Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  And just to add to that, what Rian spoke to, that he does so beautifully, was describing the intimacy of discovering each character’s conflict, which is just extraordinary. Given the enormity of the cast, that he gave us that in the experience of the workplace, and it was shocking, and Oscar and I always talked about just how stunned we were that we were in such a massive environment and did feel like we were making an indie movie. You were always encouraged to try things and explore character, and explore this duality of the light and the dark within characters, the movie speaks to so beautifully. Not just that there are alternative universes, but that that lies within, which seems to be the place where George Lucas first started the mythology. It’s just so brilliant.

  RIAN JOHNSON

  One of the things I was the most afraid of coming into the writing process was that I’m a very slow writer. I will take years just thinking about something and working it out. And I knew I couldn’t do that with this movie. I was afraid I would just go into a writer’s hole and be on page three of the script with a month to go. So I moved up to San Francisco for a few months to write and come up with a story. A few times a week I would come in to Lucasfilm, sit down with the wonderful folks in the Story Group—Kiri Hart and her whole team—and I would just put everything up on the whiteboard that I was thinking of. And we would just talk through it. That wasn’t the writing process as we weren’t working out the story in the room, but just being able to come in and bounce stuff off of everyone and ask if it feels right to them was helpful. It made the whole writing process feel like collaborative play. That took a lot of pressure off. We would also watch dailies that were coming in from Episode VII. At that point, it was just the script and the dailies we were seeing. It was probably really healthy in terms of thinking about where the story goes next; it was entirely just based on our reactions to it, as opposed to based on the phenomenon that it would become or the cultural reaction to it. It was just a very personal idea of what do we connect with about these characters, where did they go next. And what would be the hardest thing for each of them to come up against? And once I got to a place where I had something for each one of them that made sense, I started drawing it out into a story. So, it’s kind of like eating an elephant. You just do it one bite at a time.

  * * *

  After consulting with Abrams, Johnson began writing his screenplay. His primary mission was to pick up the many loose threads Abrams had left dangling in The Force Awakens and weave them into an exciting continuation. What makes it especially interesting is that one of the first big creative choices Johnson made was to jettison most of those threads.

  RIAN JOHNSON

  I knew that the bigness and the epic sense and all of that would sort itself out. I knew that would just naturally happen, because once we started playing with these toys, we came up with cool battles and cool stuff. What I needed to really work about it were the characters and the story. That was really the starting point of the whole thing. So I was never really worried about how we were going to make this big and cool. I was just worried about how are we going to develop these characters. Because it’s the middle chapter of a trilogy, this is the one where we have to slow down a little and dig into everybody a little bit more. That’s really where I put most of the focus. Then the rest of it was really like playing with a toy set.

  RAY MORTON

  (senior editor, Script magazine)

  At the conclusion of The Force Awakens, Finn is placed into medical stasis after falling into a coma and we are left wondering if he will ever wake up and, if he does, how will he be changed or altered by his experience. Johnson develops none of this—at the start of his script, Finn just nonchalantly wakes up from his coma and carries on as if nothing happened. TFA ends with an earnest Rey dramatically holding Luke’s lightsaber out to him as Luke contemplates whether or not to take it. We are left wondering if he will and, if he does, what will happen, with us fully expecting that if he does, it will signify his intention to return to fight the good fight. In Johnson’s script, Luke accepts the saber and then—blithely tosses it away.

  Much is made in TFA of Kylo Ren’s desire to model himself after Darth Vader, to the point where he wears a Vader-like mask that he has no actual need for—a notion I thought was ridiculous, but that the film took very seriously. Apparently, Johnson felt as I do, because he has Supreme Leader Snoke ridicule Kylo for wearing such a silly thing and tells him to get rid of it, after which he has Kylo smash it to pieces. Also, TFA spends a great deal of time building Snoke up as the new trilogy’s big bad. Johnson has Kylo kill him off in the middle of the movie. TFA makes much of the mystery of who Rey’s parents are, leading us to expect that there will be a big revelation of some sort, with most betting that her great Force-sensitivity would mean she was the offspring of either Luke or Leia. In Johnson’s script, Rey’s parents are dismissed as nobodies.

  * * *

  The almost off-handed way in which Johnson disposes of these significant plot points—and how his doing so did not have a major impact on the overall narrative—makes it clear that there was no master plan for this new trilogy. No overall story that Disney or Lucasfilm or the films’ creators were trying to tell. They were literally making it up as they went along. Which is rather extraordinary. When George Lucas decided to transform Star Wars into a trilogy, he did not have all of the individual details for the two subsequent films worked out, but he knew basically where the story was headed and how it was going to end. The same was true when he made the prequel trilogy. This was not the case with the creators of the sequels. In making The Force Awakens, it seems that J.J. Abrams’s goal was to craft a solid jumping-off point for a saga without knowing just what that saga was to be. This freed Johnson up to take the story off into new directions of his own, and that he did. In writing his screenplay, Johnson made a concerted effort to do something new and different with the material, rather than repeat the beats of the original trilogy’s greatest hits as Abrams had done. The result was the smartest, most thoughtful, and most coherent narrative in the new trilogy.

