J.J. Abrams’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens Th
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Posted On: 05/30/2015 9:29:24 AM
J.J. Abrams’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens
There’s not too much riding on the new Star Wars movie—just the $4 billion investment Disney made when it bought George Lucas’s production company and the expectations of countless persnickety fans. Bruce Handy goes behind the scenes.
One afternoon in March, at the offices of his Bad Robot production company, located in a nondescript two-story building on what passes for an industrial stretch of Santa Monica, the director J. J. Abrams was reviewing special-effects shots for his next film—known colloquially as “the hotly anticipated new Star Wars movie” and more formally as Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Abrams, a boyish 48, with wiry hair and black-framed nerd glasses, was seated in a small, plush screening room with a dozen or so associates, including visual-effects supervisor Roger Guyett and Abrams’s longtime producing partner Bryan Burk. The group was teleconferencing with Industrial Light & Magic, the San Francisco–based effects company, as well as a second unit in London, with the artists and technicians represented on-screen by their works in progress and on the sound system by their disembodied voices. It was a session you might think would be tense, even fraught, given the stakes on this film, the first Star Wars movie in 10 years and the first ever without creator and fanboy lightning rod George Lucas, who three years ago sold his production company, Lucasfilm Ltd., along with all rights to Star Wars, to the Walt Disney Company—which means the new movie has an added burden of needing to relaunch the franchise in robust enough fashion to justify Lucasfilm’s $4-billion-and-change sticker cost.
But if Abrams and his team were feeling any pressure, they were wearing it lightly. The director—whose credits include the TV shows Alias and Lost, which he created, and the last two Star Trek films—liked what he was seeing as the group ran through various shots, sequences, and concept art. His enthusiasm and appreciation were infectious—not that he didn’t have notes. He suggested tweaks on a C.G.I. character’s physical frame, asking for “a strong trapezoidal muscle.” Dissecting a chase scene, he questioned the height of an animated droid’s bounce in response to a nonvirtual explosion, worried the effect made the character look “a little bit light.” He asked that the arc of a spaceship’s flight be more “parabolic,” upping the scene’s vertigo quotient. But his broader notes tended toward comments such as “That’s fucking awesome!” and “That’s genius!” There was only one effect he felt wasn’t really working—two separate shots, a close-up of an actor’s hand and a longer shot of his head and shoulders, which had been linked by a clever postproduction camera move that looked flawless to my untrained eyes—but even here he was effusive in his praise for the technical achievement, telling the London-based visual artist, “It was amazing you did this at all,” and then virtually apologized for rejecting it.
I think it’s fair to say that Abrams and his team were having fun, and fun, if you are a fan of Star Wars, if Lucas’s original films fired your childhood imagination and fueled your childhood play, is exactly what you’d hope anyone working on a Star Wars movie would be having. The Force Awakens may yet turn out to be lousy, but moviegoers—and Disney shareholders—should be heartened that it is being made in an appropriately imaginative and playful spirit.
They should also be heartened by the cast Abrams and Lucasfilm have assembled, which includes Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill, reprising their original Star Wars roles as Han Solo, Princess Leia, and Luke Skywalker for the first time in three decades, as well as an impressive list of young newcomers to the series, including Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, Lupita Nyong’o, Andy Serkis, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, and Domhnall Gleeson—plus Max von Sydow, imparting the same kind of old-school Euro-gravitas that Sir Alec Guinness lent the original. Anthony Daniels and Peter Mayhew will also be back, wreathed in metal and in mohair and yak fur respectively, as C-3PO and Chewbacca.
The Force Awakens’s plot is being held under the usual wraps, as are other crucial details, including its budget. (The costume designer, Michael Kaplan, refused even to say whether Princess Leia’s side buns would return, though Fisher subsequently let slip at a fan convention that the buns are out.) But here is something I can disclose, which I suspect fans—a majority of them, anyway—will find most heartening of all: at one point during the effects review, while watching a sequence with spaceships flying low over a desert planet, Abrams asked to pause the scene. With a light pen, he drew a little squiggle on a sand dune.
“I have a thought about putting Jar Jar Binks’s bones in the desert there,” he said.
Everyone laughed.
Abrams laughed, too, but insisted, “I’m serious!” He pointed out that the shot zips by in a second, if that. “Only three people will notice,” he said, “but they’ll love it.”
If you don’t already know who Luke Skywalker is or why people would like to see Jar Jar Binks dead, you are probably not bothering to read this. But just in case, a primer:
Luke is the hero of the first three Star Wars films—the original Star Wars, since retitled A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi—released between 1977 and 1983 and now known as episodes IV, V, and VI. In that last one, Luke and his rebel comrades defeat the evil Galactic Empire, and Luke redeems arch-villain Darth Vader, who, as we learned in a famous plot twist from The Empire Strikes Back, is really Luke’s father—a good guy named Anakin Skywalker before he turned into a bad guy. He is the hero, or antihero, of episodes I, II, and III, the prequels released between 1999 and 2005: The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith, which together recount the rise of the Empire and the reasons Anakin became Darth Vader, or vice versa (as die-hard fans of the original trilogy may prefer to think of it, narrative chronology be damned).
Jar Jar Binks is peripheral to this family drama, but—and per Abrams’s brainstorm—he is inarguably the most reviled character in the Star Wars saga, a cartoonish, amphibian-like alien with a shuffling gait, prone to pratfalls and boggle-eyed reaction shots, and voiced in a patois with a Jamaican lilt, all of which prompted some critics to condemn the character as a racist stereotype. Introduced in The Phantom Menace, Jar Jar has come to symbolize what many fans see as the faults of the prequel trilogy: characters no one much cares about; a sense of humor geared toward the youngest conceivable audience members; an over-reliance on computer graphics; and story lines devoted to the kinds of convoluted political machinations which wouldn’t have been out of place in adaptations of I, Claudius or The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, but which fit less snugly in films with characters like Jar Jar Binks. Sometimes it was hard to know who George Lucas had made those films for, other than himself. (It should be noted, however, that he has a sense of humor about Jar Jar: a fan-created statue of the creature stands in one of the lobbies at Lucasfilm. On the wall next to it, taped up at Lucas’s behest, is a small printout of a British Internet poll in which Jar Jar was voted “the most annoying film character of all time,” beating out Mr. Bean, Ace Ventura, and—who knew?—Andie MacDowell’s heroine from Four Weddings and a Funeral.)
A Long Time Ago . . .
What people sometimes forget about the first Star Wars was that when it hit theaters, in 1977, it was startling not just for its revolutionary special effects but also for its unabashed sense of fun. After 10 years of haunted, pessimistic, even nihilistic hits such as Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, The French Connection, The Godfather, Chinatown, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Network, and Taxi Driver—films in which more often than not the heroes, such as they were, ended up compromised, defeated, or dead—there was something radical about a movie where the good guys win an unambiguous, bell-ringing victory, and receive medals in the final scene to boot. As Time put it in a big 1977 feature about Lucas and Star Wars, “It was a weird idea to make a movie whose only purpose was to give pleasure.” According to the magazine, Lucas’s skeptical peers had urged him to make “a deep picture, one that had meaning, significance and recondite symbolism.” Ha-ha, those film snobs. But, ironically, as Lucas over the years grew to take his saga and perhaps himself more seriously—people have written book after book exploring his really pretty simple ideas about good and evil, mythology, archetypes, and blah blah blah—“recondite” is where he ended up; what was organic and maybe even intuitive in the first film was increasingly foregrounded, skeleton turned into exoskeleton.
