Rian Johnson Explains Why Glass Onion Takes Place During The Pandemic

One of the most interesting choices in "Glass Onion" is the decision to set the whole story in the middle of the pandemic. Plenty of other movies and shows have been content to simply ignore the pandemic altogether, and for the most part audiences have been happy to go along. Having your movie set in May 2020 means you'll have to explain how every character's life has been affected by quarantine and mask mandates, and that can be drag.

But for "Glass Onion," the pandemic setting doesn't feel like a drag at all. Quarantine helps to initially explain why Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) would be so willing to fly off to a mysterious murder mystery party, and the choices for each character's masks in the early dock scene help to highlight their sensibilities in a fun, topical way. For director and writer Rian Johnson, the May 2020 setting was pretty much inevitable: "The marching orders of these movies, even for the first one, are to set them in the present moment," Johnson explained in an interview with The Filmcast.

The biggest challenge for Johnson was less about making the pandemic feel relevant to the story thematically, and more about it preventing the pandemic from making things feel too gloomy. "It is such a serious thing and these are deeply unserious movies, so taking a light touch with it, I think, was really important," he said. 

One of the most memorable early moments is the scene where Ethan Hawke's character shoots what appears to be some sort of advanced, early COVID vaccine into every characters' mouths. "You're good," Hawke's character says, and everyone's given permission to take their masks off for the rest of the vacation. When asked what was in that spray gun, Johnson answered: "It was probably bleach... horse tranquilizer probably. I guarantee that none of those people were actually safe from COVID. That should've been the end tag, Blanc coming home and getting a positive test."

It's an answer that fits in perfectly with the message the movie's making, that the eccentric mysterious billionaire class isn't actually as smart or impressive as they might seem to be from the outside. As Johnson put it, back before vaccines became widely available, "We all assumed that, I don't know, that the rich people had the vaccine... There were stories going around, it was kind of taken for granted I think." The idea that this supposed secret vaccine was another failure, just like nearly everything Miles Bron (Edward Norton) attempts to do, just feels right for this film. 

With the first "Knives Out" being set in 2019, and the second one set clearly in 2020, will the third film be set in 2021, or a little later? Either way, we know that Rian Johnson will be turning each movie into a commentary on contemporary culture, just like Agatha Christie was doing in all of her mysteries. As for the exact type of mystery the story will focus on? That's anyone's guess. 

"Glass Onion" is streaming on Netflix now.