by Edward Gross
The challenge of doing Star Trek, despite the fact that it existed before Star Wars, is that we were clearly in the shadow of what George Lucas has done. The key to me was to not ever try to outdo them, because it’s a no-win situation. Those movies are so extraordinarily rendered that it felt to me that the key to Star Trek was to go from the inside out. Be as true to the characters as possible, be as real and as emotional and as exciting as possible, and not be distracted by the specter of all that the Star Wars films accomplished.
KATHLEEN KENNEDY
There is an aspect of that which is really important for directors who step into this kind of storytelling. You do want it to feel authentic and genuine, and that is very much the way that we’ve looked for directors—[though] I wouldn’t say it has to be 100 percent absence of cynicism. I think with someone like J.J., I also felt that his sense of humor is so great, and I think that’s a really important ingredient in Star Wars movies. They’ve always had a buoyancy and a lightness to them that makes them fun and purely entertaining. That was a very important characteristic and continues to be important with the directors we consider.
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Abrams admits that he was initially reluctant to take on the daunting task of relaunching Star Wars, and it was actually his wife who convinced him that it was the right decision.
J.J. ABRAMS
I said no partly because it was an incredibly daunting thing, partly because my family and I had this plan of what we were going to be doing that next year, partly because it felt like I’ve been doing sequels and things in the past. I just wanted to sort of break away from that. At the same time, you rarely get a chance to be involved in something that you would typically be an audience for. Katie, my wife, said, “If you want to do this and you don’t, you’re going to regret it.” It was really about being willing to take that leap and jump into the possibilities of what these characters are doing and where they are.
KATHLEEN KENNEDY
We used [all those conversations I had with George] as a stepping-stone to move into what would become new—new characters, new stories, and new ideas. And the art department is very important alongside that, because our concept artists that work inside Lucasfilm work very closely with the Story Group, which is headed by Kiri Hart, our director of development. For instance, with Episode VII, Rick Carter was heading a group of concept artists that was creating artwork that we would put in the room while we discussed story. As they were developing things, they would come in with artwork that sometimes would correlate with what we were specifically discussing, or, in some cases, they might just “blue sky” something and bring in artwork that inspired an idea, and sometimes that would take us in different directions as we were talking about this story. It was incredibly helpful to the screenwriters and to J.J. This all developed because there’s nothing better than being able to have images emerge from these ideas that we’re putting up on a whiteboard. For the directors that we brought in, especially for the new Star Wars stories, this has become incredibly important to our process. And it’s something the directors really love, because it’s a great opportunity to be able to sit in a room with people who know this world and its history so well.
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When the script for the film was first being developed, it was by Toy Story’s Michael Arndt, Simon Kinberg, and Lawrence Kasdan, the latter of whom, of course, famously cowrote the screenplays for The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi as well as Raiders of the Lost Ark for Lucas.
SIMON KINBERG
(executive producer, Star Wars: Rebels, the X-Men film series)
We went up to Skywalker Ranch and started talking, really in the vaguest of terms, what Episode VII could be. We had a whiteboard and some pens and it was just three writers in a room, like a writing staff of a TV show, because the story we were telling was the continued story of Star Wars. And these were a lot of pinch-yourself moments where you were writing up on the board names like Han and Luke … and then the fact I was doing it with Lawrence Kasdan. We would work all day and then we would go back at night and all have dinner together where Larry would tell stories about working on Empire and Jedi and Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Big Chill.
RAY MORTON
The original idea was for the four of them—Arndt, Kinberg, Kasdan, and Abrams—to work out a revised story, after which Arndt would write the screenplay. However, the committee approach made for slow going—there was more discussing than writing and Arndt wasn’t able to make much progress on the actual script. Disney had imposed a tight deadline on the project, insisting it be in theaters by December 2015, and the committee process was going too slowly to make this date, so in October 2013, Arndt and Kinberg left the project, and Abrams and Kasdan took over. Preproduction and casting on the film also began at this time. Abrams and Kasdan wrote all through this period and finished up shortly before production began in May 2014.
J.J. ABRAMS
It became clear that given the time frame and given the process, and the way the thing was going, that working with Larry in this way and cowriting the script with him was going to get where we needed to be and when we needed to be. Working with Larry Kasdan, especially on a Star Wars movie, is kind of unbeatable. Working with Michael Arndt was a wonderful experience and I couldn’t be a bigger fan of his or adore him more. He is a wonderful guy and was incredibly helpful in the process.
KATHLEEN KENNEDY
I was very excited about the story we had in place and thrilled to have Larry and J.J. working on the script. There are very few people who fundamentally understand the way a Star Wars story works like Larry, and it was nothing short of incredible to have him even more deeply involved in its return to the big screen. J.J., of course, is an incredible storyteller in his own right. Michael Arndt had done a terrific job bringing us to this point.
