Rian Johnson now thinks TV is “a lot more fun” than film

Now that Rian Johnson has discovered television, the future of the “Knives Out” franchise is in deep trouble.

Okay, so not really. But the Glass Onion writer-director told the TV Critics’ Gathering on Sunday that his experience producing and writing the upcoming Poker Face series was “a lot more fun” than writing feature-length scripts like “Looper.” ”, “Brick”, and presumably the “Star Wars” stuff.

Johnson has directed television before, most notably the classic Breaking Bad season 5 episode “Ozymandias,” but he had never created a series before “Poker Face” — so he never spent time in a writer’s room. The collaborative experience beat the hell out of the loneliness that his film work entailed.

“Honestly, I had a good time,” Johnson said at NBCUniversal’s Television Critics Association winter press tour. “I write based on my own characteristics, when I’m just sitting in a room, eating horribly and feeling stressed all the time because I’m so far behind a deadline – it’s more fun to be in a room with a group of people.”

“It never felt less personal, I still felt like I was driving the stories and shaping them,” he added. – I loved.

Johnson’s Netflix deal guarantees us “Knives Out 3,” and he’s said he wants to do more.

Series writing is “a completely different process” than film, Johnson continued, so he hired not one, but two different showrunners: Nora and Lilla Zuckerman. (Okay, so in some ways they can be considered a package deal.) The sisters were cast on “Poker Face,” the highly anticipated “Columbo”-style detective series on the Peacock starring Natasha Lyonne (“Russian Doll”). ), who is also executive producer.

Johnson continued to sing the praises of television to a packed ballroom of TV reporters and critics—if nothing else, the man knows his audience—saying he preferred the “pace” of this newfound process to film. Each one-hour “Poker Face” episode took about three weeks (one for prep, two for filming). Contrast that with making a movie over “several years,” as he put it.

“I love that every episode we’re in a different setting, it’s a whole new cast — it’s like doing 10 mini-movies,” Johnson said. “I literally went into it like it was one of my movies. I really jumped into the deep end of the pool.”

Get into ‘Poker Face’ when it premieres on January 26th on the Peacock.

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