Glass Onion Director Talks Deciding the Film’s Killer

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery certainly lived up to its title. (MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW!) As teased early on in the film, The Glass Onion structure that billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) builds on his private island let’s you think you see everything, even though there are layers to peel back before you truly know what it is you’re looking at. That theme extends to the entire premise of the film, which is presented as Bron inviting some of his close friends for a private getaway and murder mystery game during the pandemic – but turns out to be an excuse for the eccentric billionaire to cover his own tracks, murdering his former partner Andi (Janelle Monáe) and poisoning his “buddy” Duke (Dave Bautista) when the gamer/streamer tried to blackmail him over the murder. 

The trick of Glass Onion really resides in making you think that the unlikable Miles is too obvious a suspect for much of the film’s runtime. In a new interview, director Rian Johnson reveals how he arrived at deciding who the killer would be this time: 

“Well it’s not like I come up with a group of suspects and then decide which one is the killer and build backwards from there or something,” Johnson told The Wrap. “In a way, when I start working on something, I’m playing chess with three pieces: I’m thinking about the victim, the protagonist, and the killer, basically, and I don’t even know who they’re going to be. 

“But I know who the killer is because I know their dramatic place in it, and I know their relationship to the protagonist – not the detective, that’s outside of this – but the protagonist being Marta in the first one and Helen in this one. 

“So it’s really thinking in terms of the bare bones structural, what is the essential gambit here that we’re trying to pull off with the murder? And then something kind of clicks in with it, I kind of figure out the shape of it before I even fill out the details of who the suspects are, and even necessarily what the details of the character of the killer is.

“So it starts very conceptually, I guess is what I’m saying. And then I kind of turn the focus knobs and kind of bring everything into focus, step by step, if that makes sense.”

Glass Onion is now streaming on Netflix.