When your object is to take something that you grew up loving and to get back to the feeling,

the essential pleasure of what that thing is,

nostalgia suddenly becomes the enemy and it becomes an obstacle. Hello, and welcome back to the Director's Cut, brought to you by the Directors Guild of America.

In this episode, Southern Detective Benoit Blanc returns

to solve another mystery in director Ryan Johnson's Houdnett, Glass Onion, a Knives

Out mystery. A follow-up to 2019's Knives Out, the film finds Blanc on a billionaire's

lavish Greek island at a yearly reunion of a disparate group of friends.

When one guest turns up dead, everyone becomes a suspect and must peel away the layers of their motivations, secrets, and lies.

In addition to Glass Onion and Knives Out, Johnson's credits include the feature films Star Wars Episode 8, The Last Jedi, Looper, The Brothers Bloom, and Brick, and episodes of the television series Terriers and Breaking Bad.

He won the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Dramatic Series for his 2012 Breaking Bad episode, 51.

Following a screening of the film at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles, Johnson spoke with director Phil Lord about filming Glass Onion.

Listen on for their spoiler-free conversation.

I want to ask you about how this film started, and I specifically want to ask you to talk about

the little notebook that you use to like start your projects.

So I, yeah, I mean, years ago I started, and again, thank you guys for being here.

And Phil, thank you for doing this. It's very cool.

I needed an excuse to wear clothes on a Monday.

So, yeah, years ago, I started just working in, because the way I write, I spend the first

like 80% of the process outlining.

So I'm just working on little notebooks.

And I realized I was falling into a pattern of kind of looking around and wasting time with the beginning of each project

looking for the perfect notebook to start.

...