i often see folks misconstruing things about how the sequel trilogy was made. some questions asked are fairly reasonable, like "why wasn't the star wars sequel trilogy all planned out in advance?" or "why did rian johnson do things so differently from jj abrams?" and others are more inane like "why did ruin johnson throw away my snoke theory???"
rian johnson is a master of giving PR-friendly answers while also saying something relatively genuine. you can see this in a lot of interviews he does, such as when anyone asks "did it suck to deal with the backlash to TLJ?" and he responds with stuff like "those folks don't get Star Wars and are lame, the majority of the fans I meet are great," etc etc.
this also means you can usually get real answers out of him, unlike jj abrams, who also often gives real answers but (imo) reveals a lack of substance. that's not quite why i'm here, this is honestly kind of a messy post. i'm kinda getting into the timeline of the disney sequel trilogy production and the goofiness that cropped up along the way.
anyway. long post ahead.
As you probably know, in October 2012, Disney announced the Lucasfilm acquisition. Prior to this announcement they had already been planning a new film trilogy, with Michael Arndt writing the script. He reportedly struggled with completing it, and with six months to go until filming, Lawrence Kasdan and JJ Abrams took over and re-wrote it, publicly stating the script was finished in January 2014. The movie came out December 2015, roughly two years later, but again there were reports of things changing during filming (such as Oscar Isaac's character Poe Dameron originally dying until he expressed concern about this fact).
Regardless of what you think about the final product, the movie was a lot of "laying the tracks as the train is running" type stuff. Then (and once again!) Disney CEO Bob Iger had set strict deadlines for the films to come out, and he wasn't budging (this would rear its head several times over the next few years as films were retooled quickly to meet encroaching deadlines). However, one of the upcoming films wasn't rushed, wasn't retooled, re-cast, or given a new director at the last minute due to Kasdan being weirdly annoyed by seeing too much improv in his goofy Han Solo script:
Ok, it's no secret if you know me that I'm a fan of TLJ. Also, if you've been on the internet for any amount of time, you also know that talking about it is a fucking nightmare because everyone and their little brother comes out of the woodwork to voice an opinion on it. Many of those opinions are bad racist and sexist shitheads. If you dislike the movie for normal reasons like you think Canto Bight is too long or meandering, that's totally fine. Anyway, that's not that important. I wanna talk about the film's production and how that affects perceptions and the final results.
The following audio clips are all from the SlashFilm podcast episode 451 in which they speak to Johnson about The Last Jedi, it's production, and the initial fan reaction to it. Also listen, you're not me. You probably don't want to listen to hours of interviews about the production of space wizard movies. So here, have some excerpts:
Rian Johnson was writing his script during the shooting of TFA. Which isn't insane but isn't super common, I think -- essentially you're going off of dailies and the script for TFA to plan out your entire film. This also means that he hasn't seen: a) the marketing campaign for TFA and b) the fan reaction.
This is critical to my mind, because it reveals why a lot of things are the way they are. One, Rian knows Rey's parentage is an important question, but the reasoning he comes to is almost entirely uninfluenced by the fan speculation about "is she a Kenobi?" or whatever else was going on at the time. This clip also has a fun bit in which he lists all the possible options for Rey's parents, and near the end starts to say "Palpa-" and then cuts himself off.
I apologize for not transcribing all this audio (listen to it if you can, it adds WAY more context), but he touches on the two key takeaways from this storytelling decision: it mirrors Empire in an inverse fashion, and also it's the hardest thing for Rey to hear right now. Recently, I said to a friend that the 11th episode of Andor also made similar storytelling decisions, in that it went out of its way to give all its characters the hardest news they could hear, right before the finale (Mothma, Luthen, and Andor mainly). I'm writing this the day before Andor's final episode, so let's hope it sticks the landing.
Another thing is in the early version of TLJ, Poe and Finn went to Canto Bight together, and Rose's character didn't exist. However, Johnson dropped this after realizing that Finn and Poe couldn't challenge each other as characters. As he reworked the script, he created Rose to play off of Finn, and then broached the issue of Poe's arc. Given his relatively simple character archetype in TFA (brash hothead pilot), there wasn't much to go on, but eventually narrowed in on the "learning to be a leader" storyline.
(I also love the aside Johnson adds about the loss Leia has been through with Han and other "hotshot pilots." That maybe after all this, she's "bow[ing] underneath the weight of all of this loss" and her wisdom and leadership style being influenced by that.)
Johnson wrote constantly, and sent his work updates to Lucasfilm every week, keeping them abreast of his thoughts and plans. Nothing was "sprung" on them, including the climax of the film with Luke. Michael Arndt said that while working on TFA it was hard to find a place to fit Luke in, because when he shows up he "sucks all the air out of the room." That led to Abrams and Kasdan placing Luke as the Macguffin at the end of the film, and in some ways tossing the problem to Johnson. "Why the hell did Luke abandon the galaxy, Han, and his sister when they needed him?" It's a tough question to answer, and while fans might've wanted Luke out there swinging his green lightsaber around, I feel like Johnson rose to the task pretty well.
He does address the elephant in the room, which is "why let each director tell their own story, instead of planning the trilogy out in advance?" Whether you find his answer compelling or not is up to you, but I do find that if I was forced to choose between a top-down story outline or letting directors go hog wild and be inventive, I'd prefer the latter. For all the failures of the Disney era of Star Wars films, it did give us one of my favorite films ever, so I can't fault it too much.
This last tidbit isn't fully verified but: scuttlebutt is that Johnson was asked back to direct episode 9 after Colin Trevorrow was fired. Johnson requested (at least) a year delay to complete the film, and Kathleen Kennedy advocated for this too, but Iger insisted on a December 2019 release. As such, Johnson passed on the film and Abrams was asked back instead. And well, the rest is history.
Anyway the real moral of this whole blog post is I love chunky spaceships that look like shit!!