A colorful array of galactic travelers, smugglers,
and other assorted riffraff fill the main hall of pirate Maz Kanata’s castle
That was the backstory—the longer, real-life version of a Star Wars movie’s serial-style opening crawl—in 2012, when George Lucas, then 67 and pondering retirement, brought the producer Kathleen Kennedy into his company and sold it to Disney that October, stepping down while Kennedy stayed on as president. Whatever post-Lucasfilm projects he was looking forward to, including launching a museum devoted to narrative art and starting a new family—he married Mellody Hobson, president of a Chicago money-management firm, in June 2013, and the couple had a daughter, Everest, later that year (he also has three adult children)—Lucas may have been motivated to sell in part by the sometimes harsh reactions to his more recent movies. The prequels made piles of money, but the griping about them rubbed him a bit raw. “It was fine before the Internet,” he told Bloomberg Businessweek following the Lucasfilm sale. “But now . . . it’s gotten very vicious and very personal. You just say, ‘Why do I need to do this?’ ” One could argue that billionaire movie moguls should have tougher hides, but most of them don’t have to deal with critiques such as “George Lucas raped my childhood,” which has become an unfortunate fanboy catchphrase. There is even a 2010 documentary on this subject, an essay in disenchantment and misplaced possessiveness titled The People vs. George Lucas.
Kennedy, 61, has produced more than 60 films, including, in one capacity or another, nearly all of Steven Spielberg’s since Raiders of the Lost Ark, released in 1981. She was a co-founder of Amblin Entertainment, Spielberg’s production company, along with her husband, Frank Marshall; until she joined Lucasfilm, the couple separately owned a second production company, the Kennedy/Marshall Company, which has made movies as varied as The Sixth Sense, the Jason Bourne series, and Persepolis. So, it wasn’t as if she needed the work when Lucas, a colleague and friend from the Indiana Jones films, asked her to lunch one day in April 2012 while both happened to be in New York. “I literally thought it was just going to be about catching up and talking about family—our normal conversations,” Kennedy said. “And then halfway through he dropped the bomb on me and said, ‘I’m sure you’ve heard I’m retiring,’ which I hadn’t, and even if I had, I don’t think I would have believed him.” Lucas persisted and told her he wanted to bring in someone to take over. “And of course the wheels are turning,” Kennedy continued, “and I’m thinking, Oh, he’s looking for a suggestion as to who. And he said, ‘I’d like it to be you.’ So it was a complete shock. He said, ‘Would you even consider that?’ ” Kennedy received her third surprise of the day when she found herself saying yes on the spot. Only in hindsight, she said, could she parse her reasons for leaping aboard—a mix of respect for Lucas and his company and the excitement of a new challenge.
A Bay Area native, Kennedy also liked the idea of working in San Francisco, and who wouldn’t, given the Lucasfilm campus’s location just inside the city’s Presidio—once an atypically gorgeous U.S. Army base, now literally a park, with views of both the Golden Gate Bridge and downtown. Though the Lucasfilm buildings are only 10 years old—the company moved in 2005 from its previous location, at Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, 30-odd miles north, in Marin County—they have an exquisitely calibrated, old-California feel, with gables, porches, trellises, abundant wood, and Arts and Crafts–style furnishings. It’s all mostly faux, designed to Lucas’s specifications, but impeccably done—a Disneyland aesthetic of the very highest order. You might imagine that Leland Stanford once worked there, or even Zorro.
Kennedy quickly strikes one as perfect for the job of running a quasi-independent studio within a massive entertainment conglomerate. She can discuss creative issues with insight and passion. (If you ever meet her, get her talking about A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, the cerebral but haunting Spielberg movie she produced that was based on an unmade Stanley Kubrick project; it’s one of her favorites.) But she is also fluent in corporate-speak, rattling off sentences such as this, regarding her early months at Lucasfilm: “There were a lot of things going on in terms of the infrastructure of the company so that we could shift strategically from what had really become a licensing model back to a production model.”
What that means in layperson language is that, in preparation for selling the company, which to some extent had been coasting on royalties from Star Wars toys and other merchandise, Lucas had decided to make more movies. He sketched out ideas for episodes VII, VIII, and IX, to be set initially several decades after Return of the Jedi, and approached Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill about re-upping. He shared his story outlines with Disney during their courtship phase. But after the deal was done, “Disney and Kathy decided they should consider other options,” as Abrams (not then involved) diplomatically put it. He said Lucas’s treatments had centered on very young characters—teenagers, Lucasfilm told me—which might have struck Disney executives as veering too close for comfort to The Phantom Menace and its 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker and 14-year-old Queen Amidala. “We’ve made some departures” from Lucas’s ideas, Kennedy conceded, but only in “exactly the way you would in any development process.”
How Lucas felt about that seems to be a delicate topic, one that Disney and Lucasfilm executives declined to address. Decades ago, after Universal had made cuts in his second film, American Graffiti, against his will, Lucas constructed his career so that he’d rarely not get his way. As he told Bloomberg Businessweek while his new Star Wars ideas were still on the table, “Ultimately you have to say, ‘Look, I know what I’m doing. Buying my stories is part of what the deal is.’ I’ve worked at this for 40 years, and I’ve been pretty successful.” But another part of the deal was that he was paid a handsome sum to cede control, and however he felt about having his story ideas rejected, Lucas (who turned down an interview request for this story) is by all accounts supportive of the new films and eager to see them for the first time in theaters like any other audience member. “I talk to him and see him frequently,” Kennedy said. “And I’m telling you, every time I say, ‘Is there anything you want to know?’ And he’s like, ‘No, no, I want to be surprised.’ ”
Shortly after it bought Lucasfilm (which includes Industrial Light & Magic, the postproduction facility Skywalker Sound, and the now largely moribund video-game company LucasArts), Disney announced an ambitious slate of annual Star Wars releases, both the new trilogy and a series of “stand-alone” movies, seemingly aping the open-the-spigot approach the company has profitably taken with Marvel Entertainment, which it bought, also for $4 billion, in 2009. Summer of 2015 was the release date for the first picture—a very quick turnaround for an effects-heavy movie that didn’t even have a wisp of a story. “I was the one raising my hand and saying, ‘Ah-ah-ah, might be a little difficult, as nothing’s in place, including a script, a director, a plan,’ ” Kennedy said. She began by assembling what would become a formal story department, charged with generating ideas for the new movies along with TV series, games, and other Star Wars products. This kind of creative brain trust is common in animation but rare in the world of live-action filmmaking—at least since the glory days of the old studio system—where creative teams are typically assembled and cast to the winds on a film-by-film basis. Kennedy’s group, a mix of insiders and newcomers, initially included Kiri Hart, who has long worked for Kennedy as a development executive; Michael Arndt, the screenwriter of Little Miss Sunshine, whom Kennedy had brought on to work on the new films even before the sale; Lawrence Kasdan, the writer-director of Body Heat, The Big Chill, and Silverado, who had co-written The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi; and Simon Kinberg, a writer and producer whose screenplay credits include the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and three X-Men movies—thus bringing a little Marvel magic into the fold. (In buying the company, Disney also got rights, for better or worse, to less storied Lucasfilm properties, among them Willow and Radioland Murders. A bigger prize is the Indiana Jones franchise. Kennedy confirmed rumors that another Indy movie “will one day be made inside this company. When it will happen, I’m not quite sure. We haven’t started working on a script yet, but we are talking about it.”)
