Rian Johnson Goes Off on AI as He Looks to His Post-Knives Out Future

It’s an unusually chilly November evening in Savannah, Georgia, but you can feel the heat of the crowd inside the Trustees Theater. The marquee outside highlights Rian Johnson as the night’s big honoree for his new movie, Wake Up Dead Man, closing out the 2025 SCAD Savannah Film Festival. Wearing a crisp navy suit, he’s standing in front of me backstage with the crawl of the credits coming to an end, all but peeking through the curtain with a relaxed smile. Then, thunderous applause. This was one of the hottest tickets for a festival graced with the presence of Dylan O’Brien, Kristen Stewart, Brendan Fraser and others. When Johnson walks onto that stage, he’s greeted like a rock star. Before he can leave, he’s swarmed for selfies and autographs.

Other than the graying facial scruff and biting sense of humor, Johnson, 51, does not exactly fit the mold of a rock star. He’s polite, soft-spoken and a little dorky. He’s less of a rebel in Hollywood than one of the few filmmakers that all corners of the town remain comfortable relying on. He’s spent the past five years making good on one of the richest movie deals of the modern era. And he’s nice — like, really nice. Nobody seems to have a bad word to say about the guy. His fellow filmmakers adore him, and if you name an actor in demand right now, they’ve likely either recently worked with him or hope to someday soon.

Wake Up Dead Man stars the man of the moment, Josh O’Connor, alongside icons Glenn Close and Thomas Haden Church; Oscar nominees Jeremy Renner and Josh Brolin; and rising stars Cailee Spaeny and Daryl McCormack. It’s also the third installment in Johnson’s smash Knives Out franchise, meaning that Daniel Craig is again front and center as the deliciously drawling Detective Benoit Blanc. The movie, a gothic murder mystery set within the community of a small Catholic church, nicely represents Johnson’s unique appeal, 20 years into his career: It’s as broadly entertaining and twisty as the previous two films, thus sure to launch well on Netflix — but it’s also darker, deeper and quieter. Where Johnson could’ve harmlessly cruised on past success, he instead took a leap of faith.

“It’s strange how you struggle for so long to be able to do the thing that you really want to do and establish your identity — and then suddenly you blink and you’ve made seven movies,” Johnson tells me over coffee on the day of the Dead Man premiere in Savannah. “It’s like, ‘Oh, so I’m doing this now.’ The danger then becomes knowing how to do it — so I find myself in a place where I want to do things that are scarier and push myself.”

Fortunately, he’s built enough goodwill to convince folks to join him on the ride — that goes for both those ecstatic fans inside the Trustees Theater and the bottom line-driven execs waiting for what he’s got cooking next.

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Early in Wake Up Dead Man, O’Connor’s Reverend Jud Duplenticy, a junior priest reassigned to a dysfunctional new congregation, exclaims, “I’m young, dumb and full of Christ!” The line is intently autobiographical. “That was me,” Johnson says. The filmmaker made Dead Man in large part to excavate his deeply religious youth, a core part of his identity that gradually faded in adulthood. “I slowly realized I was writing this through the lens of me, now,” Johnson says. “I had to step back into me, 30 years ago, and tap back into the things that inspired and drove me as a Christian.”

“He has a very complicated relationship with religion,” says Craig. “And that’s the birth of this movie.”

Johnson grew up in Orange County, California, in what he calls an Evangelical bubble. He was a youth-group kid aligned with a rising religious-conservative political movement, finding rich meaning in the milieu. “It might sound kind of cuckoo, but it’s like framing your whole world through a personal relationship with God,” he says. In Dead Man, Jud observes the methods of Msgr. Jefferson Wicks (Brolin), the church’s cruel leader, and how he manipulates his followers. “Every single one of them is a different slice of my own personal experience with faith,” Johnson says of the church attendees. We get to know them as suspects once someone in the church is brutally killed. Through Spaeny’s disabled former cellist, “I wanted to express a deep embodying of it in a physical way.” Renner’s town doctor reflects “the notion of a bitterness that you’re hanging onto.” And McCormack’s alt right-flirting aspiring politician showcases Johnson’s since-reversed political attitudes. “I know that feeling, of it feeling good to jab at the world,” Johnson says. “I hope I wasn’t that bad, but I can relate.”

Once in college, Johnson drifted from any kind of religious conviction. “At some point, I definitely had a moment of, ‘Oh, wait a minute, am I not a Christian anymore?’ It was a real loss of identity for me,” he says. “I had to spend the rest of my 20s putting the pieces back together and figuring out a new way to frame the world.”

After graduating from USC film school, Johnson spent years trying to get his debut feature, Brick, off the ground. To make ends meet, he produced promos for the Disney Channel, made instructional videos for the Preschool for Deaf Children and completed a short. At 29, he finally cobbled together a budget of less than $500,000 to make Brick, a hardboiled high-school detective story centered on a sardonic, cynical and crafty teen gumshoe named Brendan. Johnson cast Joseph Gordon-Levitt — though seven years younger, an industry veteran relative to Johnson by then, with roles in hit shows (3rd Rock From the Sun) and movies (10 Things I Hate About You) — and teamed with producer Ram Bergman and cinematographer Steve Yedlin, with whom Johnson has collaborated on every movie since. “I had spent so long storyboarding and planning every single shot, so literally every shot in it is something that I was cooking for that decade in my life,” Johnson says.

