On this date in 1973, filmmaker Rian Johnson was born in Silver Spring, Md., to parents who operated a homebuilding business and were movie buffs. His father was also a frustrated scriptwriter who was never able to sell a script. The family moved to Denver and then to San Clemente, Calif., where Johnson graduated from high school. He estimated he’d made over 90 short films by then with a Super 8mm camera.
Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” (1977) inspired his goal to direct movies and he enrolled in the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, graduating in 1996. It took him nine years to make his first feature, “Brick” (2005), while he made promos for children’s TV shows and instructional videos for the deaf and worked as a film editor. “Brick” reimagined a contemporary high school as the setting for a Dashiell Hammett-style mystery.
“The Brothers Bloom” (2009), his next feature, was critically acclaimed and followed by directing three TV episodes of “Breaking Bad.” He wrote and directed “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” (2017), that year’s highest grossing film.
Johnson wrote and directed “Knives Out” (2019), “Glass Onion” (2022) and “Wake Up Dead Man” (2025), all starring atheist Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, a Southern sleuth in a trilogy described as “masterfully twisty, broadly comic whodunits populated by tech billionaires, venal politicians, fashionistas and spoiled old-money family members.” (Religion News Service, Nov. 25, 2025)
The trilogy is steeped in religion. Johnson set “Wake Up Dead Man,” for example, in Catholicism instead of his Protestant tradition because his childhood churches “all kind of looked like Pottery Barns” while a Catholic setting felt “exotic,” “a little bit scary” and “awe inspiring.” (Ibid.)
“I grew up very Christian. I’m not anymore, but when I was a teenager into my mid-twenties, I framed the world around me through the lens of my relationship with Christ. It was a very important part of my life, so I have a lot of complicated feelings about all of it. … I have strong feelings about faith: both my own personal experience and how it intersects with our country’s cultural and civic life, and the ways that intersection touches all of us differently.” (Tudum by Netflix, Dec. 17, 2025)
The late composer Stephen Sondheim is a major inspiration for Johnson, who “sneaks him in anywhere I can.” In “Knives Out,” Craig sings along to Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind” from “Follies,” which Johnson was listening to while writing. Sondheim, who was known for hosting elaborate murder mystery parties, had a cameo in “Glass Onion” in which he is playing the game Among Us with Angela Lansbury, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Natasha Lyonne. (Reddit, Jan. 5, 2020)
Johnson married film critic and historian Karina Longworth in 2018. They met in 2008 after a screening of “The Brothers Bloom” in New Jersey.
PHOTO: Johnson at the premiere of “Wake Up Dead Man” in 2025 at the Toronto Film Festival; photo by Max Surprenant under CC 4.0.