Kennedy made it sound as if she had been leading encounter-group sessions as her team struggled to figure out how to reboot $4 billion worth of “I.P.” (intellectual property) and reconnect with audiences on a gut level. “I would say it took a good year, to be honest, in the early development stage, where we immersed ourselves in Star Wars, understanding the values George used to create the mythology, understanding what it meant to him, understanding what it means to all of us. . . . People would talk about how old they were when Star Wars came out, if it was in fact what catapulted them into the business. They’d talk about how they introduced their kids to Star Wars, whether they’re little kids today or their kids are in college now.” That might sound inspiring, or it might sound soppy, but the truth is you can’t create great popular art without being invested in it emotionally. Transformers and Thor are one thing, but “people get teary talking about Star Wars,” Kennedy said. “How often do you sit and talk with someone about a movie and they get teary?”
Empire State of Mind
By that criterion, Abrams, who had enraged Star Trek fans after joining that franchise when he told an interviewer, “I’ve always been much more of a Star Wars guy than a Star Trek guy,” was an ideal choice to direct Episode VII. He was 11, growing up in Los Angeles as a science-fiction-obsessed kid, already set on a filmmaking career, when he saw the original Star Wars during its first release. “I just remember going into the theater and coming out with a larger imagination,” he said. “It was so funny and so sweet and had such a big heart. It was all about the underdog, and it was a thrilling, rousing, emotional, funny adventure. And it looked 100 percent real.” (That had been his problem with Star Trek, he said—that the original series looked so cheap and fakey.) As a teenager, he made his own Super 8 movies. When he was 15, he won a student-film prize, which, as it happens, led to a meeting with Kathleen Kennedy, who hired him and another prizewinner, Matt Reeves—who went on to direct Cloverfield (which Abrams produced) and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes—to archive some of Steven Spielberg’s own student films. Even before Episode VII, this had all come full circle when Spielberg produced Abrams’s 2011 movie, Super 8, set in 1979, about kids who, while making a zombie movie, stumble across an actual alien.
All that Kismet notwithstanding, Abrams was reluctant to take on Star Wars when Kennedy broached the idea, in late 2012, while he was in postproduction on Star Trek into Darkness, his second go-round on the U.S.S. Enterprise. For one thing, he had a six-month family vacation planned for 2014—a respite after back-to-back-to-back projects. For another, he said, “I’d been working on these Star Trek films, and I shared the feeling that I’ve read some people have, which is how can someone who worked on Star Trek work on Star Wars? It feels like it’s somehow, I don’t know, too much Star experience for any one person.” As well, this would be his third experience stepping into an ongoing franchise, after the two Star Trek movies and Mission: Impossible III, which he had written and directed in 2006. But maybe most important of all, he said, “it was STAR WARS. I cared about it so much and I felt I’d much rather just go and see it than have to figure out what it would be.”
Still, he agreed to talk further, and Kennedy flew down from San Francisco to Santa Monica for a meeting. If the Lucasfilm campus is almost too gorgeous, too impeccably tasteful, the Bad Robot offices may be too impeccably rambunctious. Walls and shelves are lined with toys from old science-fiction films and monster movies, and connoisseurs will notice a number of original artworks by Mad-magazine artists; Abrams’s own office is graced with the very first “Spy vs Spy” cartoon. There is, as might be expected, a vintage Star Wars pinball machine outside the screening room, and the first-floor waiting area is stocked with pencils, markers, crayons, reams of drawing paper, and a sign that exhorts, PLEASE CREATE. The vibe suggests what might result if you gave a kid several million dollars to spend on a fort or tree house—which, in a way, is how you might think of a proper Star Wars sequel getting made, though with a budget several orders of magnitude larger.
“I fully expected to gratefully pass on this movie,” Abrams said, describing his meeting with Kennedy. But he grew intrigued when she told him the picture was a blank canvas. Implicit questions tantalized him—“this idea,” he said, “of what’s happened in these past 30-something years. Where is Han Solo? What happened to Leia? Is Luke alive? These questions started to percolate, and I found myself thrown completely by this visceral hunger to be part of this world.” He added, “The logic of why it was the wrong thing was overruled for me by the emotion of it.”
In Kennedy’s words, “He turned back into an 11-year-old boy.”
Of course, that’s what most fans old enough to have sex would want from any new Star Wars movie: recapturing the virgin rush of one’s first encounters with the series—which, I suppose, is a fancier way of saying everyone wants a new Star Wars movie to make them feel like a kid again. To Abrams’s taste, that meant channeling the spirit of the original trilogy. “I know that there are many people who love and in some cases even prefer the prequels, and I know why they were necessary for George. But there was a feeling I had not had since the original trilogy that was so familiar to me and still very possible to tap into—the sense of being transported to some other place where anything was possible but that was specific to Star Wars in aesthetic, in history, in design, sound design, music. It was a very unique and specific world. I could taste and I could feel it.”
After “very selfishly begging” his wife to forgo that six-month family vacation, and persuading Paramount, where he had a deal, to grant him a leave, Abrams came on board. George Lucas, he said, has been “incredibly gracious.” Abrams has known Lucas socially for years—he and his wife attended Lucas’s recent wedding—and the older director called him early on, Abrams recollected, “saying, ‘Hey, you should do the movie. Are you going to do it?’ He was very sweet and said, ‘If you do this movie, it’s your thing. I’m here to help if you want, but this is yours.’ ”
According to Lawrence Kasdan, the Lucasfilm story group was already in agreement with Abrams that the movies should be closer in spirit to the original trilogy than to the prequels. “There was a feeling,” Kasdan said, “even I think when George was still there, that we wanted to have more of a slightly retro feeling—more tactile and less C.G.-oriented.”
But there was still the matter of what would actually happen on-screen. “We were struggling to come up with a story,” Kasdan, 66, admitted. “There were elements that we would come up with and say, ‘Oh, that’s good! That’s strong!’ But it was not coming together.” With Abrams now part of the development team and the already tight summer 2015 release date looming ever closer, Michael Arndt was having difficulty finishing a script within the necessary time frame. “There was a ton of ideas and outlines, a lot of cards on the wall, a lot of writing on whiteboards,” Abrams said, but no screenplay. With pre-production chores already well under way in London, where much of the film would be shot at Pinewood Studios, Abrams and Kasdan took over the screenwriting process, starting more or less from scratch. “We said, Blank page. Page one. What do we desperately want to see?” Abrams told me. Though Abrams said both men had pet ideas from the development process they wanted to incorporate, and did, Kasdan made the process sound like more of a teardown: “We didn’t have anything,” Kasdan said. “There were a thousand people waiting for answers on things, and you couldn’t tell them anything except ‘Yeah, that guy’s in it.’ That was about it. That was really all we knew.”
