Rian Johnson Shares Peek at His Personal Notebook Featuring Original Knives Out Diagram

Knives Out was released in theaters back in November, but thanks to awards season, Rian Johnson is still gracing us with some cool behind-the-scenes content. The director best known for helming Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Looper received his first-ever Oscar nomination for writing Knives Out earlier this week. In honor of this exciting news, Johnson took to Twitter yesterday to share a cool peek at his personal journal. Apparently, Johnson always diagrams his stories before writing them. Warning: the page he shared includes some Knives Out spoilers.

“Have mentioned it in a few writing-centric interviews, so I dug up my barely legible moleskin notebook outline for @KnivesOut. This is how I always diagram stuff out before I start writing. (Spoilers… I guess?),” Johnson wrote.

Many people commented on the post to ask Johnson questions:

“Do Last Jedi,” @AsteadWesley requested.

“I’ll see if I can find it, they’re locked in a safe somewhere,” Johnson replied.

“Do you outline pretty intensely, too?,” @swankmotron asked.

“Yeah, not a formal document but scratching out the big beats of each sequence for myself,” Johnson answered.

“How old is this?,” @EmperorBigD wondered.

“This was from April 2018,” Johnson revealed.

The official Twitter account for Knives Out had a great response, too:

Rian Johnson is nominated for Best Original Screenplay for Knives Out at the Oscars this year, going up against Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story), Sam Mendes & Krysty Wilson-Cairns (1917), Quentin Tarantino (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood), and Bong Joon Ho & Han Jin Won (Parasite).

While Knives Out rests in a whole different category from Johnson’s previous film, Star Wars: The Last Jedi – with one of their few similarities being a cameo from Frank Oz – the two do have a very unique connection. Johnson’s first foray into writing and directing in the Star Wars universe, and the vitriolic backlash to it on social media, apparently influenced Knives Out in a unique way.

“Anyone who’s on Twitter these days, God bless you because it’s rough waters out there, but there’s also wonderful stuff about it. That’s why we’re all still on it I guess,” Johnson told Deadline in November. “That’s one of the things [Knives Out] engages with, the current state of online culture. Whether you made a Star Wars movie or you have a cooking show, whatever you’re doing on there, someone’s going to be screaming at you about it probably. Let’s put it on a screen in a way we can all maybe have a laugh about it.”

Knives Out is still playing in select theaters.