The director spoke with me about finding a new angle on an old story, the best whodunits of yesteryear, and why everyone’s sweaters in Knives Out look so cozy. (And, yes, we watched the Cats trailer, during which Johnson cheered and gasped with an occasional interjection like, “It’s the Jellicle Ball, motherfuckers!” and “Get that money, Ian McKellen!”)

This conversation has been edited.

David Sims: When I saw Knives Out at the Toronto International Film Festival, you came out to introduce it and said something like, “Who’s ready for a good old-fashioned whodunit?” Of course, the film is that, but you’ve messed with the genre in all these ways. Is that how you begin your creative process—taking something familiar and seeing where it goes?

Rian Johnson: Sort of! The idea for me, in terms of the genre element, is getting back to what I love about it in as powerful and pure a way as possible. [To] clear out all the cobwebs and get to the actual impact of whatever the genre is.

Sims: So you try to boil down to that emotion?

Johnson: The example I use is my first movie, Brick. It’s the way I felt when I read Dashiell Hammett for the first time, like I’d been punched in the stomach. It felt electric to me. The idea of taking how familiar we are with film noir and putting it into a different context. You have to do something so that audiences’ senses wake up a little bit.

Sims: This isn’t a dead genre exactly; there had been the throwback-y Murder on the Orient Express a couple of years ago.

Johnson: Which I thought was great! But when you see a whodunit, you tend to see it as a period piece, because it’s usually an Agatha Christie adaptation. So the idea of doing an original one and setting it in the America of 2019—not just giving it a modern skin but really plugging into today—there was something about that that seemed genuinely exciting.

Read: ‘Knives Out’ is no ordinary murder mystery

Sims: Yet with the traditional tropes of a fancy house and a family of rich people, which Knives Out has. Did you always have the family in mind for this movie?

Johnson: With this movie I was thinking about the form of the whodunit and the inherent weakness of that form, which is that it’s just clue-gathering leading up to a surprise. So the initial idea was as simple and abstract as putting a Hitchcock thriller in the middle of a whodunit, but still turning it back into a whodunit at the end. So I still get the pleasure of the denouement with the detective in the library.

Sims: I read the article you wrote for the L.A. Times about Alfred Hitchcock’s disdain for the Agatha Christie–style whodunit, which relies entirely on a surprise ending. Do you think that’s because in a Hitchcock movie, the director takes the role of Poirot, distributing the information for the audience?

Johnson: No, I think it’s about the experience the audience has. Hitchcock was all about giving the audience the most thrilling time in the theater possible. I think it was entirely just his theory of suspense—the notion that it’s more exciting to lean forward than to lean back and stroke your chin.