This was in early November 2013, six months before filming was now scheduled to begin, in May of 2014. (This was when the release date was pushed back to December 2015.) By mid-January, Abrams and Kasdan had a draft, most of it hashed out in plein air conversations recorded on an iPhone as they walked and talked for hours at a time through cityscapes that changed according to the vagaries of Abrams’s schedule: first along the beach in Santa Monica, then through a freezing Central Park, in New York, and finally on the streets of London and Paris. One day, the two men spent eight hours at Les Deux Magots, the boisterous café on Boulevard Saint-Germain where patrons are jammed elbow-to-elbow and which is famous for having once been a hangout for the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. “We’re like yelling back and forth in this noise, saying, This should happen, that should happen, he can’t do that—and hoping no one’s there from Cinema Blend,” Kasdan said, referring to the movie-nerd gossip site, not a French film-crit journal. Fortunately, no one was eavesdropping, though if you are interested in spoilers you can find plenty online. The schedule got so tight that—as memorialized in a photo Kasdan showed me—he and Abrams were still hashing out story beats on the film’s London soundstage while extras in storm-trooper gear were being drilled around them.
Guardians of the Galaxy
At any rate, whatever Abrams and Kasdan came up with apparently pleased everyone concerned—though everyone concerned may have had no choice but to be pleased at that point. Kennedy described the script’s mix of old and new characters in terms of audience expectations: “It’s sort of like going to a concert where you want to hear the new stuff that they’ve written, but really you want to hear some of the old songs. And we’re in a similar kind of thing: we’re getting the band back together, and we know that people are going to want to be reminded of the things they love, but they’re going to expect to have a new experience.”
Discussing the shoot, Abrams was quick with praise for his young cast but seemed most excited by his encounters with ghosts of Star Wars past: “The whole thing was as surreal and impossible as you can imagine. I mean, walking onto the Millennium Falcon set?” (That would be Han Solo’s iconic spaceship.) “To be on it, it’s insane. There were people who literally cried when they walked onto that set. It’s a strange thing, the effect it has.”
Abrams has known Harrison Ford for years, having written Regarding Henry, the 1991 film in which Ford starred for director Mike Nichols. Abrams was also acquainted with Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill, and so, he said, when they all met for the film, along with Kennedy, with whom he went even further back, “there was a bizarre feeling of everything coming together in a way I never could have anticipated.” And yet, Abrams added, he was “terrified at the prospect of directing Harrison as Han Solo. . . It wasn’t just about directing one of the great actors in film history. It was about directing one of the great actors in film history playing a character that was certainly one of his two defining characters.” Abrams had met with Ford during the script process. “We talked about what we were thinking for the story, and he liked what he was hearing. He was excited to get back in those shoes again, which was really interesting because I thought he hadn’t been a fan. I kept hearing those rumors when I was a kid.” According to offscreen Star Wars legend, Ford thought the films were puerile, had repeatedly begged Lucas to kill Han off, and once complained about the dialogue, “George, you can type this shit, but you can’t say it.”
Notwithstanding his reverence for actor and character, Abrams had some concerns about how Ford might now approach the role. “I knew that he had done in some movies a kind of more growly thing”—see 42 and Morning Glory—“and I didn’t want Han to be growly. But because of the backstory I wanted him to have evolved somewhat. I mean, when you’re in your late 60s you’re not the same person you were in your late 20s, and yet he had to be the character we know and love. So it was a balance that felt sort of emblematic for me in terms of this whole experience, which is it had to be what you know, but it can’t be exactly what you know.”
The shoot would take nearly six months, from mid-May through early November, with locations including Abu Dhabi, Ireland, Wales, and an R.A.F. base in England. By all accounts things went smoothly aside from one serious hiccup, a month in, when a part of the Millennium Falcon set fell on Ford and broke his leg. Production was held up for two weeks, but in Abrams’s mind there were unexpected blessings. “In a weird way,” he said, “it was the greatest gift to the movie that, once it was clear Harrison would be O.K., the way that the crew came together. I’ve never seen a crew bonded like that. And when Harrison came back, when I say he came back better and stronger than ever, I can’t overstate that. There was a fire in his eyes that you see in the movie.” The hiatus also gave Abrams time to take stock of what he was doing and rethink some sequences that normally would have had to be fixed in postproduction or via expensive re-shoots. “Anyone I’ve talked to who’s worked on a movie has said every movie should have a break after the first month or so of shooting to regroup,” Abrams said. (Ford’s principal work on the film was finished by March 5, when the actor, a pilot in real life as well as in Star Wars, reportedly fractured several more bones when he was solo-flying a small vintage plane and had to execute an emergency landing on a Southern California golf course.)
The Star Wars fan community, rendered giddy by Episode VII’s first two trailers, seems to have embraced the new regime, though as one wary fan I know tweeted, “Lucy is holding a football labeled Star Wars and I’m Charlie Brown.” The movie’s P.R. campaign is still being worked out, including an as yet nebulous Star Wars presence at San Diego’s Comic-Con in July. (By the time you’re reading this, fans will have already gathered for their annual May the Fourth Be with You celebration, held, not surprisingly, on May 4.) But given Disney’s and Lucasfilm’s combined expertise in this arena, the summer and fall promise to be one long, exquisite tease for anyone with a HAN SHOT FIRST T-shirt in his or her closet. If skeptics will accept a not disinterested view of what Abrams has accomplished, they can take the word of composer John Williams, who received one of his five Academy Awards for scoring the first Star Wars. He has written all the series’ music since and, at 83, is back again for The Force Awakens. When we spoke in April, Abrams had shown him about three-quarters of the movie in a rough assembly, and he said, “What I have seen is absolutely delightful and witty and funny and engaging. The extensions of the mythology are very cleverly and beautifully written, I think. If I can quote Steven Spielberg”—citing one of the director’s favorite phrases—“J.J. has hit it out of the ballpark. I’m having a lot of fun with it.”
The several minutes of footage I saw backed Williams up, as much as any several minutes from any movie could. Case in point: At the effects session, Abrams was demonstrating his commitment to the more retro, more tactile filmmaking Kasdan had talked about. One scene featured an alien creature that abruptly pops up out of the desert landscape with glowing, flashlight eyes that make it look like a distant cousin to the Jawas of A New Hope. Abrams later called it “a classic, old-school seesaw puppet. We just buried it in the sand, and Neal Scanlan, the creature guy, pushed down on one side and the thing came up on the other side.” At the session, the scene, with the alien suddenly sticking its head over a dune, got a big laugh. Some perfectionist suggested a few digital polishes, but Abrams was wary. “It’s so old-school and crazy,” he said. “We could improve this thing, but at some point do we lose the wonderful preposterousness?”
The question was tabled, but “wonderful preposterousness” isn’t a bad descriptor of the Star Wars ethos at its best. Reviewing another scene, with spaceships blasting away at each other with phasers or whatever, Abrams could briefly be heard making ray-gun noises, the way a kid lying on his bedroom floor and drawing his own spaceships might. That galaxy far, far away appeared to be in good hands.
