Rian Johnson likes mysteries. The writer/director made his feature film debut with the noir-ish Brick and is also the creator of the Peacock series Poker Face, starring Natasha Lyonne. But he is perhaps best known in the genre for creating the character Benoit Blanc, the detective with the laconic Southern drawl played by Daniel Craig, who has already solved two twisty murders in Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion (2022).
But Blanc, and Johnson are back, with a third installment – Wake Up Dead Man. This newest mystery sees Blanc traveling to upstate New York to solve the closed-room murder of a firebrand priest and squaring off against a parish of possible suspects.
The first two Benoit Blanc films drew their inspirations from both literary mysteries and cinematic whodunnits like Deathtrap (1982) and The Last of Sheila (1973). But Johnson says that Wake Up Dead Man‘s influences lean much more towards the literary this time.
“With this one, there wasn’t really a cinematic-like touchstone,” Johnson stated on the red carpet before the film’s screening at the opening night of the Philadelphia Film Festival. “It was more about this author, John Dixon Carr, who we name-check in the movie. He was sort of the model for it. And also tonally, I was giving like Washington Irving and ‘[The Legend of] Sleepy Hollow’ sort of as a reference, and Edgar Allan Poe.”
For Johnson, mixing up the tones between the Benoit Blanc films is determined during the story development process. As Johnson begins developing his story, he says he doesn’t necessarily decide what kind of tone he wishes it to have. Instead, he lets the story elements he wants to explore to inform and shape the tone of the film.
“I knew I wanted to ground [Wake Up Dead Man] a little bit more after Glass Onion,” he explained. “I knew I wanted it to be centered around a church, and I knew I wanted to do an impossible crime. That all kind of led it towards a certain tone. But then you sense that, and you dig into that, and you’re like, ‘Okay, just did a big kind of like blue and white kind of tropical vacation movie. Let’s go back to a church graveyard for this one.’ So yeah, then you kind of lean into it.”
While Johnson has stated that he would happy to make Benoit Blanc mysteries for the rest of his career, the detective is getting a rest after headlining the director’s last three films. He is currently writing what he hopes to be his next project, though he admits it’s a little “hard to classify” what genre it fits into.
“I guess I would say it’s a paranoid thriller,” Johnson said. “It’s kind of like Parallax View or The Conversation. It’s kind of in that mode. With a slight sci-fi-ish element to it.”
Wake Up Dead Man opens in theaters on November 26 and premieres on Netflix on December 12.
