Rian Johnson: Catering to Fans, Instead of Challenging Them, Is a ‘Mistake’

Amidst the furious debate regarding “The Last Jedi” and Rian Johnson, people tend to forget that Johnson is actually a very talented director. After all, when you’ve already directed movies like “Looper,” “Brick” and “Knives Out” in your short but successful career, it doesn’t really matter whether “The Last Jedi” was good or bad.

For the last two years, Johnson has basically been on the receiving end of a backlash from “Star Wars” fans because of their passionate ire towards “The Last Jedi.” Johnson’s creative decisions pleased film critics, but hardcore Star Wars loyalists despised the fresh new direction Johnson took with the “Last Jedi.” There was no catering to fans and the director says it would have been a mistake to do the opposite and abide by fan theories and philosophies. Johnson expressed this opinion during a recent Radio.com interview on the “Swings & Mrs.” podcast [via IndieWire]:

I think approaching any creative process with [making fandoms happy] would be a mistake that would lead to probably the exact opposite result,” Johnson said. “Even my experience as a fan, you know if I’m coming into something, even if it’s something that I think I want, if I see exactly what I think I want on the screen, it’s like ‘oh, okay,’ it might make me smile and make me feel neutral about the thing and I won’t really think about it afterward, but that’s not really going to satisfy me.

John added,

I want to be shocked, I want to be surprised, I want to be thrown off-guard, I want to have things recontextualized, I want to be challenged as a fan when I sit down in the theater…What I’m aiming for every time I sit down in a theater is to have the experience [I had] with ‘Empire Strikes Back,’ something that’s emotionally resonant and feels like it connects up and makes sense and really gets to the heart of what this thing is and in a way that I never could have seen coming.

I have seen '“The Rise of the Skywalker” and I can tell you that the film fails because JJ Abrams does exactly what Johnson is against here — he appeases to the loyalists, basically telling them, “welcome back to regularly scheduled programming.” Abrams has listened to the fans and has course-corrected the trajectory of Johnson’s “Last Jedi.” Whether that will work on the viewer will entirely depend on the individual, but I can tell you that where Johnson joyously succeeded, Abrams fails.

Of course, we can’t really know what Johnson thinks of “The Rise of Skywalker” because he supposedly hasn’t seen the film yet, but he will surely chime in with an opinion in the days to come and I most definitely look forward to his take.