The “Knives Out” mysteries are big, old-fashioned movie entertainment, but to find his way into each one, writer/director Rian Johnson starts with a modern-day topic that is making him “angry” to build his whodunit around. In the first “Knives Out,” it was the hypocrisy and entitlement of the wealthy; “Glass Onion” satirized the superficial wisdom of a tech billionaire and his “disruptors”; and now the third installment, “Wake Up Dead Ma,n” takes dead aim at how the religious right has moved away from Christian teachings and into our embittered politics.

Like the first two installments, it’s a topic of this moment, but for Johnson, a far more personal one. Johnson grew up Protestant, in what would now be termed an evangelical church, a defining aspect of his life through his early adulthood.

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“I was very Christian. My whole life was framed through a relationship with God, and it was that way for me up through my early 20s,” said Johnson, while on this week’s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “Having grown up very specifically in that evangelical moment of the rise of Christianity in the political Right in America, and being very much a part of that when I was a kid, and still having family members, I care about who has those beliefs. It’s something that is very personal for me.”

It’s a world Johnson brings to life with the character Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin), a firebrand who has stoked his devoted followers into becoming an embattled congregation, and the film’s eventual murder suspects.

“There’s the notion of team sports playing out, the notion of ‘us against them,’ the notion of being under siege, which for me, growing up in the church that I did, that was a big, big part of what was drilled in, is the notion this is war,” said Johnson.

It’s a world that Johnson’s legendary detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) and his protagonist, the idealistic Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), must try to penetrate — Blanc to find his murderer, Fr. Jud to lead them back toward the teachings of Jesus. They make an unlikely duo: the reasoned atheist and the devoted man of God, united in their clear-eyed view of the damage wrought by the church. In their introduction to one another, Johnson pits them in a respectful debate about faith in a scene the writer/director admits is a conversation he often has with himself.

“It’s nakedly the two things inside of me kind of going at it,” said Johnson Craig’s first scene with O’Connor. “As anyone who was very religious, in a deeply personal way, will tell you, it’s something that you’re constantly wrestling with.”

“Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery” is now available on Netflix.

To hear Rian Johnson‘s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.

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