‘Glass Onion’ Production Designer On How He Avoided Making the Movie “Fugly”

Rick Heinrichs loves to solve puzzles. He’s a big fan of the New York Times crossword, though not, he rushes to clarify, in the same way as Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery writer-director Rian Johnson.

“I would never go head-to-head with him,” Heinrichs, the production designer for Glass Onion, tells Vanity Fair. “I have actually done one with him. We were waiting at an airport somewhere to go off to maybe Ireland or something like that, and he was doing the New York Times crossword, and also he does it even if he’s abroad. He gets it in print. And he uses a pen…. That’s just too much commitment for me. I can’t handle that.”

However, as anyone who has seen the twisty-turny Glass Onion can attest, Heinrichs is not one to shy away from a challenge. “I don’t like to like start slow and work my way up to the hard stuff,” he says. “I like to start with the hard stuff.” And in this intricate movie, there was a lot of hard stuff.

Start with, for example, the multilayered puzzle box that introduces the movie’s mystery. Or how about the art-stuffed atrium of billionaire Miles Bron’s (Edward Norton) house, or the glass onion itself, the massive refractory dome that houses Bron’s office, as well as the heart of the movie’s mystery.

Heinrichs, who previously worked with Johnson on Star Wars: The Last Jedi, says that his inspiration for the futuristic, very man-made glass onion was in fact organic. It was…an actual onion. Though he researched architectural onion domes, he didn’t quite find what he was looking for there.

“I just sort of went back to the drawing board, if you will, or the cutting board, and literally took an onion and sliced it up,” Heinrichs says. “Pull the skin off it, and a naked onion is a beautiful thing. It’s got that sort of see-through light quality to it.”

It reflects the intrinsic intricacy of the film, which is, shall we say, multilayered. Like an onion.

The puzzle box that serves as an invitation to Bron’s “disruptors” is also a veiled overview of the film’s plot: After solving a series of puzzles, the whole thing spins and resets, presenting the solver with a whole new set of problems, just when they thought they’d gotten to the center of it.

“There is no box that can do this,” Heinrichs says. Instead, he had to devise different ways the puzzles—Magic Eye illusions, codes, and more—could lead to a box opening in some way, then meld practical builds with animated transitions to make the cipher look as realistic as possible. “Everything was bespoke.”

He credits his prior experience working with Johnson, who tends to build teams of repeat collaborators, in helping him develop a shorthand, streamlining a process that was only made more complicated by shooting in the midst of COVID. That doesn’t mean things didn’t get a little fugly every now and then, though.

“He’s one of the nicest people you could ever work with,” Heinrichs says of Johnson. “He would never make you ever feel belittled by anything. But on the other hand, you know, he will tell you if what you’re showing him is fugly or not. That was one of my favorite phrases. I got a ton of fugly designs. You have to get through all the fugly designs to get to the good stuff. He’s got really good taste in the people that he likes to work with. Obviously, apart from me.”

Speaking of taste, the film makes a strong point that that’s one thing that money can’t buy, showcased most pointedly in the atrium set where much of the action takes place. Miles has jammed the expansive room with art, including the Mona Lisa, on loan from, as he pronounced it, the “Loov-ruh.”