One thing that’s kind of fun is that Daniel Craig’s detective Benoit Blanc initially seems like a buffoon instead of James Bond. Actually, he’s more like Lt. Columbo than a Keystone Kop.
That’s straight from the Christie books, also. Hercule Poirot has a similar thing. I think all the great eccentric detectives in fiction have this thing where the suspects don’t quite take them seriously until it’s too late. Columbo has the bumbling, and Poirot is the fussy little Belgian guy with the weird mustache. Miss (Jane) Marple is the kindly lady serving you tea, and before you know it, you’re being led off in the paddy wagon because they have the whole thing dialed in.
Daniel really tapped into that element of Benoit Blanc. He really found that sort of fun, slightly buffoonish element of him, but when he has to turn the screws, man, he knows how to turn them.
The social commentary you brought into Knives Out is often side-splitting. We are “shocked” to hear that Toni Collette may be an Instagram influencer, but that doesn’t mean she has money.
Surprise. Surprise [laughs]. To me, it was another thing that was exciting about this. So often when we do see whodunnits these days, they’re generally period pieces because they are Agatha Christie adaptations, and I love that. I’m a whodunnit junkie.
I watch and adore them, but I thought it could be really fun to say what would an original modern-day whodunnit looks like in America in 2019. It meant not just giving it a modern skin with cell phones and modern cars. Instead, have all the characters be characters that could only exist in 2019 and have them talking about stuff that’s just happening today.
“…have all the characters be characters that could only exist in 2019…”
You touch on immigration issues. Because of their dad’s success, the Thrombey family has never had to work for anything, so they don’t understand what somebody like the nurse (Ana de Armas) from an immigrant family in the story would have to go through.
Yeah, that’s part of it, and whodunnits have always been very adept at sly talking about class, and it’s usually the kind of the British Upstairs, Downstairs set. It’s mostly been applied to British society just because, again, it’s mostly been Agatha Christie adaptations.
The notion of using those same dynamics and using the fact that with the broad range of suspects, you can look at a cross-section of society. When you start putting the screws on everybody you drill into where the rubber meets the road on different issues. That seemed like really interesting territory to plug into America right now.
On a technical level, I thought it was interesting how Brothers Bloom has a lot of long, wide takes, but with this movie, you have a lot of quick cuts. You need them because you have to feed viewers a lot of information in a short time.
You adjust your filmmaking to suit the needs of the script, and with this, it was snappier. One of the things I love about whodunnit is how much they play with flashbacks and perspective. You can flashback to the same moment multiple times and see it differently.
