Via Slashfilm.com:
On Tuesday night, Rian Johnson sat down with the hosts of /Filmcast for an in-depth interview about his polarizing, powerful film Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Johnson dished on everything from how he originally pitched The Last Jedi to Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy, to the furious backlash the movie received from fans on opening night, and that one striking scene that had theaters scrambling to put up warning signs assuring audiences that they were seeing what they were supposed to be seeing. And, because we’re still all arguing about it, Johnson went into detail about Rey’s origins.
Below are some of the best tidbits and trivia we learned from the interview with the director.
Johnson Didn’t Immediately Say Yes to Direct Episode 8
After he had released Looper, Johnson had been approached with offers to direct various franchises, and got very used to saying no, determined to continue writing and directing his own stuff. So when Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy brought him the offer to direct Star Wars Episode 8, his immediate instinct was to reject it. “But…it’s Star Wars,” Johnson said. “It was my whole world when I was a kid. It’s hard to overstate the importance in terms of the [franchise’s] foundations of my creative life. So it’s something that sort of stopped me in my tracks.” He told Kennedy that he would think about the offer.
“I thought I would go home and make a list of pros and cons. But what I did was I went home, and for several nights, I didn’t sleep… I stayed up all night watching documentaries about mountain climber disasters.”
In the end, Johnson said, “It wasn’t an intellectual decision, I just had to do it.”
Johnson Started Writing His Script Before Force Awakens Began Production
Johnson’s meeting with Kathleen Kennedy took place when J.J. Abrams and Lucasfilm were still prepping Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and production hadn’t even started yet. When Johnson came on board for Episode 8, the first thing he did was read script for Force Awakens. That was the only thing he had to go on when he was writing script for Last Jedi, Johnson said: “When I was writing [the script] I was watching the dailies [from Force Awakens]. I’m really grateful the timing worked like that both so I could see Daisy, John, Adam, and Oscar in their roles, but I’m really thankful I wrote it before the movie came out. I was writing based on my personal reaction to the script and to what I was seeing, and not based on some kind of perception of the world’s reaction to it. That made it more personal in terms of the launching points I used for my movie.”
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