Film schools have been the breeding ground for a number of noteworthy Hollywood partnerships: Martin Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker at NYU; writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski at USC; Barry Jenkins, cinematographer James Laxton, producer Adele Romanski and editors Nat Sanders and Joi McMillon at Florida State; David Lynch and cinematographer Frederick Elmes at AFI… The team of director Rian Johnson and cinematographer Steve Yedlin joined that list with a twist: When they met in the early 1990s, Johnson was attending USC but had been rejected by its School of Cinematic Arts, and Yedlin was a high school senior working on student films in his spare time.
Yedlin got into the school the following year, while Johnson kept taking film classes and applying to SCA until they finally accepted him midway through his junior year. The two have collaborated on every one of Johnson’s films: “Brick”(2005), “The Brothers Bloom” (2008), “Looper” (2012), “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” (2019) and the whodunit trilogy of “Knives Out” (2019), “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” (2022) and this year’s “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” which will hit theaters in November and Netflix in December.
While in England, where they’d gone for the London Film Festival premiere of “Wake Up Dead Man,” they talked to TheWrap about their partnership and shared some surprising thoughts about the value of film schools.
How’d you end up working together for the first time?
RIAN JOHNSON They used to have flyers up on the loading dock at USC where you could tear little numbers off to volunteer on student-film sets. And I guess they didn’t stop high school students from doing that, too.
STEVE YEDLIN Yeah. [Laughs] They’d take the free labor no matter who’s offering it.
JOHNSON All through high school, I had made movies with my friends. But I didn’t know how a set with actual crew members worked. I thought it was moving really slowly and I was kind of useless on set. [Laughs] I was so useless that when they ran out of sandbags, they had me sit on C-stands to hold them down. And Steve was basically running the camera department. So he took pity on me and showed me how to load the camera.
YEDLIN Rian’s leaving out the part where he was sitting on C-stands until they couldn’t figure out how to shoot a scene. And then he leaped up and solved the problem of how it should be shot and cut together.
Had both of you wanted to study film from early on?
JOHNSON Yeah. Making movies with my friends was my only social activity, really. In an issue of Premiere magazine, I read about the existence of film schools. And then I read a biography of George Lucas called “Skywalking” that talked about USC. And even though I didn’t get into the film school, I got into the university. So I went in undeclared and thought I would hang around and keep reapplying every semester. But Steve had decent grades in high school, so he got in.
YEDLIN I guess at that time, USC was a little bit easier academically. And sort of like Rian in junior high, the first time I got interested not just in liking movies but also wondering how they get made was when I saw the visual effects in “Back to the Future.” I remember getting really excited and volunteering on the student films. That was the first time I saw that division of labor [on a film set], and that’s when I was drawn specifically toward the camera.
JOHNSON Steve had made a shot-for-shot remake of “Back to the Future,” too. [Laughs]
YEDLIN Unfortunately, not shot-for-shot. It was a lot worse than that. [Laughs] It was just really schlocky shots.
Did you stay in touch through that first year?
JOHNSON We exchanged info and said, “Let’s get together this summer and make a movie.” And then Steve actually called me that summer. So we ended up driving up to San Francisco. We came up with an idea for a short, and I think I had stolen the 16-millimeter camera from my high school that I used to film football games.
YEDLIN Oh, we did a different thing with that camera.
JOHNSON Oh, that’s right. I did steal that camera, but we used another 16-millimeter camera in San Francisco. We drove up overnight, started filming the next morning and shot all day. And I think we did get a hotel room for one night. All of us slept in it, and we shot the whole next day and then drove back.
But Rian, it took you a long time to get into the film school, didn’t it?
JOHNSON I applied a total of five times. I kept reapplying every semester, and meanwhile I was meeting people in the film school and sitting in on film classes. I was trying to make peace with “OK, if I don’t get into the film school, I can still get a film education here.”
Do you know why they kept rejecting you?
JOHNSON Absolutely. My GPA was terrible. [Laughs] I had horrible grades in high school because I was just making movies with my friends. And it was an incredibly competitive program, as it is today. So I was frustrated, but not confused.
The friends that you make become the people you can struggle together with in your 20s when you’re trying to get your foothold. That’s the most valuable part of film school.”
– Rian Johnson
What did it take to finally get in?
JOHNSON In my junior year, I became an English major and loved it. But at the midpoint of that year, the application period rolled around and I thought, “Screw it.” I did one more application — and whereas in all the previous ones, I poured my heart out in long personal statements, in this one I just wrote half a page that was basically a 19-year-old’s “I don’t need you guys to be a filmmaker!” letter. I’m sure it was incredibly obnoxious, but they were sick of me or took pity on me or something, and they let me in based on that. So I got into the program midway through my junior year and did it in three semesters. By the way, it was ill-advised. I would not recommend that any students out there take that approach.
But it worked!
JOHNSON Well, it worked once. Your mileage may vary.
Was it a big change once you got into the school?
JOHNSON Oh, yeah. I was thrilled. I got to actually make movies in class — but more than that, I got to be with fellow film students. [“Donnie Darko” director] Richard Kelly was in my class, and he came in with Super 8 movies and completely blew us all away. I thought, “My God, I’ve got to up my game a little here.” It definitely got my butt in gear.
What were the most important things that USC did for you?
