Why Rian Johnson Says His Last Project Was So Challenging to Write

In a new interview with Empire, writer/director Rian Johnson opened up about his new film, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. One detail jumps out in their conversation.

"This was definitely the hardest script I've ever written," he said.

Coming from Johnson, who's written several mysteries, including two previous Knives Out stories, a sci-fi thriller in Looper, and indie darling Brick, that's saying something.

And granted, mysteries are difficult. The crime needs to seem impossibly complex so that the hero, Benoit Blanc, seems impossibly smart as he solves the crime.

Johnson has previously talked about mixing thriller and mystery elements to keep the audience engaged, saying, "The notion of doing a whodunit that begins as a traditional whodunit and orients the audience very clearly, and then turns into a Hitchcock thriller where there’s a character you care about — you’re leaning forward as opposed to leaning back. Then turns back into a whodunit at the end and reveals it’s been a whodunit the whole time; the thriller element was a whole bit of misdirection."

So it seems like he has the structure down, and it turns out that's not what challenged him on Wake Up Dead Man.

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Why Wake Up Dead Man Was Difficult for Johnson

The film follows Blanc investigating a murder in a church, where Josh Brolin's Monsignor Wicks is at odds with Josh O'Connor's Father Jud.

For Johnson, these characters became a way to explore his own complicated relationship with Christianity. He grew up deeply religious, he said—not just going to church every week, but cultivating a relationship with faith that was "incredibly central to the way I framed everything in the world."

"And I'm not anymore," he told Empire. "I have lots of people in my life that I love that still are [religious], and there are things about that time that I still really treasure. I have a lot of complicated feelings about it."

That's where the challenge came from. It took him eight months to start writing as he mulled over his approach.

"That's the real reason the script was so hard to write," he said. "It's something I do take really seriously. I wanted to explore it in a really honest way, while also not being facile about it, or—God forbid—moralistic or irreverent."

Write What You Haven't Resolved

Johnson's struggle might teach us something. The stuff we have messy, contradictory feelings about might be what we should be writing about.

We're often told to "write what you know," but maybe in this case it's "write what you don't know yet." Explore the questions you're still asking yourself. Write about the relationships and beliefs you're still trying to understand.

We talk a lot about theme around here, and even Charlie Kaufman told us that sometimes that's something you figure out as you go along. Maybe you work through something on that page, and it resonates even more.

Wake Up Dead Man is in theaters Nov. 26 and on Netflix Dec. 12.