Rian Johnson’s outline for ‘Knives Out’

The writer-director of the smash hit movie tweeted the image this week.

I find this image both comforting and inspiring.

Comforting in that it’s a structure well-known to screenwriters: Three Act Structure, plot points, sequences. Plus, there’s probably not a screenwriter alive who hasn’t jotted down an image like this when first sketching out a story just to get a sense of the narrative shape.

Inspiring because Knives Out, which is a terrific movie, proves we can work with conventional screenplay structure and still create unique, special stories.

William Goldman famously said, “Screenplays ARE structure.” Any person who has written more than a handful of screenplays gets the sentiment of that comment. What we do within the confines of that structure is where the magic of storytelling comes in.

What I’m most curious about is how Rian Johnson got to this point in the process where he knew enough about the story he could draw this rough outline, specifically, how much character work did he do to flesh out the plot.

You can check out this extensive Collider interview with the filmmaker to see what he says on the writing and production of Knives Out:

By the way, thus in its theatrical run, Knives Out has done nearly $270M in box office revenues. Not bad for a movie with a reported production budget of $40M. And it’s an original movie, not a sequel, prequel, remake, or reboot.

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