Rian Johnson and Cinematographer Steve Yedlin Saved Some of Their Best Work for ‘Wake Up Dead Man’

Never mind the murdered priest in “Wake Up Dead Man” — the real crime is that Rian Johnson’s first film, “Brick,” came out 20 years ago. For more than two decades, then, Johnson has worked with cinematographer Steve Yedlin to craft sharp, enticing worlds, be they ground down with grit or painted with the lushest, most epic colors in the Galaxy. On “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” Yedlin was tasked with pushing the cosy, woody New England vibes of the first “Knives Out” film and going full gothic with it. 

“I’m super lucky to have had [Johnson] bring me along for the ride because it started out great, and it’s kind of gotten even better,” Yedlin told IndieWire. “Like, I would be a huge fan of his films even if I didn’t have anything to do with them. So I’m lucky to have gotten involved with him, and he always makes the journey of it so much fun.”

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A collaboration and friendship forged by making shorts has now transformed into a well-oiled machine designed to find the most compelling visual way to tell the story. Yedlin told IndieWire that he and Johnson do not set up “rules” for any particular project, but just talk about what is needed to visually put the audience inside the characters’ experience — and on a “Knives Out” project, also how to fake the audience out, a little bit, of course. 

On “Wake Up Dead Man,” Yedlin and Johnson really wanted to play with light in a way that ties into the trials of young Father Jud (Josh O’Connor), who becomes the prime suspect — when his loathsome superior, Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin), is abruptly found stabbed in the back during the Good Friday mass — as well as the latest sidekick to impossible-murder-solver extraordinaire Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig). 

Between the number of days, nights, dusks, dawns, clouds, glares, sunbursts of hope, and almost-demonic flashbacks, Yedlin and his team really worked to finesse the mood of production designer Rick Heinrichs’ sets, especially the church, Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, itself — which Yedlin described as “my favorite set I’ve ever shot in, period, just in terms of how beautiful the thing he made was and how perfect [it was] for the movie.” 

The perfect church, with all sorts of nooks and corners and strong Gothic lines, gave Yedlin plenty of options to develop a space where so much of the action happens in “Wake Up Dead Man” and consistently holds so many members of the film’s ensemble. “We did a lot of work to design how the lights were rigged for options. And so, on the one hand, we could do all of the designed stuff we knew Rian wanted, like the sun coming out when Blanc’s having his ‘road to Damascus’ moment. But we also knew Rian was going to want to do all sorts of other ones that were more improvisational.” 

Yedlin had custom software to control the lights programmatically and also iterate so that the lighting improvised, almost along with the performers. “We can make sure that [a lighting cue] starts on this line and takes exactly 32 seconds. It’s very controlled and it can be very complex. But on the other hand, it’s really quick and flexible, and it’s not like once it’s all programmed, we can’t change it. I can be making changes down to the last second, where I’m fiddling with things and always just be pushing it toward something more and more refined,” Yedlin said. 

Getting closer and closer to refined — and within the time allotted for prep and shooting — is something that Yedlin and Johnson have down to a science. “Choosing which things you’re going to really get into details with is part of the process on any production, but specifically with Rian, I can get into more details than I would ever want to because there’s no spiraling time. He already knows what he wants from you; he’s already really confident. It’s not like I’m pitching him ideas; he already knows, and then he also knows that he trusts me to pick up where the specificity of the director ends and the cinematographer picks up the details,” Yedlin said. 

Some of the details important for Yedlin to track were coverage of such a large ensemble; he wanted to keep the camera language from becoming too much like a ‘90s sitcom and find shots that could be expressive of the characters driving each scene and moment without losing track of the wider (Church) group who might have wished Wicks ill. For Yedlin, that is about thinking through the power dynamics of wider shots and what context the audience can pick up about character relationships from how they situate themselves in the pews or on a couch. 

“You don’t want it to feel like it’s just one talking head replacing another, and it’s just a whole bunch of the exact same closeups, because that’s: one, visually boring, and two, that would demand way too many shots. To actually shoot every single person from every other person’s angle, you wouldn’t even be able to finish the scene,” Yedlin said. “Most importantly, so much of the meaning of having these people together and the feel of the whole thing is based on how they’re all juxtaposed with each other — who’s foregrounded and who’s backgrounded.” 

For as much power as Yedlin and Johnson are able to mine from the grim, sometimes almost horror-ready, environment of the church grounds, the true sense of menace in “Wake Up Dead Man” comes from each shady member of Wick’s inner circle and how they reinforce each other to gang up on Jud. “It’s about the people inhabiting the space together — both the physical space in the story and the screen space, too,” Yedlin said. “The group is such a character.” 

Put another way: In the world of “Knives Out,” both heaven and hell are other people.