ST Behind the Scenes of the Sequel Trilogy

You calling me lazy?
I get what you mean. It's not necessarily laziness, it probably has more to do with different perspectives; where the filmmaker's focus is.

As for the OT, I wouldn't say it did anything comparable to the Dyad, or left anything crucial unexplained.
Okay, Luke and Leia being siblings came about in the third act, but that wasn't really essential to the story at hand. It's more a part of the overarching Saga storyline.

Good point about the MCU. There's a franchise that's always been well planned thanks to Kevin Feige and his team thinking ahead. You can tell that great care goes into mapping out cohesive storylines spanning over years - and they're very adept at spotting those plot threads that most of us never even recognized as plot threads but turn out extremely significant when put in a new context.

It would be pretty cool if LFL does that with Star Wars, I agree.

 

I was going based off what Daisy Ridley stated about JJ having done story drafts for the next two films that that the following directors, Rian specifically chose to ignore since he wanted the movie to be his own. I never said that TLJ didn't continue from where TFA left off at all, so I don't know what you mean there. I will always maintain that the best thing that TLJ did for TFA was put Kylo in the position of Supreme Leader, everything else that TFA sets up or introduced however, feels like it was a plot thread that RJ wasn't personally invested in. Questions he wouldn't have asked if he made TFA, therefore they received controversial or unsatisfactory conclusions. Every set up from who Rey is, to why Kylo turned to the dark side, to Snoke, etc. We know the answer to these things now, but all of them and more felt like a race to the bottom of your excitement than an attempt to energize you. Like the director is trying to teach the audience not to get their hopes up or that this is what disappointment feels like, as if people go to the theater to be intentionally let down. Subversion has become pretty popular over years for reasons unknown to me, such as the Mandarin reveal in Iron Man 3, and the Quicksilver reveal in WandaVision more recently. The Last Jedi could follow up on all of those things you described, but that doesn't mean the answers were fulfilling. Personally, TLJ is my Iron Man 3, and the best way I can describe why I find it lacking is that it takes more than it gives.

Dammit, this has become more of a rant about my problems with TLJ than about what Ridley said, but I'm not exactly sorry about it.

 

I personally think there's lots of 'laziness' in the ST... be it in plotting, characterisation, conceptualisation etc. but it's largely semantics... and you are right, it can be equally referred to as a 'lack of appropriate focus'... The other films (the OT/PT) aren't immune to this, but I think the key difference is that (IMO) the ST's 'lack of focus' is more detrimental to the overall product. George Lucas was very much focused on plot, concepts, characters, underlying mythology/philosophies, world building etc. and maybe not so much focused on dialogue or dynamic camera movement in a scene. And when comparing Lucas era SW with Disney era, the former is more successful, IMO, than the latter because of what Lucas focuses on that Disney do not.

 

The thing that Daisy said about JJ having done 'story drafts' - I've seen that interrview, and its extremely tentative and unsure - she couches it as "here's what I think I know". Frankly I think there's absolutely no evidence to think that such a thing ever existed. Three reasons:

1. Abrams was an Executive Producer on Episode VIII. If he felt strongly the story should go in a certain direction, he certainly had the ability to say so.
2. Rian Johnson said there was no such drafts. I suppose you could assert that he's just lying, but I don't see any reason to assume this.
3. Abrams himself said he didn't do any drafts. He was asked about it in (IIRC) Empire pre-TROS, i.e. as to whether any of the stuff in TROS came from plans he had before. And he quite openly stated that he had never prepared any such thing, he just had a list of random things during TFA that he thought "might be cool". Like that's it.

Like once more, how much of a plan could Abrams have had when Daisy outright said he couldn't even decide on Rey's mysterious parentage in TFA, just like Johnson said.

 

"Here's what I think I know" is a verbal caveat for saying that everything I say may be totally wrong...

 

JJ's future story drafts could literally be just a list of 'cool' things that are mysteries in TFA, but "should" get opened later. But he, nor anyone at LFL demanded that they follow it. It was simply a list used for TFA, to keep things sealed in the box for that movie's own story.

Do not open until..
Do not open until..
Do not open until...

 

Don’t JJ’s mystery boxes tend to be opened in the movie itself....?

 

TV is different. I heard that with Lost, at least, the studio wanted more and more seasons, and JJ stopped being involved after a few of them.

As for TFA, for all we know, JJ *did* answer the major mysteries but studio (and RJ) requests/demands necessitated that they be cut because they decided to go in a different direction.

 

JJ didn't even answer the "Who is Luke Skywalker" that supposedly hooked him into doing the one movie.

 

Eh. I don't know if I'd assume he'd try to force someone to do what he wants. He may have been fairly hands off.

 

Abrams' Executive Producer credit on TLJ is more of an honorary title than anything. EP's barely have any substantial input into the creation of a film.

 

He at least implied that they originally planned on revealing Rey's parentage but decided to leave that for later because one such revelation (Kylo being Leia's and Han's son) was enough for one movie.
I don't remember when he said that, but it might have been in "Secrets of The Force Awakens".

 

Yeah. It does sound like a bit of revisionism from JJ himself.

 

I would just like to know if, at any point, it ever occurred to anyone working on TFA that they had Mark, Carrie and Harrison together and (with the killing of Han) would never have that opportunity again.

 

I'd think that Arndt's earliest outlines of TFA had an OT 3 reunion, before the decision was made to push Luke to the end of the film.

 

'Who is Luke Skywalker?' meant roughly 'what happened to him?'

'Who' would give you 'what' and vice versa, gradually. Development.

But that was given an oblique answer once. A 'who'. JJ talked about King Arthur as the mythical correlate. (That's Lucas talking about lightsaber=Excalibur in 1977)

And RJ mentioned Arthur when talking about Luke. Older Arthur, the one in Le Morte D'Arthur.

In the forceback, rocks fall and then we see Luke. Rocks, like that hut. Like the rocks being lifted in TLJ. Merlin was trapped under a rock once, and under the ground in other versions of the story.

Luke as Arthur(knight)/Merlin(jedi) - a space wizard.
https://boards.theforce.net/threads...-sequel-trilogy.50053898/page-5#post-56990556

Maybe his innocent 'she's beautiful' in ANH and his no less innocent 'I've got to save you' in ROTJ were turned against him. The temptation to help. The seduction. The trap.

That deleted 'pretty eyes' line in TLJ. There's a woman inside Ben's head. A scream. Then Luke loses it force seconds.
That french woman in Apocalypse Now. There are two of you, don't you see? One that kills...and one that loves.

Maybe he had been offered that lightsaber before.

 

I'm sorry. I have no idea what any of that means.

 

Luke being seduced and then ensnared at a certain point after ROTJ but 6 years before TFA, in a certain way; just like Ben being seduced by Snoke in another way, and then ensnared.

Arthurian legends (Old King Arthur/Merlin) as a template during development. Then those legends being alluded to by JJ and RJ in interviews.

The post means what it says.

 

It mostly seems like word salad.

 

It is rather coy about what's being alluded to, but the second post makes it very clear: the suggestion is maybe there was a Nimue figure, a villainous woman (?) who trapped Luke on that planet rather than him being there by his own choice.

 

At the very least - why didn’t they take some sort of preventative measure and film a week with all of them just incase of tragedy. Not for a specific movie, but scenes that could be used if need be. Has anything ever been done like that for a series? With Star Wars it makes so much sense.