J.J. ABRAMS
There were times when certain images came in that we felt could be applicable to certain scenes. One of the great opportunities on this movie was working with Rick Carter and Darren Gilford, our production designers. I brought Rick into the story process at the very beginning, probably because I knew how inspiring Ralph McQuarrie’s designs were to George Lucas when he was working on the original films. Rather than write the script and then hand it off to a designer and ask him to design everything that was written, it felt like we had such a brain trust—and I should also say a “soul trust”—in Rick and Darren. Rick is such a dreamer and such a glorious connection maker, with a capability to hear what we were talking about, and then go work on something and bring it in and show us; it might have been a detail we would have forgotten or overlooked, but Rick visualized it and brought it to life.
LAWRENCE KASDAN
(cowriter, producer, The Force Awakens)
I was pleased that there would be new films and that there was a chance to capture some of the spirit of the original trilogy that I’d worked on. I thought there was an audience out there—my grandchildren, lots of original Star Wars people—and there always will be. It’s only good that we tried to do some more great ones.
J.J. ABRAMS
When Kathy Kennedy and Larry and I started talking about what this was, at the very beginning, the fundamental question was what do we want to feel, and what do we want people to feel when they come to this movie? That was really the beginning of the discussion. The answer was the kind of sense of discovery, exhilaration, surprise—the comedy that George Lucas put into Star Wars was the thing that made me love the movie. But when you look at all the things he got right, it’s impossible and stunning.
LAWRENCE KASDAN
J.J. and I jumped into the thing under a lot of time pressure, and we had fun. In fact, the first day that we started real work on it, we said we must have fun with this every day. It’s really a privilege, and you have to be very lucky to get to write the next Star Wars! So we didn’t really have fear. I think we had trepidation about fulfilling people’s expectations—that they’d be satisfied with wha
t we came out with. But we didn’t want them to know what we were going to come up with, and we wanted this … to be a fresh moment for as many people in the world who were interested in it. The only pressure is, can you do something that’s worth that much anticipation?
SIMON KINBERG
I thought J.J. was the perfect fit for this film. He went on record when he was working on Star Trek saying he was a bigger Star Wars fan than Star Trek fan, and he really is as big a Star Wars fan as anyone I’ve ever met, which is saying a lot.
GEORGE LUCAS
I’d consistently been impressed with J.J. as a filmmaker and storyteller. He was an ideal choice to direct the new Star Wars film and the legacy couldn’t have been in better hands.
MARK HAMILL
I have to admit I was a little suspicious when they said J.J. was directing. I was like, “Wait a minute, isn’t that the Star Trek guy?” Listen, I like Star Trek. I’m friends with Brent Spiner, who played Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and there’s no rivalry whatsoever, but I thought it just seemed odd. Not that I was predisposed to dislike him, I was just sort of cautious about it. But he’s a really personable guy. He’s really easy to talk to. He’s very inclusive in terms of listening to your ideas instead of being adamant it’s got to be his way. He’s lovable.
ANDY SERKIS
(actor, “Supreme Commander Snoke”)
J.J. was absolutely the right man for this, and bringing back Star Wars properly was, I’m sure, a huge objective. I know all this sensibility that I’ve witnessed was about doing exactly that. You know, I’ve grown up with Star Wars. I was a really big fan of the original films. A massive fan, and I never imagined in a million years that I’d be engaging with this. And it just came about so organically. J.J. and I met and there was just this real amazing vibe between us. He said, “I think you’d really fit well in this universe,” and I was like, “Yeah, yeah, I think I probably could.”
BEN BURTT
(sound designer, The Force Awakens)
J.J. represents the next generation of filmmakers from those that were making Star Wars when I started. When he was a teen, he was a fan of Star Wars, and a great deal of his love for movies came out of his reaction to that first Star Wars film. You feel that he’s already invested so many years in it, and would propel it forward in a new way. In other words, you’re having a fan who has grown up and developed tremendous directorial skills finding himself at the steering wheel to take the franchise into the next stage. I felt like I’m there watching history turn over from one era to another.
MATTHEW WOOD
(supervising sound editor, The Force Awakens)
Working with him, it was so obvious to me that J.J. and I have the same nostalgic love of that era. Now we have someone from that generation at the helm of the Star Wars franchise that I’ve known and worked on, so it’s a great circle. Just seeing what he did with Super 8 and capturing those moments, and knowing what was so special about that era, it speaks to a new generation of audience as well.
HARRISON FORD
(actor, “Han Solo”)
It helps a lot to have somebody that gives as much as J.J. gives to the whole enterprise. And this is beside the direction of the movie and the engineering of this monster into something, to what it is today. The human kindness that J.J. brings to the set every day is part of what makes the movie what it is.