  RAY MORTON

  And the best movie. In addition to having the strongest story, The Last Jedi is the best designed, shot, and edited of the three Star Wars sequels. It’s also the most entertaining—there’s a lot of well-crafted action in the film, as well as a generous helping of good humor. Unlike The Force Awakens, which is mostly just a lot of frantic running around, The Last Jedi contains several truly memorable sequences, including Leia’s Force-powered flight through space; the ramming of the Dreadnought starship; Rey and Kylo’s battle with Snoke’s guards in the Supreme Leader’s throne room; and Luke’s showdown with Ren in the finale on the salt planet Crait. However, just because The Last Jedi is the best of the sequels and contains so many strong elements, doesn’t make it a satisfying film. The movie has a lot of problems—a lot of problems. And they begin with Luke Skywalker.

  In The Last Jedi, Luke is depicted as an embittered exile who ran away to a remote island when one of his pupils went bad. Granted, it was Abrams who developed this backstory for Luke and put him on that island, but Johnson took these not-so-hot ideas and ran with them. In Johnson’s script, we learn that the pupil who went bad was his own nephew, Ben Solo. Not only that, but one of the main reasons Ben turned evil was because Luke tried to kill him. The script explains that Luke became aware that Snoke was reaching out to Ben and attempting to corrupt him. (Again—who is Snoke? How is he aware of Ben? Explanations would have been so helpful.) Sensing Ben would go bad, Luke decided to kill him. Although Luke only entertained this murderous notion for a brief moment, it was long enough for Ben to discern his intention and strike back. Angry and hurt, Ben ran away, apprenticed himself to Snoke, and became Kylo Ren. All of this caused Luke to become so angry at himself and at the Jedi (I’m not sure how any of this is the Jedi’s fault, but whatever) that he turned his back on the galaxy and went into hiding.

  * * *

  So, The Last Jedi tells us tha
t the virtuous, idealistic farm boy, who became a Jedi and whose unwavering faith in his fallen father’s innate goodness was so strong that it redeemed his dad from the dark side, has lost his faith, has become an attempted murderer, and created the third-worst villain ever in the history of the galaxy. Instead of sticking around to help save the galaxy from the monster he created, Luke abandoned his responsibilities and his civilization and ran away to become a bitter hermit who hates the tradition he once embraced and still refuses to help right his wrong even after millions have died and the galaxy is teetering on the edge of eternal darkness.

  RAY MORTON

  This is not the Luke we came to know in the original trilogy, nor is it a logical development of Luke’s character. For some, including Mark Hamill, it was a betrayal of that character. Even if you don’t feel that strongly about it, it is certainly a strangely sour and unpersuasive twist given to a character who neither needed it nor deserved it. And it only reinforces the deeply flawed core premise of the entire sequel trilogy—that the heroes of the original trilogy were all failures. Johnson does give Luke one gloriously heroic moment when he finally emerges from exile to face off against Kylo with an awesome display of Jedi power. This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for since Luke took his first step into a larger world way back in 1977—the moment when Luke Skywalker finally becomes the biggest, most incredible, most badass Jedi of all time. And it’s a really great sequence until …

  … Johnson pulls the rug out from Luke and all of us by revealing that it’s all just a trick. Luke hasn’t come out of exile—he’s still hiding out on his craggy Irish island. And he isn’t using his awesome Jedi powers, he’s just using the Force to project an imaginary display of Jedi powers. So, it’s all a joke—a joke that accomplishes nothing except to distract Ren for a few minutes. And then what does Luke do for a follow-up? He dies (I’m still not sure why projecting an image of himself takes so much out of Luke that it kills him, but apparently it does). It’s not clear what dramatic point Luke’s death is supposed to make or what dramatic purpose it is supposed to serve. But die Luke does—not as a hero, but hiding behind an imaginary image of one. Mark Hamill does a fine job of interpreting this material, but it was a depressing and wrong way to go with the character and it’s a fatal flaw in the film.

  MARK HAMILL

  I don’t think any line in the script epitomized my reaction more than “This is not going to go the way you think.” And Rian pushed me out of my comfort zone, as if I weren’t as intimidated and terrified to begin with, but I’m grateful, because you have to trust someone and he was the only Obi-Wan available to me, not only in my choices as an actor, but my choices in sock wear. Because—well, I was so embarrassed. I looked at my drab black socks and I said, “Curse you, Rian Johnson, I’ll get my revenge!”

  Rian came out to my house to discuss the script, and we spent several hours chatting, and I showed him TV shows … you know, important things. One reason I loved Rogue One and the prequels is because I wasn’t in them. I told Rian we had a beginning, middle, and end in the original trilogy, and I don’t want to tempt fate. Truth be known, Rian, I’m terrified. Know what he said? “I’m terrified, too.” And that’s a director I can love. A lot of times you can categorize director’s films. But his films are all so original and ambitious. In this experience, he’s rocketed to the top of my favorite directors of all time. He was my seeing-eye dog, and I knew if Rian was happy, I was happy. I turned my performance over to him. I know if he was satisfied, we got it right.

