‘Wake Up Dead Man’ | Anatomy of a Scene

“My Name is Rian Johnson. I wrote and directed “Wake Up, Dead Man.” “All right, everyone!” This is a scene that’s about halfway through the movie. And Father Jud right here, who’s Josh O’Connor, he is the prime suspect in the murder of Monsignor Wicks, kind of the local priest that was his colleague. And all the parishioners who you see here have suspected. Jud, have given him a lot of guff, and he’s finally hit his limit, and he’s teamed with Benoit Blanc. And they’re going to get to the bottom of this. “And we’re going to start with what happened that night right here in this very room.” “You mean the time Jud admitted to all of us that he killed a man.” “O.K, no, that was the boxing thing.” So these movies really run off of scenes like this and getting all the suspects together and then having them all bounce off of each other in sometimes terrible, abrasive ways. And it’s about the relationships between everybody. It’s about Glenn Close and Cailee Spaeny in the same frame. So you get that great moment where Glenn screams. “Ahhh!” “Jesus!” “It’s a miracle!” “I can walk, Martha. It just hurts.” We’re getting movie stars who were all number one on the call sheet on their own films to come in and be a part of an actual ensemble. So this scene was one of the first scenes that we shot, because I thought it was really important to get everyone in the same room. And so you can see these actors, some of the best actors working today get in there and you can see the joy they’re taking in watching everyone else’s performance and seeing where everyone else is pitching it, especially on day one and all kind of finding their level. And I don’t for me, it makes my job very easy. But it’s amazing seeing them, seeing them work. “Who wants to go first?”