16 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets from Knives Out

BY G.B. BAILEY

www.gbbaileyauthor.com

SPOILER ALERT This article discusses the ending of the 2019 film Knives Out

I have always enjoyed a good whodunit. In fact, one of my original goals when I set out to write my novel, Never Wake a Serial Killer, was to write a whodunit that would be nearly impossible to figure out. While whodunits have fallen out of fashion over the last decades, 2019’s Knives Out, a modern take on this classic type of detective story, was a huge hit.

Here are 16 behind-the-scenes secrets I learned from watching the DVD commentary for the movie Knives Out. It featured Rian Johnson (Writer and Director), Noah Segan (Actor playing State Trooper Wagner) and Steve Yedlin (Director of Photography).

About the Movie:

• The movie was shot in 35 days.

• The original scene where the body is found had so much blood in it, that it warranted an R-rating. The filmmakers had to paint out some of the blood in order to get a PG-13 rating.

• The painting of Harlan Thrombey was not finished until after the filming. It was added back in with effects later.

About the Cast:

• K Callan (84), the actress who played the mother of Harlan Thrombey is actually younger than Christopher Plummer (90) and it took two hours of make up each morning to make her look like great nana.

• Daniel Craig cannot whistle and his body guard had to whistle for him during a scene.

• Ricky Jay was supposed to play the role of the groundskeeper. He passed away during production and was replaced by M. Emmit Walsh. There is a small pic of Ricky Jay on the bottom right of the screen when the groundskeeper places the photo of the mansion 50 years ago back on the fridge.

• When arriving on set, M. Emmitt Walsh passed out $2 dollar bills, steel pennies, and his resume. When asked to sign any of these things, he declined, stating that if he does it for one person, he will have to do it for everyone.

About the Names of Characters:

• The name Ransom came from a character in C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy.

• The family member names were 70s rock stars so that Rian Johnson could remember them while writing:

Joni (Mitchell)

Neil (Young)

Richard and Linda (Thompson)

Walt and Donna (Walter Becker and Donald Fagan from Steely Dan)

• The name Harlan Thrombey was taken from a 1981 Choose Your Own Adventure whodunit titled Who Killed Harlow Thrombey? (This fact came from wiki-pedia and I added it since I have that book)

About the Johnson Family (or About Johnson & Johnson & Johnson & Johnson):

• Nathan Johnson, the composer of the film, is Rian Johnson’s cousin and they have been making movies together since childhood.

• The paintings of each actor in the credits were done by Zachary Johnson, another cousin of director Rian Johnson (and brother to Nathan Johnson)

• Marke Johnson, another cousin of Rian Johnson (and sibling of Nathan) did the title card, creating it based on a series of Agatha Christie paperbacks and using a similar font that Rian Johnson loved as a child.

About the Coincidences:

• Lakeisha Stanfield, who played Detective Lieutenant Elliott, says “Get out” to Ransom and Marta at the end of the car chase. He is also told to “Get out” by Jamie Lee Curtis at the end of the will reading scene. Stanfield was in the hit movie Get Out by Jordan Peele. Rian Johnson claims this was not intentional.

• The song Sundown by Gordon Lightfoot plays in the background of one scene. Rian Johnson says that Patton Oswalt contacted him after seeing the film and shared with him that Lightfoot wrote the song about a woman with whom he had a volatile relationship (according to Wikipedia her name is Cathy Smith) . This same woman claimed to have been the person who injected John Belushi with a fatal drug overdose and served 15 years in a California prison for it (again, according to Wikipedia). Oswalt wanted to know if Rian Johnson had purposely included this song in the film given its similarity to the accident fatal overdose that Marta gives to Harlan. Rian Johnson admits he was not aware of the background of the song and did not include it intentionally.

• In his script, Rian Johnson wrote that he wanted “something like a religious icon made out of knives” and they found an industrial barbeque grate and mounted knives on it. Later in the film, Blanc compares the solving of this mystery to filling the center of a doughnut and he notes that Marta’s confession at first glance seems to fill the hole, but upon further reflection it is smaller doughnut, leaving yet another hole in the story. During filming, one of the grips came up to Rian Johnson, nodded at the knife sculpture and said, “I saw what you did there.” When Rian asked what he meant, the grip commented on the “knife doughnut.” Rian Johnson’s sarcastic reply suggests this was not done on purpose.

GB Bailey is the author of Never Wake A Serial Killer. For more information, visit: www.gbbaileyauthor.com