Rian Johnson loves a good mystery. You could see it in the writer-director’s debut, the witty and gritty noir pastiche “Brick” (2005), and in his recent Emmy-winning Peacock series, “Poker Face.” Even when his work takes him into other genres, like the time-travel thriller “Looper” (2012) or “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” (2017), the skills that make him a great mystery writer are on full display: an attention to detail, a keen understanding of human nature, a talent for surprising twists. 

But the best showcase for those skills might be his “Knives Out” series of whodunnit films, starring Daniel Craig as the brilliant detective Benoit Blanc. The two previous entries were sharp, satirical and diabolically constructed mysteries that played fair by the classic rules of the genre while bringing it into the present. But the newest “Knives Out” film, “Wake Up Dead Man,” is something else: a deeply personal and insightful story about faith set at a Catholic parish.

Mr. Johnson spoke with America about his own experience with faith, getting the Catholic details right and the detective stories that inspired the film. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You grew up in a Protestant denomination. How did that influence the creation of this movie, and how did you decide to make it about Catholics?

After making “Glass Onion,” which was a big, broad, kind of comedic film, I felt like doing something that was more grounded and dug a little deeper. My path to that was making it personal. I grew up very, very Christian, kind of in an evangelical household. I wasn’t just brought to church with my parents: I was personally very Christian up through my childhood, teenage years and into my early 20s. My walk with Christ was really how I framed the world around me. And I’m not a believer anymore. So it started with the idea of taking this complicated, very deeply rooted thing that I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about, and having a multifaceted discussion of it that doesn’t try to tiptoe around and not offend anyone, but also feels truly generous in spirit towards the subject. And can I do that in the context of a big, entertaining Hollywood movie?

The Catholicism of it all, there are two aspects. The more blunt one is that the churches that I grew up going to all kind of look like Pottery Barns. It’s not the most aesthetically pleasing world. [This is] a movie that’s both a gothic sort of murder mystery and also about the power of storytelling. Aesthetically, no one can beat the Catholic Church. Growing up Protestant, the Catholic Church was very exotic to me. I have sort of an outsider’s perspective of how it was beautiful, but also a little scary, and the sense of awe of it. 

The other element is because a lot of what I was addressing was straight out of my personal experience with the evangelical church that I grew up in. Setting it in the Catholic Church gave me a little bit of distance so that I could speak to it without feeling like I was just hitting things directly on the head.

Father Scott Bailey is credited as a consultant on the film. Can you tell me about his role in the production and what it was like working with him?

Father Scott is a wonderful guy. My uncle and aunt, who live in Denver, are very Catholic, and when I started writing this movie, I got in touch with them. I was like, “So, I’m writing a movie set in the Catholic Church….” And they were like, “Are you?” [laughs]. I started talking to them about it, and they got more excited about it. I flew out to Denver, and they set up a dinner where Father Scott came and invited five of his friends, five young priests based in the Denver area. We sat down, we had a great dinner, we drank some wine and we had a big ask-me-anything session. Not about theology or religion, but about what their life is like as young priests in America today. It was amazing, and I ended up drawing a lot from those conversations that found its way into the movie.

I was really grateful to Father Scott and stayed in touch. When we started working on the movie, I reached out to him and asked: “Would you be a technical consultant? It wouldn’t mean you’re endorsing the film, but just so we can ask you technical questions.” The other thing he did that was really meaningful: Josh O’Connor, who plays Father Jud, had a couple of calls with Father Scott, where they talked for a few hours. They talked about life as a priest, but also about faith and Josh’s own experience of faith. I know that was tremendously helpful for Josh.

In working with Father Scott, was there anything that you had to adjust or change about the story?

There were some very specific technical things. The murder takes place during the Good Friday Mass, and the whole setting of the murder takes place during Holy Week. So it was a big educational process for me learning all the different services. At some point, I went down a whole side thing where I was going to have it take place during the Tenebrae service, which was, not growing up Catholic, [something] I didn’t know about. I started watching these services online, and I was just like, this is the most dramatic thing in the world.