The movie premiered to strong reviews in 2005 at Sundance, where Focus Features bought it. “I remember being 22 and Rian telling me about their notes, and me getting all, ‘Who do they think they are? They’re not the artists!’ and blah, blah, blah,” says Gordon-Levitt. “He pushed back on me, saying, ‘Well, I don’t know. They probably have some good points.’ That really struck me back then. I didn’t expect it. It was so different from what us young men typically would say.” Brick made slightly less than $4 million at the global box office, an impressive haul for a six-figure indie. Johnson had made a movie that critics and filmmakers admired, but Brick introduced Johnson most clearly as a director who knew how to reach an audience.

That initial impression hasn’t ever changed. “A lot of great artists, whether they’ll say this out loud or not, have a sort of superior attitude — and he really doesn’t. He’s got an intrinsic humility,” Gordon-Levitt says. “His respect for the audience is a big part of why he’s able to make these movies that strike a balance between his deeply sophisticated taste and mainstream popcorn movies.”

Indeed, fast-forward two full decades from Brick, and that mix was precisely what Johnson was after with Wake Up Dead Man. “Big, entertaining movies do not really delve into religion,” Johnson says. “It was a very emotional experience — it was very hard to write. The true challenge was, as opposed to writing a navel-gazing movie, to try to express all of that through a big-tent entertainment — a Benoit Blanc mystery.” He pulled it off, of course. That’s his secret sauce.

“He has a huge amount of knowledge about cinema history — you name it, he’s seen it — and that’s crucially important,” says Craig. “He’s always tapping into what’s come before, what influences he has, but he is always on the lookout to be moving forward into the future.”

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Johnson scaled up after Brick by refining his recipe, proving its worth on expanding budgets and bolder canvasses. His sophomore feature, the heartfelt caper The Brothers Bloom, underperformed critically and commercially, but with the steadfast support of producer Bergman, he then got a shot at helming a studio movie in the midbudget sci-fi thriller Looper (again starring Gordon-Levitt). “I definitely should have been shut down after Brothers Bloom,” Johnson cracks. “I came into the writing of Looper feeling like, ‘OK, I have to hit this one out of the park because I might not get another shot.’ ” The movie won screenwriting critics’ awards, topped 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and grossed more than $176 million worldwide — nearly six times its budget.

It’s hard to say it’s been anything but smooth sailing ever since for Johnson, who went on to helm one of the greatest episodes in TV history, Breaking Bad‘s “Ozymandias,” and the middle installment of Star Wars‘ sequel trilogy, The Last Jedi, which divided fandom. “We made that movie in this beautiful, fearless little bubble, and the reality is, once you dive in and start doing the creative work, there isn’t a lot of room in your head for the notion of external pressure,” Johnson says.

Yet while Last Jedi made good money and satisfied Lucasfilm enough for them to offer Johnson the next movie — which he politely declined — here at least was his first sustained taste of backlash. Some audience members rebelled against Jedi‘s moody take on Luke Skywalker and its meta sense of humor. “Before I made the Star Wars movie, when I was very, very active on Twitter, if someone said anything mean about me, I felt like I had to fix that,” Johnson says. Now he engages far more selectively. “Having grown up as a Star Wars fan, I think the love and the hate are two sides of the same coin, and it’s all passion for what the thing is. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to deal with when it’s coming at you in a personal way.”

Johnson had signed on to mount a fresh Star Wars trilogy in 2017, and while that plan is effectively dead, he isn’t saying goodbye yet. “A part of my brain will always be in Star Wars,” he says. “It’s so much a part of me and the way I think.”

Back then, Johnson wanted to move onto something new and came to be consumed by a world of his own creation. In 2019, Knives Out premiered as an unexpected sensation in Toronto, another example of Johnson drawing from childhood to create something universal. (It was inspired most directly by such mystery authors as Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, whom Johnson read voraciously in high school.) Knives Out made north of $312 million when Lionsgate released it in theaters off a $40 million budget and earned Johnson his first Oscar nomination for best original screenplay.

Did the filmmaker feel the impact of hitting those major milestones on his career? He demurs: “My main sense of elevation was just, ‘Oh, that means we can make the next one.’ “

No kidding. In 2021, Netflix acquired the next two Knives Out movies at the height of the streaming wars in a deal worth a staggering $469 million. He laughs knowingly when I point this out: “The last brass rings — it’s true, it’s true. It was the last helicopter out.”

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In 2019, Knives Out thrived in theaters alongside such fellow originals as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Parasite, 1917 and Ford v. Ferrari, each of which grossed hundreds of millions of dollars. That was the last normal year for moviegoing; the pandemic hit in 2020, and the box office has struggled to rebound since. Johnson, a strong advocate for theatrical-first exhibition, has yet to play in this treacherous new sandbox.

