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

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

OK, so not really. But the sizzling Glass Onion writer-director told a television critics gathering on Sunday that his experience creating and writing the upcoming Peacock series Poker Face was “a lot more fun” than writing feature-length screenplays like “Loopers”. ‘, ‘Brick’ and probably the ‘Star Wars’ stuff.

Johnson has directed television before, most notably the classic “Ozymandias” episode of Breaking Bad Season 5, but he’d never created a series before Poker Face — so he’s never really spent time in a writer’s room. The collaborative experience outweighed the loneliness that came with his film work.

“I really had a great time,” Johnson said at NBCUniversal’s Television Critics Association winter press tour. “Writing in terms of my own features where I’m just sitting in a room and eating horribly and constantly feeling stressed that I’m way behind on my deadline – it’s a lot more fun when I’m with a group of people in in a room.”

“It never felt less personal either, I still felt like I was pushing the stories and really shaping them,” he added. “I really loved it.”

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

Writing for series is “a completely different process” than writing for movies, Johnson continued, so he hired not one but two different showrunners: Nora and Lilla Zuckerman. (OK, so in a way they can be considered a package deal.) The sisters were up to the task on Poker Face, the highly anticipated detective series Columbo about Peacock, starring Natasha Lyonne (Russian Doll). ), who is also an executive producer.

Johnson continued to sing the praises of television in front of the ballroom full of TV reports and critics — not least the man knows his audience — and said he prefers the “pace” of this newfound process to film. Each hour-long “Poker Face” episode lasted approximately three weeks (one for preparation, two for filming). Compare that to making a film over “several years,” as he put it.

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

Dive into “Poker Face” when it premieres on January 26th on Peacock.

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