A not-very long time ago (2011), in a galaxy not very far, far away (ours)... It is a dark time for Star Wars. The planet-destroying film franchise that spawned a galaxy-sized global fan base and a multi-billion-pound empire of toys, games, lunchboxes and spin-offs has fallen into darkness. Despite the prequel trilogy being a $2.5 billion (£1.63bn) box office hit, the fan backlash -- spiteful of Jar Jar Binks's bumbling, godawful senate politics and the sheer lameness of midi-chlorians -- turned a rightly disheartened Lucas into little more than the subject of Family Guy parodies.
But then: a new hope! In October 2012, George Lucas retired and sold Lucasfilm -- and with it the rights to Star Wars -- to Disney for $4 billion. And, like Anakin Skywalker's lightsaber, the franchise was passed on to two new wards: producer and new Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and director J.J. Abrams.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which opens in the UK on December 17, will kick off not just a third Star Wars trilogy, but a vast, Marvel-style cinematic universe. Movies confirmed so far: 2016's Rogue One and an as-yet-untitled Han Solo movie due in 2018. Star Wars isn't just back, it's about to be all consuming. (That's no moon -- it's Disney's marketing budget.)
Here's what we know: The Force Awakens takes place 30 years after the original trilogy. The original cast -- Harrison Ford (Han Solo), Carrie Fisher (Leia Organa), Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker -- at least, we think), Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca) -- are all back. They're joined by a cantina-ful of some of Hollywood's brightest young stars: Daisy Ridley as heroine Rey, John Boyega as stormtrooper Finn, and Oscar Isaac as X-wing pilot Poe Dameron. Then there's Adam Driver as the big bad, Darth Vader-like, crossguard-lightsaber-wielding Kylo Ren. (Not to mention a supporting cast including Andy Serkis, Gwendoline Christie, Lupita Nyong'o, Domhnall Gleeson and Max von Sydow.)
And finally there's Abrams, a lifelong Star Wars nerd who, after reinventing Star Trek, is now tasked with directing one of the most discussed new films of all time. To do so, he -- alongside a cast of producers and The Empire Strikes Back writer Lawrence Kasdan -- has gone back to what made Star Wars great, embracing physical sets, shooting on 35mm film and, naturally, bringing back composer John Williams to create a score worthy of the original.
To kick off WIRED'sStar Warsspecial, we sat down with Abrams in Los Angeles to talk about the most difficult job in film-making. Dim the lights. Roll titles. Trumpets blare.Star Warsis back.
WIRED: First, the spoilers. You've been very clear -- including an essay in US WIRED -- about the importance of mystery in storytelling. But with Star Wars, not only does the internet demand a stream of news, but you've got toys, novels and tie-ins all giving details about the film away.
J.J. Abrams: Sure. It's crazy.
As someone who is quite protective of secrets, how has that been for you?
It's in my nature to keep things as quiet as possible. When I was a kid, it was very hard to even get information about movies, and if you did you had to actively go and seek it out. Now we are force-fed stuff we might not even want to know.
I also realise I am learning a lot, and I don't have to keep as much secret as I might want to. So for me, this has been partly an act of education and compromise: how do we show more that I might want to, but not so much that we ruin the experience? I've got to tell you, I'm incredibly grateful to [Disney CEO] Bob Iger and [Disney chairman] Alan Horn, not only for the experience of making this movie, but because they don't want to reveal much either. I was really afraid that I would be in the situation with a studio that was dying to put it out there, and do what I can't stand, which is make trailers that tell you everything, then you're literally watching the movie to fill in the blanks.
George Lucas is a very visual director -- he talks about some of his films being visual tone poems. When you came to The Force Awakens, did you have certain visuals, such as the crashed Star Destroyer, in mind?
Some of the earliest inspirations came out of conversations with Larry Kasdan, [producer] Bryan Burk, [writer] Michael Arndt, Kathy Kennedy, [producer] Michelle Rejwan and [production designer] Rick Carter. We would all sit around and talk about things that we were interested in seeing -- there was no story in place.
Quickly, certain things started popping up. Sometimes it was imagery, sometimes it was a character, sometimes it was a situational thing. The idea of someone who found themselves in a desperate situation wearing a stormtrooper outfit. Was he a spy? Was he a defector? We didn't know at first, but there were images that started to feel like, "Oh, come on, that's hard to deny." The idea of a battlefield wasteland, where there had been a titanic battle between the Empire and the Rebellion. Whether they would end up in this movie or not, we didn't know.
How did the process for this vary from your other films?
