The Murder

You can’t have a Rian Johnson who-dunnit without a mysterious murder, and in Wake Up, Dead Man, that honor belongs to Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin). Jud narrates the scene as we watch it play out, first recalling the fire-y, unhinged Good Friday sermon that Wicks gave that day, atop his signature ambo carved into the bow of a ship. Soon after, Wicks collapses in a nearby storage closet, where Jud finds him dead with a knife in his back.

Production designer Rick Heinrichs and his team built that unique pulpit by Johnson’s request, who referenced John Huston’s 1956 film adaptation of Moby Dick, which featured a scene where Orson Welles, as Father Mapple, preaches from a ship’s prow.

“It’s a metaphor that’s used quite a bit throughout religious iconography,” Heinrichs told Decider. “The world is like an ocean. Mankind is plowing through the waves like the ship and the religious leader is the captain at the helm.” Heinrichs repeated that ship imagery by adding a maritime painting behind the desk where Jud sits, to write his letter to Blanc.

You don’t hear Blanc’s sermon the first time we see this sequence—instead you hear unsettling string music, played on a harp. Composer Nathan Johnson intentionally chose an instrument often associated with the church, and turned it on its head for this track, titled “The Good Friday Murder.”

“The harp often feels heavenly and wonderful,” Nathan Johnson said. “I got really excited about was using [it] in an off-kilter, darker way.”

As with the ambo, the director gave his composer the reference of Moby Dick, which led to Wicks’s signature music motif, played on a broken harmonium. “[The harmonium] is a bellows instrument, and because it’s broken, it’s really creaky,” Johnson said. “I recorded that in an old, stone church in London with a string quartet, and slowed it down. When you slow down a broken harmonium, it sounds like timbers creaking on a ship.”

When lighting the murder sequence, cinematographer Steve Yedlin opted for drama over realism. “We want to keep up the drama and design it shot to shot, so that it’s always got the intensity to it,” Yedlin told Decider. “Exactly what that light bulb from the closet looks like is different in every shot, rather than slavish realism of, ‘The light bulb has to be right here and it can never move.’”

The Resurrection

As you might expect from a movie titled Wake Up, Dead Man, there’s a moment in the film where Jud witnesses the impossible: Monsignor Wicks, who seems extremely dead during his autopsy, appears to come back to life. The door to his tomb—which we’re informed requires special equipment to open from the outside, but can be opened by single push from inside—shatters to the ground. A blinding security light, triggered by the movement, flicks on. A figure who looks a lot like Wicks, dressed in priest robes, steps into the rainy night.

On of the biggest challenges for Heinrich’s production design team for this scene was the tomb door. “We had to draw that the door was going to break into those pieces. It didn’t break into those pieces all by itself,” Heinrichs explained. “They were all prescribed.”

The door itself was made from a hard plaster with a wooden structure inside, which kept it from shattering into too many pieces. “We designed the piece the architecture of the steps, so we knew how it was going to fall, and it just fell perfectly and busted apart perfectly,” Heinrichs said. “We were so pleased with ourselves from that.”

Yedlin recalled that Johnson came with a very specific vision for lighting the scene. “I don’t think we could have done it that perfectly if Rian wasn’t so confident in how he wanted to do it,” Yedlin said. “A really dark night exterior and then the security light comes on, and it’s like a blinding floodlight blasting out your eyes.”

The security light was actually your typical movie light.

“Our gaffer, Dave Smith built this rig around a ring around that entire little valley that we were shooting in,” Yedlin explained. “He had a huge construction crane with the big rig, that was the back light. He had smaller things along the one side, so that we could flood the light in. Behind the crypt, he put a bunch of lights where we could backlight the smoke so that you can see the air, silhouetted trees with some deep blue atmosphere behind them.”

As Jud watches this scene in disbelief, we hear Wicks’s signature disconcerting broken harmonium, punctuated by loud, percussive beats, likely to make viewers jump, on the track “Wake Up, Dead Man.”

“Instead of using drums for the percussion, we use all the stringed instruments, slapping their bows against the strings, a technique called col legno,” composer Nathan Johnson explained to Decider. “They either use the back of their bows or they bring drumsticks and they slap the strings. When you have a whole bunch of double basses doing that together in Studio One at Abbey Road, the sound is absolutely terrifying and amazing.”

In a shot that recalls a camera technique invented by Irmin Roberts for the Hitchcock film Vertigo, Jud’s disorientation is represented via a dolly zoom, in which a camera dollies in the opposite direction of lens zoom, creating a dizzying result.

“The big dolly counter zoom thing on Jud was something Rian came up with in prep. In the script stage, he just knew it needed to be something special,” Yedlin said. “That alley of trees, where they go all the way back in that line, [was] actually shot somewhere adjacent, even though it looks like it’s that alley that the house is in. We ended up doing some visual effects augmentation to [the shot], with exactly what the trees look like.”

As the scene culminates in the movie’s big climax—the figure stepping out of the tomb—the music crescendos.

“Everything lets loose,” Nathan Johnson said. “Finally Jud, runs through to the forest, as it all builds up and then we just give it a hard cut as the punch lands.”