There’s not too much riding on the new Star Wars movie—just the $4 billion investment Disney made when it bought George Lucas’s production company and the expectations of countless persnickety fans. Bruce Handy goes behind the scenes.
One afternoon in March, at the offices of his Bad Robot production company, located in a nondescript two-story building on what passes for an industrial stretch of Santa Monica, the director J. J. Abrams was reviewing special-effects shots for his next film—known colloquially as “the hotly anticipated new Star Wars movie” and more formally as Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Abrams, a boyish 48, with wiry hair and black-framed nerd glasses, was seated in a small, plush screening room with a dozen or so associates, including visual-effects supervisor Roger Guyett and Abrams’s longtime producing partner Bryan Burk. The group was teleconferencing with Industrial Light & Magic, the San Francisco–based effects company, as well as a second unit in London, with the artists and technicians represented on-screen by their works in progress and on the sound system by their disembodied voices. It was a session you might think would be tense, even fraught, given the stakes on this film, the first Star Wars movie in 10 years and the first ever without creator and fanboy lightning rod George Lucas, who three years ago sold his production company, Lucasfilm Ltd., along with all rights to Star Wars, to the Walt Disney Company—which means the new movie has an added burden of needing to relaunch the franchise in robust enough fashion to justify Lucasfilm’s $4-billion-and-change sticker cost.
But if Abrams and his team were feeling any pressure, they were wearing it lightly. The director—whose credits include the TV shows Alias and Lost, which he created, and the last two Star Trek films—liked what he was seeing as the group ran through various shots, sequences, and concept art. His enthusiasm and appreciation were infectious—not that he didn’t have notes. He suggested tweaks on a C.G.I. character’s physical frame, asking for “a strong trapezoidal muscle.” Dissecting a chase scene, he questioned the height of an animated droid’s bounce in response to a nonvirtual explosion, worried the effect made the character look “a little bit light.” He asked that the arc of a spaceship’s flight be more “parabolic,” upping the scene’s vertigo quotient. But his broader notes tended toward comments such as “That’s fucking awesome!” and “That’s genius!” There was only one effect he felt wasn’t really working—two separate shots, a close-up of an actor’s hand and a longer shot of his head and shoulders, which had been linked by a clever postproduction camera move that looked flawless to my untrained eyes—but even here he was effusive in his praise for the technical achievement, telling the London-based visual artist, “It was amazing you did this at all,” and then virtually apologized for rejecting it.
I think it’s fair to say that Abrams and his team were having fun, and fun, if you are a fan of Star Wars, if Lucas’s original films fired your childhood imagination and fueled your childhood play, is exactly what you’d hope anyone working on a Star Wars movie would be having. The Force Awakens may yet turn out to be lousy, but moviegoers—and Disney shareholders—should be heartened that it is being made in an appropriately imaginative and playful spirit.
They should also be heartened by the cast Abrams and Lucasfilm have assembled, which includes Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill, reprising their original Star Wars roles as Han Solo, Princess Leia, and Luke Skywalker for the first time in three decades, as well as an impressive list of young newcomers to the series, including Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, Lupita Nyong’o, Andy Serkis, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, and Domhnall Gleeson—plus Max von Sydow, imparting the same kind of old-school Euro-gravitas that Sir Alec Guinness lent the original. Anthony Daniels and Peter Mayhew will also be back, wreathed in metal and in mohair and yak fur respectively, as C-3PO and Chewbacca.
The Force Awakens’s plot is being held under the usual wraps, as are other crucial details, including its budget. (The costume designer, Michael Kaplan, refused even to say whether Princess Leia’s side buns would return, though Fisher subsequently let slip at a fan convention that the buns are out.) But here is something I can disclose, which I suspect fans—a majority of them, anyway—will find most heartening of all: at one point during the effects review, while watching a sequence with spaceships flying low over a desert planet, Abrams asked to pause the scene. With a light pen, he drew a little squiggle on a sand dune.
“I have a thought about putting Jar Jar Binks’s bones in the desert there,” he said.
Everyone laughed.
Abrams laughed, too, but insisted, “I’m serious!” He pointed out that the shot zips by in a second, if that. “Only three people will notice,” he said, “but they’ll love it.”
If you don’t already know who Luke Skywalker is or why people would like to see Jar Jar Binks dead, you are probably not bothering to read this. But just in case, a primer:
Luke is the hero of the first three Star Wars films—the original Star Wars, since retitled A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi—released between 1977 and 1983 and now known as episodes IV, V, and VI. In that last one, Luke and his rebel comrades defeat the evil Galactic Empire, and Luke redeems arch-villain Darth Vader, who, as we learned in a famous plot twist from The Empire Strikes Back, is really Luke’s father—a good guy named Anakin Skywalker before he turned into a bad guy. He is the hero, or antihero, of episodes I, II, and III, the prequels released between 1999 and 2005: The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith, which together recount the rise of the Empire and the reasons Anakin became Darth Vader, or vice versa (as die-hard fans of the original trilogy may prefer to think of it, narrative chronology be damned).
Jar Jar Binks is peripheral to this family drama, but—and per Abrams’s brainstorm—he is inarguably the most reviled character in the Star Wars saga, a cartoonish, amphibian-like alien with a shuffling gait, prone to pratfalls and boggle-eyed reaction shots, and voiced in a patois with a Jamaican lilt, all of which prompted some critics to condemn the character as a racist stereotype. Introduced in The Phantom Menace, Jar Jar has come to symbolize what many fans see as the faults of the prequel trilogy: characters no one much cares about; a sense of humor geared toward the youngest conceivable audience members; an over-reliance on computer graphics; and story lines devoted to the kinds of convoluted political machinations which wouldn’t have been out of place in adaptations of I, Claudius or The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, but which fit less snugly in films with characters like Jar Jar Binks. Sometimes it was hard to know who George Lucas had made those films for, other than himself. (It should be noted, however, that he has a sense of humor about Jar Jar: a fan-created statue of the creature stands in one of the lobbies at Lucasfilm. On the wall next to it, taped up at Lucas’s behest, is a small printout of a British Internet poll in which Jar Jar was voted “the most annoying film character of all time,” beating out Mr. Bean, Ace Ventura, and—who knew?—Andie MacDowell’s heroine from Four Weddings and a Funeral.)
A Long Time Ago . . .
What people sometimes forget about the first Star Wars was that when it hit theaters, in 1977, it was startling not just for its revolutionary special effects but also for its unabashed sense of fun. After 10 years of haunted, pessimistic, even nihilistic hits such as Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, The French Connection, The Godfather, Chinatown, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Network, and Taxi Driver—films in which more often than not the heroes, such as they were, ended up compromised, defeated, or dead—there was something radical about a movie where the good guys win an unambiguous, bell-ringing victory, and receive medals in the final scene to boot. As Time put it in a big 1977 feature about Lucas and Star Wars, “It was a weird idea to make a movie whose only purpose was to give pleasure.” According to the magazine, Lucas’s skeptical peers had urged him to make “a deep picture, one that had meaning, significance and recondite symbolism.” Ha-ha, those film snobs. But, ironically, as Lucas over the years grew to take his saga and perhaps himself more seriously—people have written book after book exploring his really pretty simple ideas about good and evil, mythology, archetypes, and blah blah blah—“recondite” is where he ended up; what was organic and maybe even intuitive in the first film was increasingly foregrounded, skeleton turned into exoskeleton.
