe the film will have a Stranger Things-Kate Bush effect and people will start to catch on.

That’d be nice. We’re really gonna put those Beatles on the map! [Laughs]

Looking at your own back catalogue, there’s a line in The Brothers Bloom I like where Adrien Brody says, somewhat sneeringly, “My brother writes his cons the way dead Russians write novels, with thematic hooks and embedded symbolism”. It feels quite pointedly self-analytical.

Yeah, and it’s something that’s interesting to talk about for a lot of reasons. Part of the game of writing movies is building something that is a piece of pop entertainment that can work entirely on that level. That’s its own form of craftsmanship. Then there’s this aspect of trying to layer in all these things that I’m angry about. I’m not in the business of making message movies, so any social commentary has to work in the context of delivering a big, fun movie.

Glass Onion definitely feels more overtly political than Knives Out, in terms of the types of people you’re satirising.

The first one was very much about a family; about the arguments you’d have over the dinner table with relatives. With this one… it’s hard to not go big with it because every time you turn on the news or open Twitter, you’re confronted with this terrible, carnivalesque reality, to the point where it seems like there’s not a small subtle way to reference it. If you want to talk about this stuff, you have to raise your voice.

The Edward Norton character is fascinating. He’s this incredibly self-serving, self-mythologising tech billionaire who wants to change the world. There’s a running joke that no one can quite figure out whether he’s a genius or an idiot.

Yeah, well, there are so many specific examples of that in the real world. But when writing the character, I very quickly found the more specific I was, the more boring it became. The Elon Musk jokes didn’t seem very fun or interesting. Sometimes you have to take a step back and look at the overall structure and the systems that allow these people to exist. And why we look up at these people on pedestals.

The current moment certainly feels like fertile ground for writing a character-driven satire, which is partly what Glass Onion is.

Yeah, absolutely. I guess this one is a bit more Strangelove in tone than what came before it, and probably what will come after it. But it goes back to this idea of trying to get into what Christie was doing in her day. She was never political per se, but she always engaged with the culture at the time. I think it’s something that’s kind of been lost from the genre.

When we see contemporary period pieces that are adaptations of Christie’s work, they often feel overly lavish and quaint. But when you read Christie now, it still feels fresh. Y’know, she was dealing with class and gender dynamics in a really interesting way. There’s this perception of her work that it’s like the cover of a game of Clue. It’s stuffy British society, it’s the body in the library… Which Christie herself lampooned in her books. She was very aware of that and was constantly subverting the genre, which I think has helped to prolong her legacy.

In terms of your own career, you’ve directed a sequel before, but this is the first time you’ve made a follow-up to one of your own movies. Does that bring its own added pressure?

With The Last Jedi and this, I’d say the pressure was kind of different, but there’s still the same clickity clack of riding the rollercoaster. The instant you’re at the top, that’s when the nerves set in. With Star Wars it’s a whole set of massive pressures, whereas the success of Knives Out created a good problem for me to solve. That said, a successful movie can quickly turn into this gilded object that is somehow outside of you – even though you made it, it suddenly seems beyond your reach. I’ve never really faced that before in terms of writing something as a follow-up. It was pretty terrifying and I’m sure it will be the same doing the third one.

When does number three start?

I don’t know. I’m just starting to think about ideas for it, but I think I’m probably going to make it as my next film. We’ll see how quickly we can get it together. Let me put this one out there first. Just give me a minute [laughs].

We’ve touched on the political and satirical side of the film but, as with Knives Out, it’s telling that you once again end things on a positive note: truth will out in the end.

As I see it, that’s an essential part of the whodunit. A lot of academic writers have characterised the genre as being essentially Conservative: a crime is committed; chaos is created; the paternal detective swoops in and solves the case, restoring order to society. I see it much more in terms of moral order being restored. So when you step out of the theatre, you’re satisfied that things have been set right in the end. But now that you mention it, maybe I should do a bummer ending for the next one. The killer gets away with it…

Would watch.

Shit, don’t tell me that. Don’t tell Netflix that!

Sorry, Netflix. By the way, I very much enjoyed seeing Noah Segan pop up in this.

[Laughs] I like the idea of him being a bit like Patrick McGoohan in Columbo. He just turns up wearing a different beard each time. But y’know, we’re best friends, and having him hang out on set is always a blast. We’ll always figure out something for him to do.

Has he read ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ yet?

Noah? No… No one has! [Laughs]. I gave him a copy and I think he got like a hundred pages into it.

What were you reading while you were making Glass Onion?

I’m all about audiobooks, they’re kind of my obsession. Typically non-fiction. It was 2020 and we were in lockdown, so I was probably busy making sourdough starter or something. When I’m writing I don’t generally read Agatha Christie books, just because it feels too close to what I’m doing. Right now I’m reading the Sherlock Holmes short stories and novels for the first time, which Daniel suggested to me. They’re very good.

And what about music?

I have a Glass Onion playlist that I’ve been building since I started writing it. ‘Long Black Limousine’, the Elvis Presley version, was one that I listened to over and over. Also, the George Harrison song ‘Gone Troppo’ off his weird album [of the same name]. Oh, and also Nino Rota’s main theme from [1978’s] Death on the Nile. That was a big influence on Nathan [Johnson]’s score.

You and Nathan recorded the Knives Out score at Abbey Road. Did you get to go back for this one?

I didn’t get to go sadly; I was busy shooting my TV show [Poker Face]. It was magical being there for Knives Out though. The fact we got the opportunity again to record Glass Onion there, with the whole Beatles connection, that was pretty special.