Rian Johnson Breaks Down a Scene From Wake Up Dead Man
Along with Sinners and One Battle After Another,1 Wake Up Dead Man is one of my favorite films of the year. So I enjoyed director Rian Johnson breaking down the investigative scene in the bar in this Vanity Fair video.
This is, for me, even a little more personal than the previous movies because faith and religion is at the heart of this movie. And I grew up very Christian. I grew up not Catholic. This movie is set in a Catholic church. I grew up Protestant, kind of what we would call evangelical today. I was a youth group kid and it wasn’t just that my parents took me to church. I really, my whole perspective in life was really based on a relationship with Christ. It was very important to me. I’m not anymore, I’ve kind of grown away from that later in life, but it’s still something that I have deep feelings about. So this movie, in a way, by having Father Jud and Benoit Blanc kind of talk about this and kind of butt heads about it, it was a way for me to take both of those perspectives inside me and get them talking with each other.
The practical effect with the photograph (~10:05 mark) was 💯.
- I can’t for the life of me ever remember the name of this movie and end up searching for it (“dicaprio pta movie”) every time I want to write or talk about it.↩
Comments 2
Those three are in my top 5 movies of the year with Hamnet and Marty Supreme. All five are gorgeous with multiple layers and well acted.
The previous piece about the film (entirely
too many thoughts about…) has been running on loop in my head for weeks and possibly one of my favorite reads in recent memory. As we close out the year, thank you for being a place that celebrates both the human experience of art and life, and the cool techy dorkness that makes it possible. It’s a joy
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