STAR WARS’ UNIVERSAL SHIFT
Strong women aplenty in Last Jedi
Back in 1977, Laura Dern had R2-D2 and C-3PO action figures at her bedside.
Like much of the world, she had lined up to see the original Star Wars movie as an impressionable 10-year-old girl. But she quickly decided that as much as she loved the droids, she actually wanted to be Princess Leia: the heroine of the Star Wars universe played by the late Carrie Fisher.
“I tried for years to do my hair like that,” says Dern, in an interview in downtown Los Angeles to promote Star Wars: The Last Jedi. “It never worked out.”
With her sharp tongue, takecharge attitude and strange double-bun hairdo, Princess Leia was an anomaly in 1970s cinema when Star Wars: A New Hope came out. She was a groundbreaker when it came to females in genre films.
Her power as a role model crossed oceans and generations and, in a recent media conference featuring the cast of The Last Jedi and writer-director Rian Johnson, weighed heavily on the minds of those who worked with Fisher. Discussions about Leia have become even more poignant after Fisher died last year not long after finishing work on The Last Jedi. Her final take on Princess Leia was also her final film role.
“She was very significant,” says actress Gwendoline Christie, who plays the villainous Captain Phasma in The Last Jedi and grew up in South Downs, England, during the 1980s. “Because I was first shown the New Hope when I was six. I remember thinking ‘Wow, that character is very different.’ I watched TV and film obsessively from such a young age. But it stayed with me throughout my formative years: She’s really interesting, she’s really smart, she’s really funny, she’s courageous, she’s bold and she isn’t prepared to be told what to do.”
But if Leia was pioneering as a female character, it would take another 40 years for the balance of the Star Wars universe to significantly shift. Arguably, it all began when Daisy Ridley picked up a lightsaber as the orphan scavenger-turned-heroine Rey in 2015’s The Force Awakens, becoming the first female who seemed just as able as the boys when it came to harnessing the power of The Force.
While she was aware of the disparity in films, the 25-year-old actress admits she was unprepared for the reaction when it came to light that the new heroine of the Star Wars universe — a potential “chosen one” with a precocious gift for The Force — would be a woman.
“I knew it was a big deal but the response was so beyond anything I could have imagined,” she says. “It was just so monumental, the response and how people thought about it.”
In The Last Jedi, Rey is just one of the female characters who commands the screen. There’s also Kelly Marie Tran, who plays the resourceful Resistance mechanic Rose Tico. Double Oscar nominee Dern makes her first Star Wars appearance as Resistance leader Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo. Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o returns as Force-sensitive pirate queen Maz Kanata, while Christie is back as the fierce Captain Phasma. And, of course, Fisher returns one last time to command the rebel manoeuvres as General Leia.
When it comes to how he presents female characters, Dern calls Johnson “one of the most brilliantly subversive filmmakers” she has ever worked with, which is no small pronouncement for an actress who has so often worked with chronically subversive filmmaker David Lynch.
“In the case of the look of my character, I was moved by the fact that he really wanted her strength to first lead with a deep femininity,” she says. “To see a powerful female character also be feminine is something that moves away from a stereotype that is perceived, that strong female characters must be like the boys.”
“You get to see women that are not being strong just because they are acting like men,” adds Christie. “They are doing something else. And also you are seeing a developed character or at least a developing character that is showing some complex character traits. I’m delighted that something as legendary as Star Wars has decided to be modern and to reflect our society more as it is.”
And for Tran, a newcomer to the Star Wars universe, it’s now a matter of continuing to bring interesting and complex female characters to this world.
“It feels like both an honour and a responsibility at the same time,” she says.
“I feel like from the beginning when I initially found out I got this role, I just felt like I wanted to do the whole thing justice. I’m so excited that the girls in this movie kick some butt.”
There have been by conservative estimates some 30 portrayals of Winston Churchill on film, including Timothy Spall in The King’s Speech, Rod Taylor in Inglourious Basterds and John Evans twice, in 1989’s Casablanca Express and five years later in Honey Sweet Love. But British director Joe Wright, whose new film Darkest Hour shows Churchill as a newly appointed prime minister at the start of the Second World War, says he knows only one.
“The only Churchill I have ever seen was Albert Finney’s in Gathering Storm,” he says, referring to the 2002 TV biopic. “Which I’m quite pleased about because I wasn’t corrupted by other interpretations of the man.”
Wright, working from a screenplay by Anthony McCarten, says he wanted to “get to know that man for all his faults and all his genius. And what I found was a deeply human, deeply flawed great man. And I loved him.”
He’s not alone in that respect. Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Churchill in Darkest Hour has many convinced he’s the front-runner in the Oscar race for best actor.
“The important thing I find with all the characters in every film I make is that I have to love them,” Wright says. “And that’s not blind love; that’s a humanistic love. What I’m looking for is understanding.”
Wright says he disagrees with the historical Churchill on many fronts, most notably women’s suffrage (Churchill was a lukewarm supporter at best), Indian independence (he was against it) and “his disastrous Gallipoli campaign” in the First World War, which resulted in more than 100,000 deaths.
“And yet at the moment where it counted the very most he was the one who stood up and resisted, kicking and screaming, the rise of Hitler and Nazism. He understood the perils of appeasing such a totalitarian regime, and for that I will be always be grateful.”
We view Churchill’s wartime success through the clear lens of history, but one of the great achievements of Darkest Hour is the way it reminds us that nothing was certain in 1940.
“I tried very hard to put myself and the actors back into the position of not knowing the outcome,” Wright says. “Churchill was right because Hitler turned left.” If Hitler had “turned right” and invaded England, “it’s conceivable we’d be looking back and thinking Churchill was wrong.”
Darkest Hour takes place in the same time period as this summer’s hit film Dunkirk, but with very little overlap. Christopher Nolan’s film doesn’t even include a portrayal of Churchill.
As a work of dramatic storytelling, Darkest Hour hews close to the truth but includes some inspired invention. In the truth column is its re-creation of the Cabinet war rooms, from which Churchill directed much of the conflict.
“One of the things I love about that place was the way it’s a kind of ‘make do and mend’ environment. It’s bits of coloured wool and string wound around drawing pins stuck into a map on the wall. There’s lots of very dodgy soldering of telephone cables and wires. It blows my mind that they were able to run a global war from that funny little homemade shonky nerve centre.”
And if you’re looking for a stretch of the truth, take the scene in which Churchill rides the Underground one stop from St. James’s Park to Westminster, a two-and-a-half-minute journey that takes three times that in the film, as the prime minister takes an impromptu poll of the passengers’ mood regarding the impending conflict.
“We did a test screening in London,” he says. “I think the only complaint about the film at the time was: ‘Well, you know, between Westminster and the next stop is not that long.’ And you go: Come on, guys, if that’s your problem with the plausibility of the movie then that’s kind of like — wow.”