KATHLEEN KENNEDY
It was really interesting watching J.J. and Larry Kasdan when they started to really break down the storytelling [of] the first Star Wars and realized just how simple and great it was—and how difficult that is to do. I think people come at the franchise with lots of different points of view as to why it means something to them. It all usually has something to do with filmmaking, storytelling, and the fact that George always tried to push technology. A lot of things that we take for granted today were created over the years inside of Star Wars.
J.J. ABRAMS
Frankly, taking this on is vaguely terrifying, because you just don’t know and you hope the fans will like what you’re doing. They deserve something great, and we just worked really hard to give it to them. And this is very much a tightrope walk for the movie itself. This had to be new and it had to be a story that fans have not seen before. At the same time, it’s Star Wars and you have to allow it to be inheriting what it’s been. The trick is to be forward-thinking, but embrace everything that was built before us.
SIMON KINBERG
Nobody wants to do karaoke. Those movies exist. They’re essentially perfect films. Nobody wants to repeat them, so I think—and this is true with adapting X-Men or Sherlock Holmes when I worked on that—you want to be true to the essence of the source material, but you also want to be original and give people something that they haven’t experienced before and that they can’t experience by just reading the comics or watching the original Star Wars films. That is absolutely the trickiest part of any of this: being reverent, but also giving yourself license to be a little irreverent sometimes, too.
MARK HAMILL
After I’d read the script, I saw some parallels between Luke’s story and Rey’s. I thought, “Well, she’s been living in the desert sort of aimlessly,” and I saw the parallels with my character and so forth. But heritage is so important in the Star Wars films. At the time we didn’t realize how big Vader as the father was. When Return of the Jedi came along, because George had always made it seem like he had all these things mapped out in his head, when I read that Luke and Leia were long-separated twins, I said, “Wait a minute, is he trying to top Vader? If that’s the case, then let’s go for broke. Let’s have them unmask Boba Fett and it’s my long-lost mother!”
J.J. ABRAMS
While The Force Awakens features the return of Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher as, respectively, Luke, Han, and Leia, it also heralds the arrival into the franchise of Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron, Daisy Ridley as Rey, and John Boyega as Finn, each of whom entered Star Wars fandom in their own way. Beyond them, there was Adam Driver as the villainous Kylo Ren and Andy Serkis (Gollum from the Lord of the Rings film series) as Supreme Commander Snoke.
MARK HAMILL
People wondered if we tried to offer any suggestions to the new cast, but there’s no way you can really describe it to them. First of all, I went to the table read and was just knocked out at how good they are. They’re just wonderful. If anything, I should be asking them for advice, but in terms of how your life is going to change, I’m sure they had an inkling, because there was something to base it on. We discovered it as it happened. At that table read, every person had a specific place to sit. It’s not like we just wandered in and sat down. You sit here, you sit here, you sit here, and so forth. So I was across from Harrison and Carrie and Daisy Ridley was right between them. And I thought, “See, now people are going to start reading things into it,” because when they saw the photograph, they said, “Well, she’s got to be the daughter of Han and Leia, because look at where she’s sitting.”
KATHLEEN KENNEDY
That first reading was pretty amazing. We didn’t quite realize until we all sat down to start the read-through that many of the legacy cast had not seen each other in years. There was that element, and there were all the new cast members. Then everybody got settled down, got their scripts out, and stopped taking pictures of one another. Mark Hamill had agreed to read the entire script out loud for everybody, and about five minutes into it, J.J. had to actually stop the read-through to say, “Does everybody realize what’s happening here?” It was just kind of incredible. It was one of those moments where you realize it’s a little slice of history happening in real-time.
OSCAR ISAAC
(actor, “Poe Dameron”)
The first movie I saw in the theater was Return of the Jedi. For me, that moment when Darth Vader’s helmet comes off and you see a fat, sad little man underneath, was incredibly traumatizing and you just never forget that moment. But it was interesting, because I was in my ho
tel room waiting to find out if I had been cast, and if I needed to stay for that reading—that iconic picture everyone saw. When I finally got the call that I was indeed officially going to play Poe Dameron, I was so excited/nervous. But I blasted the Star Wars theme as loud as I could, grabbed my shampoo bottle, and started swinging it around like a lightsaber and was like, “I can do this!” That’s how I dealt with the nerves.
JOHN BOYEGA
(actor, “Finn”)
I was actually exposed to the merchandise before the movie, so I had all the action figures, toys, and bedspread, and then I watched the prequels and then the originals after. I mean, with me the excitement just turns into absolute nerve, and I was scared to tell my parents that I got the part of Finn in Star Wars in case they didn’t believe me. I waited until that cast photo was released before I told my parents. All that time my dad saw me leaving to go into this place, and I was reading all these red sides, and he’s like, “What is going on.” I just told him I was filming 24.
