Via Ew.com:

“Noooo! I’ll never join you!” That’s what Luke Skywalker cried out when Darth Vader asked him to cross over to the Dark Side and rule the galaxy alongside him, and J.J Abrams basically said the same thing (perhaps more politely) to Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy when she first reached out to ask if he’d sign on to help launch the first in a new constellation of Star Wars films.

The director, who had previously rebooted Star Trek for the big screen in 2009 and was in the midst of finishing his 2013 sequel Star Trek Into Darkness, simply said he preferred to turn to some original projects. Undeterred, Kennedy persuaded him to helm Star Wars: The Force Awakens by asking a simple question, one with the potential to upend our core beliefs about the galaxy far, far away. “In the context of talking about story and laying out what we were thinking, I said one thing to him,” Kennedy recalls. “‘Who is Luke Skywalker?’”

Abrams, who’s 49 now but was only 11 when the original Star Warsdebuted in 1977, decided he needed to know the answer, even if he had to devise it himself. “He said, ‘Oh my God, I just got the chills. I’m in,’” Kennedy says. “I mean, it really was almost that quickly.” 

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