IN THE STAR WARS SPOTLIGHT
Last Jedi director ready for the glare from a galaxy far, far away
It’s fitting that Rian Johnson rolls out a geeky analogy involving giant robots when asked about directing, Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
It helps if you are familiar with the film Johnson enthusiastically references. So, for the uninitiated, Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim is a 2013 adventure about futuristic soldiers piloting massive robots against invading sea monsters.
When asked if it was daunting to take on a project the size and budget of The Last Jedi, Johnson admits he originally feared the mammoth apparatus needed to guide a Star Wars movie would be too unwieldy to properly control and would distract him from such niceties as character and plot.
But he quickly realized that said apparatus, while undeniably huge and complex, was also extraordinarily well-oiled and fine-tuned. He says he felt less like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times and more like one of those brave pilots controlling a battle-ready robot.
“Basically you get into a suit in the head and the massive machine of a robot follows your every movement perfectly,” says Johnson.
“That’s how I felt the machine was in making this movie. It only helped. It let you use these big-scale things to craft these intimate moments.”
Still, Johnson admits he was as surprised as anyone when he was approached by Lucasfilm president and Last Jedi producer Kathleen Kennedy a few years back about taking the reins on the next Star Wars film, continuing the 40-year-old fantasy franchise that pits Resistance fighters against an evil empire in a galaxy far, far away. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know the material. Johnson has been a Star Wars fanatic ever since he was four and his father took him to the 1977 original. Later, he made up his own Star Wars stories with toys in his back yard.
But when it came to film and TV, Johnson’s reputation was built on directing episodes of Breaking Bad and smaller films such 2005 highschool noir Brick and the 2008 caper-comedy Brothers Bloom.
Even when he did graduate to higher-budget sci-fi fare with 2012’s Looper, he brought a personal and cerebral touch to the genre.
“After Looper came out, because (it) was a sci-fi movie, I would get approached occasionally to be in the mix for bigger things,” he says. “I had just got into the habit of saying no, just because I had set my sights on writing movies and making them on a smaller level. And then this came around and it was very unexpected. I took some time to think about it and just realized nothing I could possibly do would make me happier.”
Earlier this month, Johnson joined the impressive all-star cast in meeting the press in downtown Los Angeles. It was still a few weeks before the film was set to open and it was not screened for attending journalists. Which meant that Johnson and his cast were forced to discuss plot points of The Last Jedi in the vaguest of terms.
What we know is that The Resistance, made up of both new (Daisy Ridley’s Rey, John Boyega’s Finn, Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron) and old (Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker and the late Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia, in her final role) fighters, are gearing up to fight the mysterious First Order and the dark side of the force in various pairings.
As 2015’s The Force Awakens ended, Rey had finally tracked down a broken and reclusive Skywalker, who was living in exile.
“To me, the job of the middle chapter is to take these characters you’ve set up in the first chapter and put them through the ringer and see what they’re made of,” he says.
“We’re going to challenge each one of them, we’re going to really test their mettle. The other big job of this movie is Luke Skywalker and getting into his head. This is the film where we are going to learn what Luke’s deal is.”