I'm all for JJ Abrams returning to direct the ninth and final chapter of the Skywalker saga. But can we please point out the elephant in the room when it comes to the failure of this Disney-fied version of Star Wars? The fact that there was no apparent overarching planned story. Is it just me or does it look like there’s a brand new creative team in place for each chapter and they were given carte-blanche to do whatever they felt like doing with the story and characters? If I hadn’t known before watching it, I would have barely guessed that “The Last Jedi” was a sequel to “The Force Awakens.” Thematically, visually, dialogue-wise, it all felt uncorrelated. That, to me, will be the lasting legacy of this trilogy. Let’s hope Abrams can somehow find a way to bring it all back home.
Speaking with Fast Company (via The Playlist), Abrams says he had originally turned down Star Wars 9 when he was first asked to direct it:
“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. 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.’”
It was Abrams’ wife and Bad Robot co-CEO Katie McGrath who convinced him he should return:
“To ask to have that happen again, I felt a little bit like I was playing with fire. Like, why go back? We managed to make it work. What the hell am I thinking? And there was a moment when I literally said, ‘No,’ and Katie said, ‘You should do this.’ And my first thought was, has she met someone? And then I thought, she’s usually right about stuff. And when she said it, I think that she felt like it was an opportunity to bring to a close this story that we had begun and had continued, of course.”
Abrams admits it was a daunting prospect given that Star Wars 9 already had a release date, and revealed that he did indeed toss out the previous script that Trevorrow was working on:
“To have no script and to have a release date and have it be essentially a two-year window when you’re saying (to yourself), you’ve got two years from the decision to do it to release, and you have literally nothing . . . . You don’t have the story, you don’t have the cast, you don’t have the designers, the sets. There was a crew, and there were things that will be worked on for the version that preceded ours, but this was starting over.”