He shepherded the streaming mystery series Poker Face alongside Natasha Lyonne (after our conversation, news broke that Peacock had canceled the show but that Johnson would shop it elsewhere), and he launched his Knives Out sequel, Glass Onion, to great success on the Netflix platform in 2022 (and later, to another screenwriting Oscar nom — a rare twofer for a franchise).

Glass Onion hit 600 theaters for a week before the streaming drop, but the studio did not report grosses, per standard policy. Estimates had it at more than $13 million for its first five days, signaling the demand was there, while Craig reportedly told Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos of the arrangement, “Your model is fucked.” But things won’t change much with the next movie: Wake Up Dead Man will hit select theaters for two weeks before streaming on Netflix beginning Dec. 12.

“People generally don’t understand that it’s not just Netflix saying, ‘You can’t have this number of theaters’ — there’s a bit of trench warfare going on with the theater chains and Netflix, and the chains won’t play Netflix movies if they don’t have a [longer] window,” Johnson says. “The temptation is to frame it as ‘us against Netflix’ or something. It’s not that at all. It sounds a little bit like corporate speak, but it’s also just the reality: You’re in the boat with the person you got on the boat with. You’ve got to kind of start rowing.”

How will the theatrical release compare to Glass Onion‘s? “It’ll probably be about the same number, screens-wise, as the last release. I wish it was more,” he says. “Netflix is our partners in these, and they’ve been awesome. They are what they are, and they do what they do. We signed up for the ride with that.”

You can link Johnson’s measured comments about Netflix all the way back to how Gordon-Levitt remembers Johnson patiently absorbing studio notes on Brick, exactly 20 years ago. This is a guy who respects the system and the process and whose ego never gets in the way.

But Hollywood is different now. While open to more Knives Out movies down the line, Johnson will next step out of the streaming bubble that’s kept him cozy amid the turmoil. He’s writing a ’70s-inspired paranoid thriller and says his goal is to distribute that movie in a traditional wide theatrical release. He knows the market has changed drastically and is prepared to meet it head-on. “Given the realities of the uncertainty of everything, how do we make these movies for a price that makes sense?” he says. “Not to say there aren’t realities in the industry — and not to say it isn’t really, really tough right now, and we swim in the same waters as everyone — but I still believe you can make something unique and interesting. That’s still the most valuable coin.”

Johnson is equipped to meet this perilous moment. He’s spent his career melding idiosyncratic creativity with commercial viability. “He always remembers that we’re doing it for an audience — it’s the thing that drives him,” Craig says. Good thing, since the industry is starved for original ideas that will actually bring people to the multiplex. Johnson wants to reach them both in his own movies and in those he helps develop through his production company, T-Street, co-founded and run with Bergman. Put another way: If he can’t figure it out, it’s hard to see who can.

“We’re really committed to finding and encouraging new voices that are, for lack of a better word, commercial in their sensibilities,” Johnson says. “We want interesting people who have something to say and who want to connect with audiences and bring people in. I think that is essential.”

Johnson is all about expanding the tent — while holding firm to his values. For example, he feels very much aligned with his buddy Guillermo del Toro’s current anti-AI media tour. “Yeah, fuck AI. It’s something that’s making everything worse in every single way — I don’t get it,” Johnson says. “I mean, I get it in a ‘This makes sense to save money by not paying artists’ way.’ But then, what the fuck are we doing? Is this where we want to be?” But even within Johnson’s circle of collaborators, there is clearly room for disagreement: Lyonne, who will remain attached as an exec producer on Poker Face should it find a home (though her role will be recast), was announced as a co-founder of an AI production company this year. Either way, the Internet can rest assured T-Street’s backing of Gordon-Levitt’s next directorial effort, which is said to explore AI and star Rachel McAdams, does not equal an endorsement.

“He’s always mentored me, and it feels like coming home,” says Gordon-Levitt.

As for right now, Johnson is trying to savor the moment. He’s enjoying the awards trail — pockets around the world, like here in Savannah, where he can meet, bond and gossip with fellow filmmakers and speak frankly about the state of the medium he so treasures. On this round, he’s enjoyed getting to know Celine Song (Materialists) and Nia DaCosta (Hedda). His friendship with del Toro, in the awards race with Frankenstein, has deepened: “He has really inspired me to make more connections. It’s something that he puts a lot of value in. It’s incredible, the energy that he has for people.”

This year, Johnson traveled to Chicago for a 20th anniversary screening of Brick. He watched the movie all the way through, and memories came flooding back. The popping of the cheap champagne after the final evening of shooting on the beach. The debilitating illness that knocked him out for four of the 19 shooting days, “to the point where in between takes I’d be in a fetal position on a little cot off to the side.” The Sundance premiere that set him on a life-changing path.

Gordon-Levitt has been thinking back to that time, too. He met a friend and collaborator for life, an artist with a vision he admired.

“It was very obvious that this was someone who had something special. However, even at that young age, I was cynical enough to not necessarily think that that’d translate into a widely recognized success story,” Gordon-Levitt says. “It is reaffirming to see that, sometimes, the good guys win.”

This story appeared in the Nov. 19 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.