JJ Abrams is not a man who gives up secrets lightly, and that's doubly true when it comes to his work on Star Wars films. And while he might not be spilling any juicy plot details for Episode IX, due later this year, in this new interview for business mag Fast Company, he does talk in considered terms about his initial reluctance to return for the third of the new trilogy, the challenges of following in the footsteps of Rian Johnson and The Last Jedi, and why he thinks they were able to pull off something "special" with the new film.
When Colin Trevorrow, who had initially been hired to take on Episode IX, dropped out, Abrams was the man that Lucasfilm approached to step in. "I wasn’t supposed to be there. I wasn’t the guy, ya know? I was working on some other things, and I had something else that I was assuming would be the next project, if we’d be so lucky," the director recalls. "And then Kathy Kennedy called and said, 'Would you really, seriously, consider coming aboard?' And once that started, it all happened pretty quickly. The whole thing was a crazy leap of faith. And there was an actual moment when I nearly said, 'No, I’m not going to do this.
I was trepidatious to begin with, getting involved, because I love Star Wars so much and felt like it was... It was almost, on a personal level, a dangerous thing to get too close to something that you care that much about." Fortunately for Kennedy and the wider Wars galaxy, Abrams' wife and producing partner Katie McGrath talked him into it.
With two years to make the movie for a pre-ordained release date, and no script in hand, Abrams asked Argo's Chris Terrio to co-write the script with him. And even then, there were challenges... "It was a completely unknown scenario," he explains. "I had some gut instincts about where the story would have gone. But without getting in the weeds on Episode VIII, that was a story that Rian wrote and was telling based on VII before we met. So he was taking the thing in another direction. So we also had to respond to Last Jedi. So our movie was not just following what we had started, it was following what we had started and then had been advanced by someone else. So there was that, and, finally, it was resolving nine movies. While there are some threads of larger ideas and some big picture things that had been conceived decades ago and a lot of ideas that Lawrence Kasdan and I had when we were doing The Force Awakens, the lack of absolute inevitability, the lack of a complete structure for this thing, given the way it was being run was an enormous challenge."
With the film now in post-production and on track to meet that December release slot, Abrams sounds a lot more relaxed. And, while we could never imagine him saying, "it's total rubbish and should be fired into the sun", he is at least enthusiastic about what the filmmakers have achieved: "I feel like we’ve gotten to a place – without jinxing anything or sounding more confident than I deserve to be – I feel like we’re in a place where we might have something incredibly special. So I feel relief being home, and I feel gratitude that I got to do it. And more than anything, I’m excited about what I think we might have." For more from Abrams, head to Fast Company's site.
With Star Wars Celebration kicking off in a couple of days and an Episode IX panel scheduled, we can surely expect to learn the title and at least see a teaser for the new movie. The film itself arrives on 19 December.
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