It's always the same process, even if it's a Star Wars movie -- you find yourself attracted to certain ideas, certain feelings, things that are disparate and disconnected. The leap of faith that we all took was that these would start to assemble. Over time, certain moments that had inspired us enormously became secondary and tertiary to the plot. And often we'd forget that a moment started out as "Wouldn't it be incredible if?" What was fun, sometimes when we were shooting -- and even now when we're looking at visual effects reviews -- a moment that is part of a much larger piece, you suddenly see it and you think, "Oh my god, that's so cool!" and you remember that's what inspired the scene to begin with.
One of the most memorable things about the first Star Wars trilogy was the used universe: that lived-in feel that fired so many imaginations. For this film, the universe has changed. Fans are going to analyse every little detail and try and connect it to the earlier films. How much attention do you have to pay to those details?
What you're describing is true, both in what you see, and also in the history of the characters. Everything that they are is standing on the shoulders of what has come before it. And it's not just how those things got there -- a Star Destroyer crashed in the desert -- but things like: what's the legacy of Darth Vader? We were in the room when his mask came off, but there were only two people in that space that we know of when he saved his son. Who reported that? Is he seen as something to resent, or as a martyr? Is he something to aspire to? That idea of what has come before, and how has it decayed or been distorted. The fascinating thing for me was: what has transpired between what we know, and what is now?
There's a young generation of characters in this movie who have not seen Star Wars. By that I mean they may live in a place that resembles it, they may have some existing knowledge of it -- but they've never seen it. And that idea of: what about the young characters who find themselves in the middle of a Star Wars adventure? Characters who aren't prepared for it, but find themselves as absolutely desperate as any Star Wars character -- and desperation for me is the key quality that every character in Star Wars has. That, for me, was a thrilling way in.
It's interesting you mention desperation. You don't hear people say a lot about it, but one of the key aspects of the original films is comedy.
Of course! What's funnier than desperation? I mean, C-3PO might be the most desperate character in the movie. Han Solo is desperate to make money. Luke's desperate to get the fuck off that farm. Leia's desperate to get the plans to her father. Vader's desperate to get the plans back from the Rebellion -- everyone is desperate. And it is the desperation that makes for some of the funniest moments in the movie. Han accepting this job because he's desperate to pay back Jabba? That's perfect comedy. Then their desperation when they're all together in the middle of that trash compactor? It is a series of absolutely extreme, ridiculous, desperate moments. But I will say, when I get asked again and again what is the fundamental element to Star Wars, my answer is always that it is a movie that had such incredible humour. The heart of that movie was so remarkable. Yes, the music was incredible, yes the visuals were amazing, yes the technology was incredible. Everything that George did right was winning the lottery -- it's an impossibility, the odds that he succeeded in that. But the humour, that was the way in.
You can't talk about Star Wars without talking about the music. What was it like for you, a lifelong John Williams fan, to hear him playing you the soundtrack for the first time?
Unbelievable. I mean, unbelievable. There's John Williams playing me music on the piano, in his house, and I'm extrapolating it into what it's going to be when a 110-piece orchestra is going to be playing it. It's like seeing those old Abbey Road behind-the-scenes films of Paul McCartney playing a song to George Martin for the first time, and he's like playing the guitar but making a French horn noise, and you're like, "Oh my god, this moment is something historic." To say mind-blowing doesn't even touch the impossibility of it. Especially given that I grew up listening to his music, instead of downloading or watching DVDs or VHS tapes, because none of those things existed when I was a kid.
A New Hope was, technologically, one of the most groundbreaking films of all time. But on The Force Awakens you've gone back to 35mm film and practical effects. How do you balance capturing the feel of the original trilogy while keeping that legacy of pushing boundaries?
The thing about this movie, going in, is that I knew there were going to be thousands of computer-generated [CG] shots in the film. The work that Industrial Light & Magic is doing, that Roger Guyett our special effects supervisor, is doing, is groundbreaking -- they're using simulations and all sorts of techniques that haven't been done before, partly because we did do as much as we could without CG.
Why's that?
We desperately wanted there to be a standard of reality and authenticity, so that everything that was CG had something to adhere to and a standard that it needed to achieve. The inspiration was that feeling I had, that Kathy had, Larry Kasdan had, watching those original films. When you are in the middle of Tattooine, and you're looking out at the binary sunset, the amazing thing was yeah, they put in another setting sun there, but there is no question that is an actual human being standing in an actual desert location. When you're on the frozen planet of Hoth, when you're in the forest of Endor -- again and again and again, there were examples of physical, tangible reality.
