‘Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery’ Filmmakers on Netflix’s High-Stakes Rollout and the Lessons of ‘Star Wars’ - Hollywood Reporter

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Rian Johnson and producing partner Ram Bergman also dish about casting Natasha Lyonne as a 21st century Columbo and what keeps them up at night.

Writer-director Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman, his producing partner of two decades, are improbably modest for a pair who made one of the biggest film deals in recent memory — a $469 million two-picture pact with Netflix to have their T-Street production shingle make two sequels to their 2019 whodunit Knives Out.

It’s not just that the two got Netflix to loosen the purse strings; they’ve pushed the company beyond its well-established comfort zone?

Speaking over Zoom in early November, Johnson and Bergman seemed well aware of these stakes — though they also maintained that seismic industry shifts are not their priority.

“We just like making movies.”?

Until we met, I’d done the thing everybody does … where you have a line producer friend read your script and tell you it’ll cost $3 million to make.

Ram broke me out of that thinking and said, “No, you figure out what you can scrape together and make it for that?

RAM BERGMAN We know each other, and we just want to make the best movie?

BERGMAN We wanted people who were clearly willing to bet on us — and bet on the movie?

We wanted to set it up — not just for monetary success but in a way we could keep making more of them, so we can get together with our friends and do one every couple of years.

JOHNSON The choice was not between a big traditional theatrical release or Netflix.

And box office is not going to be reported — by Netflix, at least.

We want as many people as possible to see it in theaters.

And then we want it to do incredibly well when it hits Netflix — so lots of people see it and so it demonstrates to everybody, most of all Netflix, that these two things can coexist … that a great run in the theater will only build the word-of-mouth and the prestige for when it hits the service.

That’s something a lot of folks, not just at Netflix, are betting on.

You want to hang out with them every week.

Now that you’re creating TV, and Lucasfilm is very aggressively pursuing series, is there a Star Wars series you’d like to make?

JOHNSON A big piece of it, which Ram taught me, was coming into every situation — with studios, financiers, decision-makers — and embracing them in the process.

BERGMAN If you bring people into the process early, they’re rooting for you.

And they eventually let you do what you want to do.

I respect people who do it — Pete Docter stepping up at Pixar or what J.J

It seems like the old Hollywood story, be it Babylon or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, is something a lot of big filmmakers eventually tackle

JOHNSON Look, I would love to — someday

And we’ve talked about it, but we have such a great marriage, I don’t know if we want to bring work into it

They’re not going to make 20 or 30 movies and spend $200 million or $300 million apiece

We’ll always be able to make something