Pracy for mercy!
Benoit Blanc is back and this time, he’s looking for a confession to a bizarre religious murder (pardon the double entendre).
Rian Johnson’s third Knives Out film—Wake Up Dead Man—sends the gentleman detective (once again played by 007 alum Daniel Craig) to upstate New York following the bizarre death of a local clergyman named Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). What makes this case so odd, and seemingly impossible, is the fact that Wicks was unexpectedly stabbed to death inside a cloistered room within his own church during a pre-Easter service.
It’s your classic locked room mystery setup, but the journey of the unmasking the culprit is anything but cliche. And speaking of culprits, the list of suspects is quite extensive, with Johnson calling on another impressive cast comprised of A-list talent.
On the one hand, you’ve got Wicks’s small, yet fiercely devoted, flock of churchgoing devotees: Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack), and Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church).
On the other hand, you’ve got parish newcomer, Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), an assistant priest and former boxer with whom Wicks had a notable beef.
“They’re all ensemble pieces,” Johnson’s longtime cinematographer Steve Yedlin said of the current Knives Out trilogy during a recent Zoom conversation. “We really try to keep the visual interest of seeing these groups of people and getting a sense of how they’re interacting with each other and the space they’re in. “Rather than saying, ‘Let’s just get a bunch of close-ups and one head keeps replacing another on cuts.’”
Wake Up Dead Man cinematographer Steve Yedlin talks visual language of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out 3
Given the film’s Catholic-soaked backdrop of grand churches and creepy crypts, Johnson and Yedlin, decided on “a darker, more Gothic look,” revealed the director of photography. “Just getting more inky blacks into the shots. Not necessarily meaning that it’s darker overall, but just that the black is in there to really go bigger with the contrast. There’s a popular style right now where I think some movies—by no means all of them—go for a look that’s kind of dim and flat. That’s not the version of dark we wanted. We wanted a contrasty version of dark and Gothic.”
Where Knives Out was “a little more [of a] classic murder mystery” inside the walls of an old manor house and Glass Onion opted for a “sun-drenched” aesthetic on a private island in Greece, Wake Up Dead Man “is leaning more into film noir and/or horror type stuff,” Yedlin explained. “But we tried to balance these different things … We’re not trying to make it look [like] overwrought, scary lighting. It’s got more of a rich, burnished feel to it. Things are scary and dark when they’re supposed to be, but even then, we’re trying to keep a rich photographic look to it overall.”
For Johnson, it’s always about “pushing forward” creatively, visually, and narratively, stressed the cinematographer. “He’s never just repeating himself or doing the same thing, which also inspires all of us—the rest of the cast and crew—to not rest on our laurels, not repeat ourselves, and really try to elevate it. He’s got these beautiful stories, themes and, characters. It’s very visual. There’s definitely the sense of every shot tells a story.”
That’s certainly the case in Wake Up Dead Man, which brilliantly uses the visual medium of cinema to its fullest potential. For example, several key scenes contain waxing and waning sunlight to reflect the film’s overarching motifs of divinity and the darkness lurking inside all of us.
“[It’s something] he told me [about] early on in the script stage, this idea of the light always shifting. Even while we’re inside the church and the rectory, the the sun is coming out from behind clouds or going into the clouds within a scene,” Yedlin recalled, later adding that Johnson wanted the rays to appear on specific lines of dialogue. “As soon as I knew that, [I was like], ‘We’ve got our work cut out for us.’”
He continued: “We had to do a lot of prep to figure out how we could do this in a way that was as visually exciting and evocative as he wanted it to be. It couldn’t be something that was so difficult to program and pre-fixed that it couldn’t be changed. It needed to be something we could finesse and play with on the day and react to what the actors were doing. But it also needed to have the repeatability, where once we got what we liked, we could do it for multiple takes and multiple shots.”
The sunlight effects required close collaboration with production designer Rick Heinrichs, whose team built the interior church set on a soundstages at Leavesden Studios just outside of London.
“It’s so evocative of the time and place,” Yedlin gushed. “He also made it really conducive for us to do all of these different looks and changes. So we could have not just the changes I mentioned—where things are happening within the shot—but also where we could have all these different times of day—dawn, dusk, night, early morning sun. We worked a lot with the supervising art director Dean Clegg, who did a lot of the technical figuring out in terms of of, ‘How is the set going to be positioned, so that we can get these sun rays in here?’ All that kind of stuff.”
While Johnson is still interested in making future Benoit Blanc movies, his next effort will be something entirely different. If he has any ideas for another Knives Out murder mystery, however, “I don’t know about them,” Yedlin confessed.
Still, there’s no question of who will serve as director of photography on Johnson’s next film (and the film after that). Yedlin has worked on every single one of the director’s features over the last 20 years—from Brick to Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
“I’m just so lucky that that he keeps bringing me along,” he humbly concluded. “He’s such a gentleman to everybody and really makes it about the experience of the movie. It’s not just about the end film, it’s also about the journey of doing it that he really authors and makes magical the same way he makes the movie magical. All of the movies, whether it was Brick or Star Wars, feel like a Rian family get-together.”
Wake Up Dead Man is now playing in theaters ahead of its Netflix debut on Friday, Dec. 12. Click here for tickets!