A colorful array of galactic travelers, smugglers,
and other assorted riffraff fill the main hall of pirate Maz Kanata’s castle
That was the backstory—the longer, real-life version of a Star Wars movie’s serial-style opening crawl—in 2012, when George Lucas, then 67 and pondering retirement, brought the producer Kathleen Kennedy into his company and sold it to Disney that October, stepping down while Kennedy stayed on as president. Whatever post-Lucasfilm projects he was looking forward to, including launching a museum devoted to narrative art and starting a new family—he married Mellody Hobson, president of a Chicago money-management firm, in June 2013, and the couple had a daughter, Everest, later that year (he also has three adult children)—Lucas may have been motivated to sell in part by the sometimes harsh reactions to his more recent movies. The prequels made piles of money, but the griping about them rubbed him a bit raw. “It was fine before the Internet,” he told Bloomberg Businessweek following the Lucasfilm sale. “But now . . . it’s gotten very vicious and very personal. You just say, ‘Why do I need to do this?’ ” One could argue that billionaire movie moguls should have tougher hides, but most of them don’t have to deal with critiques such as “George Lucas raped my childhood,” which has become an unfortunate fanboy catchphrase. There is even a 2010 documentary on this subject, an essay in disenchantment and misplaced possessiveness titled The People vs. George Lucas.
Kennedy, 61, has produced more than 60 films, including, in one capacity or another, nearly all of Steven Spielberg’s since Raiders of the Lost Ark, released in 1981. She was a co-founder of Amblin Entertainment, Spielberg’s production company, along with her husband, Frank Marshall; until she joined Lucasfilm, the couple separately owned a second production company, the Kennedy/Marshall Company, which has made movies as varied as The Sixth Sense, the Jason Bourne series, and Persepolis. So, it wasn’t as if she needed the work when Lucas, a colleague and friend from the Indiana Jones films, asked her to lunch one day in April 2012 while both happened to be in New York. “I literally thought it was just going to be about catching up and talking about family—our normal conversations,” Kennedy said. “And then halfway through he dropped the bomb on me and said, ‘I’m sure you’ve heard I’m retiring,’ which I hadn’t, and even if I had, I don’t think I would have believed him.” Lucas persisted and told her he wanted to bring in someone to take over. “And of course the wheels are turning,” Kennedy continued, “and I’m thinking, Oh, he’s looking for a suggestion as to who. And he said, ‘I’d like it to be you.’ So it was a complete shock. He said, ‘Would you even consider that?’ ” Kennedy received her third surprise of the day when she found herself saying yes on the spot. Only in hindsight, she said, could she parse her reasons for leaping aboard—a mix of respect for Lucas and his company and the excitement of a new challenge.
A Bay Area native, Kennedy also liked the idea of working in San Francisco, and who wouldn’t, given the Lucasfilm campus’s location just inside the city’s Presidio—once an atypically gorgeous U.S. Army base, now literally a park, with views of both the Golden Gate Bridge and downtown. Though the Lucasfilm buildings are only 10 years old—the company moved in 2005 from its previous location, at Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, 30-odd miles north, in Marin County—they have an exquisitely calibrated, old-California feel, with gables, porches, trellises, abundant wood, and Arts and Crafts–style furnishings. It’s all mostly faux, designed to Lucas’s specifications, but impeccably done—a Disneyland aesthetic of the very highest order. You might imagine that Leland Stanford once worked there, or even Zorro.
Kennedy quickly strikes one as perfect for the job of running a quasi-independent studio within a massive entertainment conglomerate. She can discuss creative issues with insight and passion. (If you ever meet her, get her talking about A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, the cerebral but haunting Spielberg movie she produced that was based on an unmade Stanley Kubrick project; it’s one of her favorites.) But she is also fluent in corporate-speak, rattling off sentences such as this, regarding her early months at Lucasfilm: “There were a lot of things going on in terms of the infrastructure of the company so that we could shift strategically from what had really become a licensing model back to a production model.”
What that means in layperson language is that, in preparation for selling the company, which to some extent had been coasting on royalties from Star Wars toys and other merchandise, Lucas had decided to make more movies. He sketched out ideas for episodes VII, VIII, and IX, to be set initially several decades after Return of the Jedi, and approached Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill about re-upping. He shared his story outlines with Disney during their courtship phase. But after the deal was done, “Disney and Kathy decided they should consider other options,” as Abrams (not then involved) diplomatically put it. He said Lucas’s treatments had centered on very young characters—teenagers, Lucasfilm told me—which might have struck Disney executives as veering too close for comfort to The Phantom Menace and its 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker and 14-year-old Queen Amidala. “We’ve made some departures” from Lucas’s ideas, Kennedy conceded, but only in “exactly the way you would in any development process.”
How Lucas felt about that seems to be a delicate topic, one that Disney and Lucasfilm executives declined to address. Decades ago, after Universal had made cuts in his second film, American Graffiti, against his will, Lucas constructed his career so that he’d rarely not get his way. As he told Bloomberg Businessweek while his new Star Wars ideas were still on the table, “Ultimately you have to say, ‘Look, I know what I’m doing. Buying my stories is part of what the deal is.’ I’ve worked at this for 40 years, and I’ve been pretty successful.” But another part of the deal was that he was paid a handsome sum to cede control, and however he felt about having his story ideas rejected, Lucas (who turned down an interview request for this story) is by all accounts supportive of the new films and eager to see them for the first time in theaters like any other audience member. “I talk to him and see him frequently,” Kennedy said. “And I’m telling you, every time I say, ‘Is there anything you want to know?’ And he’s like, ‘No, no, I want to be surprised.’ ”
Shortly after it bought Lucasfilm (which includes Industrial Light & Magic, the postproduction facility Skywalker Sound, and the now largely moribund video-game company LucasArts), Disney announced an ambitious slate of annual Star Wars releases, both the new trilogy and a series of “stand-alone” movies, seemingly aping the open-the-spigot approach the company has profitably taken with Marvel Entertainment, which it bought, also for $4 billion, in 2009. Summer of 2015 was the release date for the first picture—a very quick turnaround for an effects-heavy movie that didn’t even have a wisp of a story. “I was the one raising my hand and saying, ‘Ah-ah-ah, might be a little difficult, as nothing’s in place, including a script, a director, a plan,’ ” Kennedy said. She began by assembling what would become a formal story department, charged with generating ideas for the new movies along with TV series, games, and other Star Wars products. This kind of creative brain trust is common in animation but rare in the world of live-action filmmaking—at least since the glory days of the old studio system—where creative teams are typically assembled and cast to the winds on a film-by-film basis. Kennedy’s group, a mix of insiders and newcomers, initially included Kiri Hart, who has long worked for Kennedy as a development executive; Michael Arndt, the screenwriter of Little Miss Sunshine, whom Kennedy had brought on to work on the new films even before the sale; Lawrence Kasdan, the writer-director of Body Heat, The Big Chill, and Silverado, who had co-written The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi; and Simon Kinberg, a writer and producer whose screenplay credits include the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and three X-Men movies—thus bringing a little Marvel magic into the fold. (In buying the company, Disney also got rights, for better or worse, to less storied Lucasfilm properties, among them Willow and Radioland Murders. A bigger prize is the Indiana Jones franchise. Kennedy confirmed rumors that another Indy movie “will one day be made inside this company. When it will happen, I’m not quite sure. We haven’t started working on a script yet, but we are talking about it.”)
