Rian Johnson reveals that Apple doesn’t let bad guys use iPhones

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Now that Rian Johnson (KNIVES OUT) has released his own murder/mystery film, he's revealed a little tidbit which may change just how you watch movies moving forward. While taking part in Vanity Fair's latest installment of Notes on a Scene, the KNIVES OUT writer/director dropped a bit of a bombshell in regards to which types of characters are allowed to use iPhones.

"I don’t know if I should tell you this,"Johnson laughed. "Not because it’s, like, lascivious or anything, but because it’s gonna screw me on the next mystery movie that I write. Apple, they let you use iPhones in movies, but – and this is very pivotal if you’re watching a mystery movie – bad guys can not have iPhones on camera… Every single filmmaker who has a bad guy in their movie that's supposed to be a secret wants to murder me right now." So there you have it, something to keep an eye out for in future murder mystery movies, unless this is all part of some long con on Johnson's part in regards to his upcoming KNIVES OUT sequel.

Speaking of the KNIVES OUT sequel, it was officially announced earlier this month that a sequel to Rian Johnson's star-studded murder-mystery KNIVES OUT had been given the go-ahead, but with the exception of Daniel Craig's Detective Beniot Blanc, it seems that the sequel could be an entirely different beast, in fact, Johnson has stated that he doesn't "even think of it as a sequel."

The same way Agatha Christie wrote a bunch of Poirot novels, we can do that with Blanc and keep making new mysteries, you know, whole new cast, whole new location, whole new mystery, it's just another Beniot Blanc mystery. There's so many different things you could do with it.

Johnson said that the KNIVES OUT sequel could jump to another sub-genre altogether, just like Agatha Christie's novels. "You look at Agatha Christie's books for example, it's not like every single one is a mansion, and a family, and a library, and a detective," Johnson explained. "Besides settings, she also explored a bunch of different sub-genres, And Then They Were None is essentially a slasher film, it's basically a horror movie; The ABC Murders is kind of like a proto-serial killer movie in a way. She found a very different narrative way into each of them." KNIVES OUT is now available on Digital/DVD/Blu-ray/4K Ultra HD.