  RAY MORTON

  Johnson introduced a really interesting theme into The Last Jedi—the need for us to let go of the past so we can move forward into the future. It’s an intriguing notion on its own, as well as an interesting meta-message (whether it was intended or not) for Star Wars fans and creators. Unfortunately, Johnson chose to dramatize this idea by continuing to dump on what has come before, especially the Jedi, by having Luke openly (and continuously) express his scorn of and disgust with the Order—essentially writing all the Jedi off as arrogant screw-ups and saying the Order must die.

  The Force is given all sorts of new capabilities in the sequels (few of which are ever properly explained). Johnson gave it an interesting new wrinkle in his narrative’s other major plotline—Kylo Ren’s attempts to lure Rey to the dark side. In Johnson’s script, Ren and Rey now have the ability to use the Force to create a psychic link with one another, which Johnson visualizes by having both of them appear to be in the same place, even though they are actually in vastly different locations. It’s a logical extension of the Force and generates some striking staging and intercutting whenever the two attempt to communicate with one another.

  Unfortunately, Johnson’s invention does not extend to the core material of this plotline, which is just a retread of the Luke/Vader narrative from the original trilogy—there’s a good Jedi and a bad Sith; the Sith seeks to convert the Jedi; will the Jedi turn?; the Jedi believe the Sith still has good in him; will the Sith be redeemed? Ridley and Driver play these scenes for all they are worth, but we’ve seen this all before and it’s just not as interesting the second time around. (Also, it’s understandable why Luke wants to redeem Vader—the dude is his father—but it’s never clear why Rey cares so much about redeeming Ren, since they have no connection to one another, apart from the fact that Kylo has been trying to kill her from the moment they met.)

  RIAN JOHNSON

  Rey, at the end of The Force Awakens, has been thrown into this big adventure and been sent on a mission to find Luke. She has a desire for connection to her past and some notion that there are answers there that she can get. I think she probably expects there are some answers about who she is, and that’s really what she is on a quest to find out. Not just meaning who her parents are or where she comes from, but meaning what’s her place in all of this? When she shows up on that island, there’s part of her, and there’s a big part of us, that expects that she’s going to get that information from Luke.

  DAISY RIDLEY

  (actress, “Rey”)

  I mean, the biggest thing for me when I read the script, because you know, even though you’re trying to avoid what people are saying, it’s hard to, and because people responded well to John and me as a team, I was a bit nervous about not being a team so much in this one. So I think for me personally it was a challenge. The film was a challenge and I don’t know what it was like for anyone else, but to be in a different combination of people—we’re in different situations, we’re with different people that we are learning about, we’re meeting for the first time. It felt pretty different to me.

  RIAN JOHNSON

  Kylo Ren was the character I was the most excited about getting into and writing. In the first Star Wars films, Darth Vader was a great villain, but he was never someone you identified with. You identified with Luke’s relationship to him. So, Vader was the monster. He was the scary father, and then he was the father you had to reconcile with. He was an outside force, especially in the context of these stories being about the transition from adolescence into adulthood. You’re identifying with Luke and he’s the one going through that transition, and Vader is something he essentially has to navigate to get there. Whereas with Kylo, it’s almost like Rey and Kylo are two halves of the protagonist. Rey is the light, and Kylo is the dark. And with Kylo, again, this is all about the transition from adolescence into adulthood. Kylo is that anger of adolescence, and wanting to reject your parents, and wanting to break away, which, to some extent, all of us can identify with as much as we can identify with the hopeful Rey looking up at the stars from her planet.

  ADAM DRIVER

  (actor, “Kylo Ren”)

  I think definitely there’s a competition and it’s maybe yet to be discovered where that comes from. If anything, I think that’s more of a testament to kind of what everyone has been saying of Rian’s inability to not mine a character in every moment, which seems like an obvious thing, but he doesn’t, so he knows that
spectacle, it won’t mean anything if you don’t care about anything that’s going on, which again, seems very obvious. It’s a really hard thing to balance with this many moving parts in the scale of something like this. So I love playing those scenes. Rian slows the pace and there’s not a moment that’s taken for granted. It’s always broken up into little pieces and the story in our mind comes first before an explosion.

  RIAN JOHNSON

  For Kylo, Snoke is an important character. He’s the leader of the First Order. In The Force Awakens, you get just little glimpses of him through a hologram. In The Last Jedi, we wanted to actually meet Snoke and have a little more face time with him. He is a very powerful villain. He’s the source of evil behind Kylo Ren. Kylo is a more complicated villain, so you need that very strong malevolent being that is just a bad guy sitting there. Snoke looks like a bad guy, and he’s got evil intentions. You need the monster back there, especially if you’re going to have your villain be a little more complex. So, that’s who Snoke is. Andy Serkis plays him. It was my first time working with Andy, and it was my first time really working with a motion-capture character. Snoke is entirely CG, and it’s built from Andy’s mo-cap performance. Andy’s extraordinary. For the longest time in the cut, we just left Andy in the mo-cap suit in there, because just seeing him perform was mesmerizing.