Kennedy made it sound as if she had been leading encounter-group sessions as her team struggled to figure out how to reboot $4 billion worth of “I.P.” (intellectual property) and reconnect with audiences on a gut level. “I would say it took a good year, to be honest, in the early development stage, where we immersed ourselves in Star Wars, understanding the values George used to create the mythology, understanding what it meant to him, understanding what it means to all of us. . . . People would talk about how old they were when Star Wars came out, if it was in fact what catapulted them into the business. They’d talk about how they introduced their kids to Star Wars, whether they’re little kids today or their kids are in college now.” That might sound inspiring, or it might sound soppy, but the truth is you can’t create great popular art without being invested in it emotionally. Transformers and Thor are one thing, but “people get teary talking about Star Wars,” Kennedy said. “How often do you sit and talk with someone about a movie and they get teary?”
Empire State of Mind
By that criterion, Abrams, who had enraged Star Trek fans after joining that franchise when he told an interviewer, “I’ve always been much more of a Star Wars guy than a Star Trek guy,” was an ideal choice to direct Episode VII. He was 11, growing up in Los Angeles as a science-fiction-obsessed kid, already set on a filmmaking career, when he saw the original Star Wars during its first release. “I just remember going into the theater and coming out with a larger imagination,” he said. “It was so funny and so sweet and had such a big heart. It was all about the underdog, and it was a thrilling, rousing, emotional, funny adventure. And it looked 100 percent real.” (That had been his problem with Star Trek, he said—that the original series looked so cheap and fakey.) As a teenager, he made his own Super 8 movies. When he was 15, he won a student-film prize, which, as it happens, led to a meeting with Kathleen Kennedy, who hired him and another prizewinner, Matt Reeves—who went on to direct Cloverfield (which Abrams produced) and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes—to archive some of Steven Spielberg’s own student films. Even before Episode VII, this had all come full circle when Spielberg produced Abrams’s 2011 movie, Super 8, set in 1979, about kids who, while making a zombie movie, stumble across an actual alien.
All that Kismet notwithstanding, Abrams was reluctant to take on Star Wars when Kennedy broached the idea, in late 2012, while he was in postproduction on Star Trek into Darkness, his second go-round on the U.S.S. Enterprise. For one thing, he had a six-month family vacation planned for 2014—a respite after back-to-back-to-back projects. For another, he said, “I’d been working on these Star Trek films, and I shared the feeling that I’ve read some people have, which is how can someone who worked on Star Trek work on Star Wars? It feels like it’s somehow, I don’t know, too much Star experience for any one person.” As well, this would be his third experience stepping into an ongoing franchise, after the two Star Trek movies and Mission: Impossible III, which he had written and directed in 2006. But maybe most important of all, he said, “it was STAR WARS. I cared about it so much and I felt I’d much rather just go and see it than have to figure out what it would be.”
Still, he agreed to talk further, and Kennedy flew down from San Francisco to Santa Monica for a meeting. If the Lucasfilm campus is almost too gorgeous, too impeccably tasteful, the Bad Robot offices may be too impeccably rambunctious. Walls and shelves are lined with toys from old science-fiction films and monster movies, and connoisseurs will notice a number of original artworks by Mad-magazine artists; Abrams’s own office is graced with the very first “Spy vs Spy” cartoon. There is, as might be expected, a vintage Star Wars pinball machine outside the screening room, and the first-floor waiting area is stocked with pencils, markers, crayons, reams of drawing paper, and a sign that exhorts, PLEASE CREATE. The vibe suggests what might result if you gave a kid several million dollars to spend on a fort or tree house—which, in a way, is how you might think of a proper Star Wars sequel getting made, though with a budget several orders of magnitude larger.
“I fully expected to gratefully pass on this movie,” Abrams said, describing his meeting with Kennedy. But he grew intrigued when she told him the picture was a blank canvas. Implicit questions tantalized him—“this idea,” he said, “of what’s happened in these past 30-something years. Where is Han Solo? What happened to Leia? Is Luke alive? These questions started to percolate, and I found myself thrown completely by this visceral hunger to be part of this world.” He added, “The logic of why it was the wrong thing was overruled for me by the emotion of it.”
In Kennedy’s words, “He turned back into an 11-year-old boy.”
Of course, that’s what most fans old enough to have sex would want from any new Star Wars movie: recapturing the virgin rush of one’s first encounters with the series—which, I suppose, is a fancier way of saying everyone wants a new Star Wars movie to make them feel like a kid again. To Abrams’s taste, that meant channeling the spirit of the original trilogy. “I know that there are many people who love and in some cases even prefer the prequels, and I know why they were necessary for George. But there was a feeling I had not had since the original trilogy that was so familiar to me and still very possible to tap into—the sense of being transported to some other place where anything was possible but that was specific to Star Wars in aesthetic, in history, in design, sound design, music. It was a very unique and specific world. I could taste and I could feel it.”
After “very selfishly begging” his wife to forgo that six-month family vacation, and persuading Paramount, where he had a deal, to grant him a leave, Abrams came on board. George Lucas, he said, has been “incredibly gracious.” Abrams has known Lucas socially for years—he and his wife attended Lucas’s recent wedding—and the older director called him early on, Abrams recollected, “saying, ‘Hey, you should do the movie. Are you going to do it?’ He was very sweet and said, ‘If you do this movie, it’s your thing. I’m here to help if you want, but this is yours.’ ”
According to Lawrence Kasdan, the Lucasfilm story group was already in agreement with Abrams that the movies should be closer in spirit to the original trilogy than to the prequels. “There was a feeling,” Kasdan said, “even I think when George was still there, that we wanted to have more of a slightly retro feeling—more tactile and less C.G.-oriented.”
But there was still the matter of what would actually happen on-screen. “We were struggling to come up with a story,” Kasdan, 66, admitted. “There were elements that we would come up with and say, ‘Oh, that’s good! That’s strong!’ But it was not coming together.” With Abrams now part of the development team and the already tight summer 2015 release date looming ever closer, Michael Arndt was having difficulty finishing a script within the necessary time frame. “There was a ton of ideas and outlines, a lot of cards on the wall, a lot of writing on whiteboards,” Abrams said, but no screenplay. With pre-production chores already well under way in London, where much of the film would be shot at Pinewood Studios, Abrams and Kasdan took over the screenwriting process, starting more or less from scratch. “We said, Blank page. Page one. What do we desperately want to see?” Abrams told me. Though Abrams said both men had pet ideas from the development process they wanted to incorporate, and did, Kasdan made the process sound like more of a teardown: “We didn’t have anything,” Kasdan said. “There were a thousand people waiting for answers on things, and you couldn’t tell them anything except ‘Yeah, that guy’s in it.’ That was about it. That was really all we knew.”