The Acid Bath

The scariest scene in the Knives Out franchise to date has be the sequence where Blanc and Jud, on the verge of cracking the case, discover Monsignor Wicks’s body draped over a bathtub of acid in Dr. Nat (Jeremy Renner)’s basement.

“I did a little bit of a deep dive into the kind of basement that one would have in the house that we were saying was Dr. Nat’s,” production designer Rick Heinrichs told Decider. “It’s own kind of tomb in there—concrete, but also crumbling. We have some metal struts that are clearly not as old as the whole thing itself, that makes it feel a little slightly dangerous and precarious. Wll these different textures and different reflectivity in the middle of this dingy workaday basement. If I was a kid, I wouldn’t want to go down there. That’s a scary basement!”

The basement is lit almost entirely by dusty rays of light, shining in through a small window.

“I proposed that idea of these shafts of light coming in,” cinematographer Steve Yedlin told Decider. “It’s not very realistic. I guess, Dr. Nat has some lights in his backyard. It’s just dramatic. Once we did that that became a huge part of how all of that stuff was lit, where there’s the really stark contrast between the sharp shafts of light that are coming in and how dank everything else is in there.”

A horrible stench tells Blanc and Jud what to expect as they cautiously approach the tub of acid. Blanc turns a faucet to drain the tub, at which point we cut to a shot of the camera panning down, in sync with draining liquid. As the goop falls away, a terrible, decomposing skeleton is revealed.

“The special effects department rigged up an L-shaped bathtub, so that the cmare could be in the bathtub,” Yedlin explained. “For the liquid level to actually be going down that fast, that doesn’t work with a regular drain. That would take forever. The whole bottom of the thing opened instead of just a regular drain, so that it could go down fast.”

But the imagery alone isn’t what will send chills down viewer’s spine—it’s the haunting, repeating pattern of string music that accompanies it, a truly terrifying musical moment of the track titled “In the Flesh.”

“This is where [Rian] wanted the leviathan to appear from under the deep, this horrific moment,” composer Nathan Johnson recalled. “We played around with that moment for quite a long time.”

Eventually, Johnson opted for something simple—a slowed down version of a single cello, recorded in the stone church in London.

“It’s a technique called ricochet, where the bow bounces off the strings really, really quickly,” he explained. “I just snipped a moment of that and then stretched it out, and that became this repeating rhythm, as the goop slides away. Really, it’s just a single cello, slowed way down, and the bow is just bouncing frenetically off the strings.”

The Revelation

For the denouement moment when Blanc delivers a speech to solve this mystery in a dramatic fashion, we return to the central set of the film: the Church, aka Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude. The exteriors of the church were filmed at the High Beach Holy Innocents Church in Epping Forest in Essex, just a few miles outside of London. But the interior was a set built by Heinrichs and his production design team.

“The actual church’s interior was quite bland,” Heinrichs told Decider. “It actually is a lot smaller than you think it is. It’s more of a chapel than it is a church. [The interior set] is practically twice as big as what it what it was. I was always concerned that you would notice that.”

Early on, Rian Johnson made it clear he wanted, as Yedlin puts it, “that the weather outside seeping into the church—where the sun goes behind clouds, and it gets dark and steely blue, and then the sun burst through the clouds.”

So, the design team rigged the church windows with a special, programmable lighting box.

“Steve [Yedlin] was able to program a repeatable pattern of the sun disappearing behind clouds,” Heinrichs said. “We were building tree flats and real trees and stuff like that out the windows, so that when you are able to see out those fabulous stained glass windows, there is real movement.”

The lighting box was put to use throughout much of the film, including a key moment where Blanc and Jud first meet, that Yedlin was particularly proud of. “We were setting up this face off between these two approaches to faith,” Yedlin explained. “When Blanc does his speech about reason over faith, the clouds block the sun and it gets dark. When Jud gives his counter speech, and as the speech swells, the sun is coming out in the shot over his shoulder and flaring the lens.”

That lighting moment gets a callback when, in the middle of his big speech to explain what actually happened, Blanc is struck by a revelation of his own. The detective abruptly cuts off, turns to one of the stained glass windows, where he is suddenly bathed in a warm, heavenly light.

All of that was written into the script, Yedlin said, which allowed his team to “do all this rigging and prep. Then, when we’re actually shooting, it’s like playing music. You could improvise, change things up, and you’re not stumbling over the technical part of it. A huge percentage of it could be done just with light control software.”

Blanc’s “Road to Damascus” moment wouldn’t be complete without the musical track, “Blanc’s Revelation,” that plays beneath it. Filled with hope and beauty, it is completely at odds with the disconcerting music that blankets most of the film.

“This was one of my favorite moments of the score, because it’s a key moment for Blanc’s character, when he gives up what’s most important to him,” composer Nathan Johnson revealed. “We’ve had so much tension and ugliness in the music.  This is the moment for Blanc where we’ve got to contrast that, and contrast is the most powerful tool in music.”

To achieve this sonic moment of beauty, the composer had his musicians utilizes a technique called “circular bowing.”

“Rather than just moving their bows back and forth across the strings, they move them in a circle and it activates little harmonics,” Johnson explained. “That felt really appropriate with the lighting that Steve [Yedlin] was doing. Just for the briefest moment, we tip into this holy revelation where everything feels full of awe and wonder.”