'Glass Onion' director Rian Johnson says he was dragged 'kicking and screaming' to choose major plot twist
- Warning: Spoilers ahead for "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery."
- Rian Johnson said he originally thought the movie's major twist would be a "horrible trope."
"Knives Out" creator Rian Johnson said he was originally opposed to the major twist in the sequel, "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery."
In the Netflix movie, tech genius billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) gathers a bunch of his friends to an island holiday, including his former business partner Cassandra "Andi" Brand (Janelle Monáe), whom he cut out of the company they built together.
Despite the betrayal, Andi still attends the holiday, but after the chaos of one of the party members being murdered, she is shot by a mystery assailant. At this point, the film jumps back in time to before the vacation to reveal that Andi had actually been murdered before the trip. It is further revealed that her identical twin Helen (also played by Monáe) hired detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) and posed as her sister to find out who murdered Andi.
In an interview with The Wrap, Johnson said it was "a challenge" to figure out how to pull off the flashback scene introducing Andi's twin.
"I guess the primary thing was, it can't just be seeing it from a different angle," the director said. "It has to be enough of a basic perspective shift that there's a new tension that's introduced in the repeat of all the different scenes. This is what led to the idea of twins."
Johnson continued: "By the process, I was dragged kicking and screaming to identical twins. I didn't want to do it, it seemed like a horrible trope, and just, 'Will the audience ever forgive me for this?' But I think we get away with it because it's not like a reveal at the end of 'Aha! It was a twin!' It's a complication in the middle that leads to a deepening of the stakes and the story. So I think that's why we get away with it."
Johnson also said he was worried about the pacing of the film because the movie doesn't introduce a character for the audience to root for until halfway through.
"It's like if we played the first movie for half of it without introducing Marta [Ana De Armas' character in 'Knives Out']," he said. "What was scarier to me is, is the audience gonna stick with this group of terrible people up to the point where we actually give you someone to care about when we introduce Helen? And then from that point on, it was kind of a trial and error calibration of how much do you repeat?"
While the sequel was praised by both critics, the slow start and the twin reveal divided fans.
"Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery" is available to stream on Netflix.