Rian Johnson Had Fun Making an ‘Asshole Studio Cut’ of the New ‘Knives Out’

When film directors demand “final edit,†it’s because of the idea of an asshole studio executive. You’ve heard the stories. A filmmaker works tirelessly on their film, but then someone with more authority, and typically less artistic integrity, comes in and demands the filmmaker cut the film. “Make it shorter for more screenings.†“Make it tamer for a better rating.†“Remove that scene so we don’t get in trouble.†Exactly how often this happens, no one knows, but it’s certainly a story people in the movie business hear and tell.

For his new movie, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, writer and director Rian Johnson decided to use that persona to his advantage. Here’s how he described his “asshole studio cut†of the film at a recent screening of the film, hosted by Collider.

“In this movie, I got to very near to the end of the process, and I did something I had never done before that I might start doing on every movie because it was really useful,†Johnson said. “We were a week out from [sound] mixing. So we should have been locked basically. And I was very insecure about the running time of the movie, because it’s the longest of the three. I thought, ‘Have I been hard enough on the movie? Is anything precious [I] held onto?â€

“And so my editor Bob [Ducsay] and I went into the edit over the weekend, just the two of us, and we made a copy of the movie in the Avid, so it was an exercise we were doing,†he continued. “It wasn’t going to be the actual film. And, basically, we did the asshole studio cut. And I had a lot of fun. I put on, like, a persona of an asshole studio exec. I was like, ‘Yeah, why are we still in the fucking church? Cut away from this shit! No one wants to see that!’ And basically anything that could actually come out, we slashed. And we cut, basically, from the movie that you guys watched, we cut about 30 minutes out of it.â€

“And it was, in one way, really cathartic,†Johnson said. “It’s kind of a rage room, sort of. Because… at the end of the editing process, you hate your own movies so much [that] going in there with a machete, just hacking it to pieces, kind of feels good. 
But also, it was very useful because, to a lesser extent, there were a couple of things we found that were actually like, ‘Oh, some version of that could actually be a good cut.’ More so, though, for me, it let me know why the stuff that was in there did have to be in there. Sitting down and watching it without all that stuff and feeling, ‘Oh, if you don’t have this, then at the ending, you don’t feel the emotional impact of this.’ That was so incredibly useful for me to just be able to kind of take a breath and put most of it back in and kind of say, ‘Okay, we can go mix now.’â€

And, trust us, it worked. Wake Up Dead Man is fantastic. In our opinion, the best of the three films. But Johnson has had lots of great revelations in editing. In the same Q&A, he was asked about any scenes that were particularly difficult for him, and he immediately thought of one from Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

“When we made The Last Jedi, the opening sequence was just like a big bombing run where things go very poorly,†he said. “That was something that obviously had been written, and then I storyboarded the whole thing, and I worked with a previz, we got it all put together. And then it was just kind of fat. It didn’t quite work. And so that’s something that we kind of reconstructed in the edit and consolidated… Any of you who are filmmakers know, in the edit, the thing where suddenly you’re literally like, ‘Wait a minute! Can we take this thing and stick it here?’ It was that kind of thing. And then when it did click together and it felt like a Lego set that had been designed that way, that was kind of like [deep sigh]. It’s that breath-of-relief-type moment when you get the sequence working. So, I don’t know if that’s the hardest [sequence I’ve ever done], but that comes to mind.â€

The Last Jedi is currently streaming on Disney+. Wake Up Dead Man will be in select theaters on November 26 and on Netflix on December 12.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.