‘I Tried to Give It an Ending’

Knives Out director Rian Johnson recently spoke about his divisive Star Wars film, The Last Jedi. Specifically, Johnson discussed the film’s ending and his approach to endings in general.

“Look, in terms of the Star Wars movie I did, I tried to give it a hell of an ending,” Johnson told The Atlantic. “I love endings so much that even doing the middle chapter of the trilogy, I tried to give it an ending. A good ending that recontextualizes everything that came before it and makes it a beautiful object unto itself — that’s what makes a movie a movie. It feels like there’s less and less of that.”

Johnson goes on to explain how he feels that the recent prevalence of creating intellectual properties in media is a “poisonous idea” for storytellers.

“This whole poisonous idea of creating [intellectual property] has completely seeped into the bedrock of storytelling,” Johnson lamented. “Everyone is just thinking, How do we keep milking it? I love an ending where you burn the Viking boat into the sea.”

Johnson’s latest film is Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which he wrote, directed, and produced. The sequel follows Daniel Craig’s Detective Benoit Blanc as he travels to Greece to peel back the layers of a mystery involving a new cast of colorful suspects.