Key Change: Rian Johnson on Wagner's 'Das Rheingold'

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Hrishikesh Hirway. This episode contains explicit language. This is Key Change, where I talk to fascinating people about the music that changed their lives. My guest today is director Rian Johnson, which is exciting for me because I've been a huge fan of his ever since seeing his first feature film, Brick, in 2006. Since then, he's made six more feature films, including Looper in 2012, Star Wars: The Last Jedi in 2017, the murder mystery Knives Out in 2019, and his most recent movie, another in the Knives Out series, Wake Up Dead Man, which is already out in theaters and comes to Netflix on December 12th. I talked to Rian about a piece of music that had a profound impact on him, which was-

The overture to Das Rheingold, the opera by Richard Wagner. Call him Richard. His friends call him Richard.

[laughs]

So this is either gonna be really fun or really pretentious and boring.

For the record, I think it was really fun. Here we go.

I think what people think with Wagner is the Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Yeah. Kill the Wabbit.

Kill the Wabbit.

Kill the wabbit. Kill the wabbit. Kill the wabbit

Also, by the way, if any true opera scholars or fans are listening, I don't know when I'm talk... I'm a casual, I'm a fan of opera [laughs] I'm not like a... I probably say dumb shit probably-

[laughs]

... in the context of opera.

But you were not an opera listener when you were growing up?

When I was a kid, no. And then I was pretty broke in my 20s and trying to get my first movie made. I had never traveled, and so I scraped together some money and did a backpacking type trip to Berlin. But the nice thing about Europe is, you know, opera is subsidized by the state, and so you can get good tickets for not that much. I went to see La Traviata, the Verdi opera, and the opera bug got me. It was just so powerful and beautiful, and, and I was just completely... And, and from that point onward, I would say I was an opera fan.

And so how much time passed between seeing the first opera and then seeing Das Rheingold?

So that trip happened maybe late '90s, and it was 2011 when I saw Das Rheingold for the first time.

Oh, okay. So you, at this point, you'd already made Brick.

I made Brick. You know, it got picked up by Focus Features, and that meant I was able to make my second movie, The Brothers Bloom, which was a big, beautiful experience and a very personal project and nobody saw [laughs] so-

I saw it.

Oh, you saw it? Thank you for watching it.

[laughs]

And then I have a very good producer, so he was able to get my third movie, Looper, off the ground, and I had made Looper at that point.

Hmm.

And it had been well received and had done pretty well, and I felt really, really good about it. But there's this strange thing that happens when you make something and put it out in the world, where suddenly people start talking about it, and it's not even like everything they say is great about it, but it becomes an object outside of yourself. And for the first time, I experienced the thing of me kind of feeling like it became kind of a foreign object, and I couldn't