Writing in the Style of Rian Johnson

The Principle

Rian Johnson is a genre enthusiast who writes from inside the machinery of genre, understanding its every gear and spring well enough to rebuild it into something the audience has never seen before. His screenplays are not deconstructions — a word that implies destruction — but reconstructions: loving, meticulous reassemblies of familiar narrative forms that preserve everything that makes those forms pleasurable while rearranging the internal architecture to produce surprise.

Brick (2005), his debut, drops a Philip Marlowe hardboiled detective into a Southern California high school and plays the result completely straight — the noir dialogue, the femme fatale, the corrupt power structure — proving that genre is a language that can be spoken in any setting. Looper (2012) takes the time-travel thriller and bends it into a character study about the violence men inherit and transmit. The Last Jedi (2017) takes the most beloved franchise in cinema and argues that hero worship is the enemy of genuine heroism. And Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion (2022) take the Agatha Christie whodunit and turn it into a vehicle for class satire that Christie herself would recognize and approve.

What unites these seemingly disparate projects is Johnson's foundational conviction that audiences are smart, that they know how stories work, and that the most thrilling experience a screenplay can offer is the moment when a familiar structure does something genuinely unexpected — not by cheating, but by revealing that the rules were different than you assumed.

Screenplay Architecture and Structure

Johnson's screenplays are architecturally brilliant. They are puzzles, but not the cold, mechanical kind — they are puzzles where every piece is a character, and the solution requires understanding people as well as plot. Knives Out reveals its murderer in the first act, then spends the rest of the film building a different, more complex mystery around that revelation. Glass Onion inverts the classic locked-room mystery by making the solution obvious and the motive opaque.

He uses structural misdirection — not lying to the audience but directing their attention so skillfully that they construct the wrong theory from true information. The audience is always given everything they need to solve the puzzle, but the screenplay's architecture ensures they are looking in the wrong direction when the key information appears.

His act breaks are often structural reveals — moments where the genre the audience thinks they are watching shifts into a different genre, or where the story's apparent trajectory is revealed as misdirection for a deeper, more interesting narrative.

Johnson writes ensemble structures with democratic precision. Every character in a Johnson screenplay has a complete interior logic — motivations, secrets, alibis, perspectives — that makes them a plausible suspect and a complete human being simultaneously. The ensemble is not a collection of types but a group of fully realized individuals whose interactions generate the plot.

Poker Face (2023-) demonstrates his ability to apply structural innovation to episodic television, inverting the Columbo formula so that each episode reveals the crime first and the detection second.

Dialogue

Johnson's dialogue is genre-literate and character-specific. Each character speaks in a distinct voice that reflects their class, education, self-image, and relationship to truth. Benoit Blanc's ornate Southern diction is simultaneously a character trait and a strategic tool — people underestimate the man who talks like a gentleman detective from a novel.

He writes dialogue that delivers exposition without feeling expository. The information the audience needs to solve the mystery is embedded in conversations that appear to be about something else — a family argument, a social interaction, a casual observation — and the skill of the writing lies in making the necessary information feel incidental.

Johnson deploys monologues as reveals — extended speeches where a character reframes the entire narrative by connecting dots the audience has been given but failed to connect. These monologues are structurally positioned as the screenplay's climactic set pieces, and they are written with the precision and momentum of action sequences.

His humor is character-based and situation-driven, never winking at the audience. The comedy in Knives Out comes from the Thrombey family's recognizable awfulness, not from the screenplay pointing at its own cleverness.

Themes

Genre itself — its conventions, its pleasures, its limitations — is Johnson's meta-theme. His screenplays are always simultaneously telling a story and thinking about what it means to tell that kind of story. This is not academic exercise but genuine engagement: he loves the genres he works in and wants to push them to new places.

Class warfare, particularly in the Knives Out films, is rendered through the detective story's natural focus on who has what and who wants what. The mystery's solution is always, at its core, about economic power and the lengths people will go to protect it.

The subversion of heroic narrative — the idea that the expected hero may not be the real hero, that the comfortable story may not be the true story — runs through The Last Jedi and into all of Johnson's work. His screenplays ask the audience to let go of the narrative they want and accept the narrative they need.

The donut hole — the thing that is not there, the absence at the center of the mystery — is Johnson's recurring structural metaphor. His stories are organized around what is missing, and the solution comes from understanding the shape of the absence.

Writing Specifications

1. Construct the screenplay as a puzzle where every piece is a character — the solution must require understanding people, not merely assembling plot points, and every character must have complete interior logic.
2. Reveal key information early and in plain sight, then direct the audience's attention away from it through structural misdirection — never lie to the audience, but ensure they are looking in the wrong direction.
3. Write at least one structural turn where the genre the audience thinks they are watching shifts into a different or deeper genre, reframing everything that preceded it.
4. Build an ensemble where every character speaks in a distinct voice reflecting their class, education, and self-image — dialogue should characterize as precisely as it informs.
5. Embed exposition in conversations that appear to be about something else — the information the audience needs should feel incidental to scenes that are ostensibly about character dynamics or social interaction.
6. Design the climax as a monologue of revelation — a scene where a character reframes the entire narrative by connecting information the audience has been given but failed to assemble, written with the momentum and precision of an action sequence.
7. Use genre conventions as a shared language with the audience — acknowledge that viewers know how these stories work, then use that knowledge to create surprise by fulfilling expectations in unexpected ways.
8. Organize the narrative around an absence — the thing that is missing, the question that cannot be answered, the donut hole — and make the shape of that absence the key to the solution.
9. Write class dynamics with specificity and satirical edge — the economic positions of the characters should be visible in their speech, their assumptions, their relationships to each other, and their relationship to truth.
10. End with a satisfying resolution that redefines "satisfying" — the solution should feel inevitable in retrospect while having been genuinely surprising in the moment, rewarding the audience's intelligence rather than their assumptions.