Rian Johnson's dreams came true - and then so did his nightmares. In 2014, Johnson was invited to join the small, slowly growing group (so far, all men) to write and direct his very own Star Wars movie. But then he gave the first draft of his script for The Last Jedi to his childhood hero, Mark Hamill, and said childhood hero - as quoted in Vanity Fair earlier this year - fundamentally disagreed with every choice he had made for Luke Skywalker.
Johnson laughs about it now, but at the time, "it was absolutely terrifying! It didn't feel good," he says. "But it ended up being healthy because I had to put my ego aside and step back. I had to think, 'OK, this character has been part of Mark's identity in many complicated ways for the past 40 years.' The notion that some young asshole is going to come along, drop a script in his lap and say, 'And now it's this' and he would say, 'Yep, makes perfect sense to me, let's do it!' is kind of fanciful. It was a process."
Read more: Kathleen Kennedy made your favourite childhood films. Now she's reinventing Star Wars
The past versus the future - such is the conflict of the third Star Wars trilogy. In 2015, J.J. Abrams' The Force Awakens bridged the ages by taking the heart of A New Hope and remixing it for a modern age; come for Han, Luke and Leia, stay for Rey, Finn and Poe. But now it's down to Johnson - the baby-faced 43-year-old Californian best known for the dark and brooding Brick and time-travel thriller Looper - to pilot the franchise into uncharted space. "All these movies, in some way, rhyme with each other," he says. "But I am almost allergic to nostalgic callbacks for the sake of callbacks. [The Last Jedi] feels connected to the past, but also like it's moving forwards… We start pushing these characters and seeing what they can take."
Kathleen Kennedy, the president of Lucasfilm [see WIRED 01.17], had her eye on Johnson for a while. She was said to like his sophisticated storytelling, his command of the camera, everything that marked him out as an indie auteur. But Johnson wasn't interested in making "my version of a Star Wars movie", he says. "I was just thinking, 'How do I make a good Star Wars movie?'"
From the beginning, he was given a "terrifying amount of freedom". He moved to San Francisco for six weeks for guidance from Lucasfilm's story team, who he would meet with regularly for "validation… for permission to go to weird places". What they worked out exactly is top secret, but the gist is a middle chapter with "the sensibilities of The Empire Strikes Back baked into it", and "the goofy element" of Return of the Jedi.
It's a story driven, primarily, by the ending of The Force Awakens: by the Jedi training of Daisy Ridley's Rey, and the apparently controversial question not of where, but who is Luke Skywalker? But The Last Jedi also features many of Johnson's own inventions. These include the shady DJ, played by Benicio Del Toro; a major new hero called Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran), a maintenance worker for the Resistance; the glamorous casino city of Canto Bight, Star Wars' very own Monte Carlo; Porgs, the cute definitely-not-Ewoks that inhabit Luke's exile planet of Ahch-To; and Laura Dern's Vice Admiral Holdo, an important figure in the Resistance and key to the storyline of Princess Leia, who takes on a poignancy after the death of Carrie Fisher in December 2016. "She's beautiful in so many ways in this movie," Johnson says. "I wish she could see it. I'm sure she'd find something to give me hell about! But I think mostly she would love it."
Such freedom to innovate may sound surprising. Over the past few years, Lucasfilm has developed a reputation for eating up independent film-makers and spitting them out. In 2015, Josh Trank was fired as the prospective director for Rogue One; while earlier this year, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, The LEGO Movie duo hired for the Han Solo spin-off, were sensationally fired in favour of Ron Howard. Finally, in September, there was the news that Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow had departed Episode IX, with J.J. Abrams being brought back to replace him. And yet Johnson has survived, relatively unscathed and drama-free. Not that he could - or would - tell you why.
"Other people's film sets are like other people's marriages," he says. "If you're on the outside looking in and think you know what's going on, you're probably wrong. Speaking for myself, I wasn't in any of those processes. I know the process I was in and I know my experience was the exact opposite of that characterisation. I was protected and felt like creatively I was in a safe space. There were times during the making of this movie where I'd say, 'God, it feels like we're making Looper or Brick even'. It would feel like we were making an indie movie, just with lightsabers."
Star Wars: The Last Jedi is released on December 15
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