This was in early November 2013, six months before filming was now scheduled to begin, in May of 2014. (This was when the release date was pushed back to December 2015.) By mid-January, Abrams and Kasdan had a draft, most of it hashed out in plein air conversations recorded on an iPhone as they walked and talked for hours at a time through cityscapes that changed according to the vagaries of Abrams’s schedule: first along the beach in Santa Monica, then through a freezing Central Park, in New York, and finally on the streets of London and Paris. One day, the two men spent eight hours at Les Deux Magots, the boisterous café on Boulevard Saint-Germain where patrons are jammed elbow-to-elbow and which is famous for having once been a hangout for the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. “We’re like yelling back and forth in this noise, saying, This should happen, that should happen, he can’t do that—and hoping no one’s there from Cinema Blend,” Kasdan said, referring to the movie-nerd gossip site, not a French film-crit journal. Fortunately, no one was eavesdropping, though if you are interested in spoilers you can find plenty online. The schedule got so tight that—as memorialized in a photo Kasdan showed me—he and Abrams were still hashing out story beats on the film’s London soundstage while extras in storm-trooper gear were being drilled around them.
Guardians of the Galaxy
At any rate, whatever Abrams and Kasdan came up with apparently pleased everyone concerned—though everyone concerned may have had no choice but to be pleased at that point. Kennedy described the script’s mix of old and new characters in terms of audience expectations: “It’s sort of like going to a concert where you want to hear the new stuff that they’ve written, but really you want to hear some of the old songs. And we’re in a similar kind of thing: we’re getting the band back together, and we know that people are going to want to be reminded of the things they love, but they’re going to expect to have a new experience.”
Discussing the shoot, Abrams was quick with praise for his young cast but seemed most excited by his encounters with ghosts of Star Wars past: “The whole thing was as surreal and impossible as you can imagine. I mean, walking onto the Millennium Falcon set?” (That would be Han Solo’s iconic spaceship.) “To be on it, it’s insane. There were people who literally cried when they walked onto that set. It’s a strange thing, the effect it has.”
Abrams has known Harrison Ford for years, having written Regarding Henry, the 1991 film in which Ford starred for director Mike Nichols. Abrams was also acquainted with Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill, and so, he said, when they all met for the film, along with Kennedy, with whom he went even further back, “there was a bizarre feeling of everything coming together in a way I never could have anticipated.” And yet, Abrams added, he was “terrified at the prospect of directing Harrison as Han Solo. . . It wasn’t just about directing one of the great actors in film history. It was about directing one of the great actors in film history playing a character that was certainly one of his two defining characters.” Abrams had met with Ford during the script process. “We talked about what we were thinking for the story, and he liked what he was hearing. He was excited to get back in those shoes again, which was really interesting because I thought he hadn’t been a fan. I kept hearing those rumors when I was a kid.” According to offscreen Star Wars legend, Ford thought the films were puerile, had repeatedly begged Lucas to kill Han off, and once complained about the dialogue, “George, you can type this shit, but you can’t say it.”
Notwithstanding his reverence for actor and character, Abrams had some concerns about how Ford might now approach the role. “I knew that he had done in some movies a kind of more growly thing”—see 42 and Morning Glory—“and I didn’t want Han to be growly. But because of the backstory I wanted him to have evolved somewhat. I mean, when you’re in your late 60s you’re not the same person you were in your late 20s, and yet he had to be the character we know and love. So it was a balance that felt sort of emblematic for me in terms of this whole experience, which is it had to be what you know, but it can’t be exactly what you know.”
The shoot would take nearly six months, from mid-May through early November, with locations including Abu Dhabi, Ireland, Wales, and an R.A.F. base in England. By all accounts things went smoothly aside from one serious hiccup, a month in, when a part of the Millennium Falcon set fell on Ford and broke his leg. Production was held up for two weeks, but in Abrams’s mind there were unexpected blessings. “In a weird way,” he said, “it was the greatest gift to the movie that, once it was clear Harrison would be O.K., the way that the crew came together. I’ve never seen a crew bonded like that. And when Harrison came back, when I say he came back better and stronger than ever, I can’t overstate that. There was a fire in his eyes that you see in the movie.” The hiatus also gave Abrams time to take stock of what he was doing and rethink some sequences that normally would have had to be fixed in postproduction or via expensive re-shoots. “Anyone I’ve talked to who’s worked on a movie has said every movie should have a break after the first month or so of shooting to regroup,” Abrams said. (Ford’s principal work on the film was finished by March 5, when the actor, a pilot in real life as well as in Star Wars, reportedly fractured several more bones when he was solo-flying a small vintage plane and had to execute an emergency landing on a Southern California golf course.)
The Star Wars fan community, rendered giddy by Episode VII’s first two trailers, seems to have embraced the new regime, though as one wary fan I know tweeted, “Lucy is holding a football labeled Star Wars and I’m Charlie Brown.” The movie’s P.R. campaign is still being worked out, including an as yet nebulous Star Wars presence at San Diego’s Comic-Con in July. (By the time you’re reading this, fans will have already gathered for their annual May the Fourth Be with You celebration, held, not surprisingly, on May 4.) But given Disney’s and Lucasfilm’s combined expertise in this arena, the summer and fall promise to be one long, exquisite tease for anyone with a HAN SHOT FIRST T-shirt in his or her closet. If skeptics will accept a not disinterested view of what Abrams has accomplished, they can take the word of composer John Williams, who received one of his five Academy Awards for scoring the first Star Wars. He has written all the series’ music since and, at 83, is back again for The Force Awakens. When we spoke in April, Abrams had shown him about three-quarters of the movie in a rough assembly, and he said, “What I have seen is absolutely delightful and witty and funny and engaging. The extensions of the mythology are very cleverly and beautifully written, I think. If I can quote Steven Spielberg”—citing one of the director’s favorite phrases—“J.J. has hit it out of the ballpark. I’m having a lot of fun with it.”
The several minutes of footage I saw backed Williams up, as much as any several minutes from any movie could. Case in point: At the effects session, Abrams was demonstrating his commitment to the more retro, more tactile filmmaking Kasdan had talked about. One scene featured an alien creature that abruptly pops up out of the desert landscape with glowing, flashlight eyes that make it look like a distant cousin to the Jawas of A New Hope. Abrams later called it “a classic, old-school seesaw puppet. We just buried it in the sand, and Neal Scanlan, the creature guy, pushed down on one side and the thing came up on the other side.” At the session, the scene, with the alien suddenly sticking its head over a dune, got a big laugh. Some perfectionist suggested a few digital polishes, but Abrams was wary. “It’s so old-school and crazy,” he said. “We could improve this thing, but at some point do we lose the wonderful preposterousness?”
The question was tabled, but “wonderful preposterousness” isn’t a bad descriptor of the Star Wars ethos at its best. Reviewing another scene, with spaceships blasting away at each other with phasers or whatever, Abrams could briefly be heard making ray-gun noises, the way a kid lying on his bedroom floor and drawing his own spaceships might. That galaxy far, far away appeared to be in good hands.
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