There were 12 seats on the stage for a Q. and A. about the latest “Knives Out” entry. One was for the producer Ram Bergman. Another was for the director, Rian Johnson. The other 10 were all for actors.
It took a full two minutes for the moderator to get through introductions.
“Putting this many stars into one film is literally the definition of herding cats,” the first star on the call sheet, Daniel Craig, said during the session last month at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“Logistically, it’s a nightmare, and this is the man that puts it together,” he added, playfully rubbing Bergman’s shoulder.
Of course, a star-studded ensemble is part of the draw of the popular murder-mystery franchise, which is putting its third installment, “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” in theaters Nov. 26, followed by a Netflix release on Dec. 12. Many viewers will delight at seeing Glenn Close as a devout churchgoer or Jeremy Renner as the town doctor or Mila Kunis as the local police chief.
Getting all those stars together has its challenges. The job is “like a puzzle,” Bergman explained during an interview in October at the Los Angeles offices of the production company he runs with Johnson. The biggest hurdles involve figuring out who can work with whom, and who is available when.
Bergman said he and his team hired Craig for the lead role of private detective Benoit Blanc just seven weeks before they began filming the original 2019 movie. The rest of the ensemble joined after that. Ana de Armas was locked in with only a week remaining.
The team has more or less continued that last-minute approach for subsequent films: Figure out when is Craig available, then cast with weeks to go, not months.
“Most people want to cast long in advance — we cast short in advance,” Bergman said. “If you haven’t taken a job, you’re probably not going to take a job now.”
Bergman insisted the process wasn’t as taxing as Craig made it seem. “I never thought it was difficult, but I also don’t think that making movies is brain surgery,” he said. “My job — our job — is to get the best people.”
Johnson has described the casting process for “Knives Out” as “curating a dinner party” and emphasized that the chemistry between stars matters. So each role must be solidified before the next actor can be hired. Bergman recalled, for instance, that once they had secured Chris Evans for the first movie, only then could they move on to selecting his mother (who turned out to be Jamie Lee Curtis).
In 2018, Evans was coming off a long run in Marvel movies. Bergman noted that major actors like him often join the “Knives Out” franchise content with not being at the top of the call sheet. They are attracted by the prospect of working with Johnson, Bergman said, and that is enough.
But enthusiasm alone does not cause schedules to magically fall in line. For “Wake Up Dead Man,” Josh Brolin was initially thought to be unavailable, Bergman said. He was on another movie and would not be done until seven weeks after the “Knives Out” team had started filming. So they found a workaround: They rescheduled the entire shoot to allow Brolin to film all of his scenes in the final two weeks.
Separately, Andrew Scott was asking about being released from the London set for a few days to do a Richard Linklater movie in Ireland, a request Bergman was able to accommodate.
The answer, however, is not always yes.
“I am going to try to figure out how to get them out,” Bergman said. “But I will tell them right off the bat if I can’t.” Bad things happen all the time, Bergman added. People get sick, which can be particularly problematic for an ensemble. “You figure it out,” Bergman said, “and ultimately you remember you’re just making a movie.”
The original film was shot in a mansion in New England with an old-school rec room for a basement. The cast ended up hanging out there rather than going back to their trailers, Johnson said. It helped build camaraderie, so he and his team made sure to set aside a similar sort of green room when they shot “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” and “Wake Up Dead Man.”
Bergman recalled that Kerry Washington and Glenn Close would bring their dogs to the green room while working on “Wake Up Dead Man.” And when “Glass Onion” was being shot during the pandemic, Johnson hosted murder-mystery dinners in the penthouse of the hotel they had been confined to.
The whole idea is to to “try to make the experience good for actors,” Bergman said, adding that this is what he and Johnson would remember, “the experience of making the movie while you watch it. At this stage of our lives, it’s all about that.”
Matt Stevens is a Times reporter who writes about arts and culture from Los Angeles.
The post The Delicate, Last-Minute Dance of Building a Starry ‘Knives Out’ Cast appeared first on New York Times.