There were lots of little things that I wanted to get right about it, but at the end of the day, it is also still a Hollywood murder mystery.

How do you hope Catholic audiences will respond to the film?

The short answer is I don’t know. As someone who has a very personal perspective on the church that I grew up in, the reason I felt some degree of confidence to even come at this topic was because I knew I was going to be coming into it with what I hoped was a generous spirit. The movie talks about faith in a way that, from my own experience, is very honest. At the same time, having made movies, it’s not like it succeeds or fails based on whether people feel the way you wanted them to about it. You’re making a piece of art and putting it out there, and it’s gonna be reacted to in ways you never could have expected. That’s the beautiful thing about it; that’s what it’s for. I don’t want to have people just echo my own views back to me. I want to hear what they think, people who love it and connect to it, people who don’t and bounce off it in different ways. I think that’s what good art does, and that’s kind of the whole purpose of delving into yourself and self-interrogating and going to those personal places: to create something that resonates with people.

This film is a powerful depiction of how different types of religious leaders can affect their followers. We see both a really positive vision of that in Father Jud and a much darker vision in Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin). Why were you interested in exploring that theme?

Sadly, I didn’t know anyone exactly like Father Jud, and thankfully, I didn’t know anyone exactly like Monsignor Wicks. But they both represent a cloud of very real experiences that I had growing up in the church. For me, it comes down to a very fundamental thing: as Father Jud says, this [opens his arms] versus this [raises fists like a boxer]. It’s Father Jud’s selflessness of service and loving your enemy—that basic, basic thing, which is the hardest thing in the world to do—versus Wicks, who is all about “us against them” and speaks in the language of war and talks about being persecuted and building the walls of the fortress in spiritual warfare. [Those were] two opposing poles that I very much experienced from my life in the church, so to create a movie where I have these two things collide and work through it for myself through that collision, that was the goal.

One of my favorite scenes is when Father Jud is on the phone with a receptionist, Louise (Bridget Everett). It starts off as a funny scene, but then he realizes that she needs him to minister to her as a pastor. It’s a really beautiful, really profound moment that, to me, embodies what a priest should be. Could you tell me a little about the inspiration for that scene?

That actually came out of that dinner with the priests. They said: Look, during the day, we go to the grocery store, we’re wearing the clerical collar. That means we’re just going about our day buying groceries, and a woman will come up and start sobbing to us because she has a sick relative. Or someone will come up and get in our face and start screaming at us. And that is something that I’d never really thought of, but it struck me, the notion that it’s truly a life of service, and that there’s never a switch that turns off. 

Jud, at that point in the movie, has been pulled into a version of the gamified us-against-them dynamic of Blanc’s murder mystery solving. It’s us against this group of suspects, and we’re going to find the guilty one, and we’re going to bring them to justice. And Jud—just like us, because we’re in the middle of a murder mystery movie—has been swept up in that. But then having him remember: “Wait a minute, this is the opposite of what I’m here to do.” That was the origin of that moment. And Josh O’Connor and Bridget Everett, I think they did such a beautiful job of making it feel honest.

The “Knives Out” movies wear their mystery influences on their sleeves. For this film, did you look to any of the Catholic whodunnits, like G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown series or Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, for inspiration?

I reread all of the Father Brown mysteries. It was a huge, huge influence in many ways. The essential thing about Father Brown is that he’s a great detective not because he understands the divine or the holy. He’s a great detective for the same reason he’s a great priest: because he understands the human and the sinful, and he has empathy for it. Chesterton is such a great writer, and beyond the Father Brown mysteries, I’ve read his essays, I delved back into some of his theological writing and some of his novels—he’s one of my favorite authors. But the Father Brown mysteries specifically were a huge, huge influence on this movie.

John Dougherty is the director of mission and ministry at St. Joseph’s Preparatory School in Philadelphia, Pa.