The brilliance of what George did was in part using real-scale so judiciously that you would then buy things that were illusions. He was the ultimate magician in being able to know exactly where your eye was looking when he would palm the coin and make you believe it was in the other hand.
What does that then give you as a film-maker, when you're on set?
It was enormously valuable for the actors, for the camera, for the look of the movie. And it allowed us to create characters and sets and locations and props and explosions and things that added a level of authenticity that is not always quantifiable, but without question is hugely important. So, for example: if you look at the first movie, they didn't have lightsabers that lit up -- so there's no interactive lighting, there wouldn't be. Does it mean those scenes aren't among the greatest scenes ever filmed? No. But what an amazing thing to see our prop department created these ridiculously powerful lightsaber props that would allow us to do scenes where there was interactive lighting. And what that did was allow us to do things we probably never could have anticipated, and we couldn't have even replicated in CG, where you literally can see the light not just on the characters' clothes and on their faces, but in their eyes. It's just an amazing thing to see. Small detail. Does it make a scene good? No. But is it a wonderful piece of reality to have on your side? Yes.
We had the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon outdoors on a gimbal. We didn't have to do it outdoors, or on a gimbal. The only reason we did that was we knew you can't fake sunlight. It's one thing to have a big BB light on a dolly moving back and forth, it's another to have actual sunlight. When you see the sequence of Daisy Ridley in that cockpit, the light that is interacting with her is sunlight -- and it just simply looks better.
When we're outside in the forest in Wales; when we're on ice in Iceland; in Skellig; even in Pinewood Studios, when we built exterior sets, we're actually at scale outdoors. The scene where you see the rally of the First Order -- we could have shot that inside somewhere, but we shot it outdoors with enormous scope and crazy big cranes. We filled in the vast majority of the characters and extended the set [with CG], but it was amazing how much was physical and real. We had hundreds of stormtroopers. We didn't have 100,000, but we had enough to give the movie a reality.
Being able to use CG to remove things such as puppeteers, arms and controls and strings and legs of people that were under creatures, instead of adding things, was priceless. We were in a desert in Abu Dhabi with five guys inside a Hopabor costume -- in between takes they would shove an air conditioning unit up its ass to cool the guys down so they didn't die in 50°C heat. But you had this physical, tangible creature right there that John Boyega could interact with. Could it have worked otherwise? Of course. We've all seen movies that have done that. But by making it physical and real, I would argue it made that scene better. None of this makes it a good movie, but some of it can prevent it from being a bad one.
As a lifelong Star Wars fan, you've got this cast of legends -- Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill -- but also a young cast. How do you direct them without treating them differently?
It's a great question. The key to doing this movie, for me -- and I think I share this exact sentiment with everyone else in the crew -- was to acknowledge, embrace and appreciate your fandom, and then put it in your pocket. I couldn't be on the set and be a fanboy. I needed to be a director. Harrison, Carrie, Mark, Anthony [Daniels], Peter -- none of the original actors wanted a fanboy to work with. They needed someone who would give them criticism, feedback, notes, ideas. So while there were moments -- almost every day -- where I would find myself gasping that it was happening, I would have to suppress that and do the job required, because no one, and certainly not the movie, would benefit from my being blinded by the love of Star Wars.
There were nights where I would go to bed at night and just think, "Holy shit, we shot a chase sequence in the Millennium Falcon today." But I was holding my breath all day because I couldn't let myself bathe in the impossibility of what we were doing. The young cast was so helpful, because as brilliant as they are -- and they fucking are -- they were game as hell to do the best possible job. And I think they were as inspired by the original cast as the original cast were inspired the young cast.
You won't be directing Episode VIII, but you will be executive producing.
Eight and nine, yep.
How does it feel to be giving that up, while also knowing that this will follow you around forever? You're always going to be the guy that brought back Star Wars.
I hope people like what they see. I hope it's something that I won't regret. But I also find a kind of comfort with [Looper director] Rian Johnson taking over on the next movie. I'm one of a handful of people to have carried this burden. It's a wonderful and amazing burden, but it's still a challenge to do something worthy of what people deserve. So I'm very grateful for Rian and now Colin [Trevorrow, director of Jurassic World), who will direct Episode IX] coming on board.
It's been George for a long time. And it's only been George. And I think now, with Kathy running Lucasfilm, it's going to be a big group of people -- and any interest people have with my involvement will soon fade, and it will become someone else in this chair.
Oliver Frankin-Wallis is assistant editor at WIRED, and edits the Play section
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
