The follow-up to 2019 hit whodunnit Knives Out will close this year’s BFI London Film Festival.
Director and writer Rian Johnson said it was an “honour” to bring the new film, starring Daniel Craig as detective Benoit Blanc, to London given so much of its inspiration comes from the golden age of crime writing with authors including Agatha Christie.
He said: “It’s a rollercoaster analogy, you’ve spent years building this track and you finally get to put people in the car and set it going.
“Seeing an audience react to it and also having deep inspirational roots from Agatha Christie it feels very meaningful to be in London showing this to a UK crowd and a tremendous honour to close the festival.”
He also revealed the film, officially called Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, takes some of its inspiration from the Beatles song of the same name.
Glass Onion, which contains references to a handful of the band’s biggest hits, was written by John Lennon in response to critics who started dissecting their lyrics for hidden meanings.
Johnson said: “If you look at the lyrics of Glass Onion and why John wrote it, it definitely has a thematic tie-in to our movie and it’s very explicit in the movie and it’s also just a banger of a song.”
Joining Craig in this film is a cast including Edward Norton, Janelle Monae, Kate Hudson and Dave Bautista but Johnson said fame was no guarantee their characters would not be killed off in the murder mystery.
He said: “I don’t want anyone in the audience thinking anyone is safe.”
He said the success of the first film, which also starred Ana de Armas and Jamie Lee Curtis, convinced him there was the potential for a series of three or four films at least.
He said: “That’s the fun thing about this. This movie is a very different vibe to Knives Out, it takes the audience to a very different place both in terms as opposed to being a cosy New England town in the fall, this time we’re on a Greek island but also story wise it’s not just a repeat of the first movie.
“And for me it feels very exciting loving the genre and loving Agatha Christie knowing all the different ways she would shake it up with each new book.
“The whodunnit genre is a way of exploring lots of other kind of mini genres and being able to have that firm base to take chances from.”
The film will receive its European Premiere on Sunday October 16 at the Southbank Centre in the Royal Festival Hall ahead of its U.K. cinema release and subsequent launch on Netflix.