JOHNSON Meeting this guy [indicating Yedlin]. I mean, honestly. Look, USC is a good school. There are a lot of good schools. I think the big thing is the people that you meet, the people you become friends with. People like Steve, or Lucky McKee, a director who we’re both still really close with, who gave me my first job as an editor on a real movie. I became friends with a guy, Tom Callicoat, who got me a job at the Disney Channel, which let me pay my bills through my 20s until I was able to make my first movie. The friends that you make become the people you can struggle together with in your 20s when you’re trying to get your foothold. That’s the most valuable part of film school, I think.
What about for you, Steve?
YEDLIN I absolutely agree with Rian. To me, the most memorable, informative stuff happened outside the program. It was us making short films on the weekends and stuff. Rian and I did student films for the program together, but we shot a lot more shorts for practice, honing the craft. On a Friday night, Rian and I and some of our friends in the dorms would say, “Hey, you wanna shoot something this weekend?” We’d start on Friday night, and by Sunday night it had been shot and edited with our rudimentary version of a sound mix. It was just for fun. It wasn’t a product.
JOHNSON More than anything, that was where I think we all learned how to make movies. You have a camera in your hand and you’re kind of cutting in-camera, so that teaches you editing in an in-the-trenches-type way. And you’re having fun with your friends, which to this day is how we want our film sets to feel, even now that we’re getting paid to do it.
Is there anything you wish they would’ve taught you in school that they didn’t?
JOHNSON Well, I’m sure USC is different now than it was when we went there. But I do feel like I graduated not really knowing how a real film set works. [Laughs] They were concentrating more on the filmmaker as an artist, and I graduated not really knowing what a first AD did. But on your first day as a PA on a real set, you’re tossed into the deep end of the pool and you learn all that stuff before lunch, you know? So it’s not a big deal, really.
YEDLIN I do think that’s different now.
JOHNSON I’m sure it is. If [film school] Dean [Elizabeth] Daley is reading this, I’m sure it’s different now. [Laughs] Invite me back!
YEDLIN I also do an AFI seminar once a year, and I find when I talk to the students there, one thing that does sometimes get left out, strangely, is off-camera stuff for actors. Off-camera marks and eyelines and all that.
How long did it take for you to start working professionally after you graduated?
JOHNSON Steve started working on sets right away, in the electric department usually.
YEDLIN I was mostly a gaffer on really low-budget stuff. Rather than working up through the ranks of the lighting department, I was working up from micro stuff.
Did you always have your sights set on being a DP?
YEDLIN Oh, yeah. It wasn’t my main source of income at that time, but I was shooting anything I could whenever I could.
Rian, what was the transition like for you?
JOHNSON It was a lot of unemployment. [Laughs] I didn’t have a skill set like Steve. And also, when I talk to film students about this, I do feel like if you want to be a DP, if you want to be a head of a department, then you start working on a film set and you can meet people and work your way up. If you want to write and direct your own movies, I don’t think it’s the best choice to have a job on the set. That eats up all of your time and energy, so you don’t have time to write.
If you want to write and direct, the only thing that matters is having a good script. It’s not something where you work your way up on set and that somehow helps you become a director. The old saying that a director is the only entry-level position on a set is actually true. [Laughs] But I had some great day jobs in my 20s. I worked at a preschool for deaf kids for a while as the AV guy. I worked at the Disney Channel producing promos, which was a great job, and was able to keep a roof over my head and still have space to write and to try and hustle and get my first movie made.
Were you always planning to work together down the road?
JOHNSON Yeah, yeah. It was a lot of late nights in coffee shops saying, “How do we get our first movie made?” Brick was the script I had. I basically spent my 20s trying to get it made. Seven or eight years of failing to get it made, and then it happened.
Let’s talk about “Wake Up Dead Man.“ When you’re going into the third “Knives Out” movie, are you thinking, “OK, we’ve got to do something different”? Or are you looking for continuity, or a bit of both?
JOHNSON For me, one of the reasons I felt excited about doing multiple murder mysteries is that the genre is such a wide spectrum. There are so many different things it can be. Not even as a strategic choice, but it was exciting for me to just try something totally different, tonally and visually and thematically.
What were the particular challenges for you, Steve?
YEDLIN Rian really, really knows what he wants storytelling-wise with the lighting and camera. And that means that I have my work cut out for me. We can be honing those ideas rather than spiraling and spitballing and not knowing what the ideas are. I think the most fun we had was figuring stuff out when Rian wanted big changes during scenes, like where the clouds go over the sun or the sun breaks through the clouds. On the one hand, we have a huge infrastructure that’s pre-rigged and set up, but on the other hand, it’s agile. It’s not like, well, we set up for this and now we can’t change it. We improvise it and adjust it to the performances and what’s happening in the scene as it comes together on the day.
JOHNSON Tonally, this was a little more Edgar Allan Poe-y, a little more gothic. And I think that of the three movies, I would call it more of a lighting movie than the other two. It was really fun watching Steve work on this one because I feel like the ball was very much in his court in terms of creating the texture and the tone.
Has your working relationship changed since you were making student films together?
YEDLIN It always feels like family, and it’s only gotten more comfortable. It’s not like things have gotten more distant or businesslike or anything. It’s really the opposite, you know?
JOHNSON Even today, it’s kind of the same as when we were in the dorms making movies on the weekends.
This story first ran in the College Issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
