Explaining the failure of ‘Solo’
Its original directors were removed after shooting began and there were shifts in tone when Ron Howard signed up
The one thing the director Ron Howard wanted to get right about Star Wars was the Kessel Run. In the original 1977 film, Harrison Ford’s Han Solo boasted of having navigated this apparently deadly hyperspace route in “less than 12 parsecs”. But in the Solo spin-off, audiences would get to see the escapade first-hand — and discover it hadn’t been quite the breeze Han’s vague, offhand bluster had implied.
“The idea that you’d heard him casually bragging about this thing, and then would discover what a near miss it had been, and all the obstacles he’d had to outwit — I loved that,” says Howard. “I just liked the idea that everything was far more complicated than he would ever dare let on afterwards.”
Funny, that. Howard isn’t an obvious kindred spirit to Star Wars’ foremost smuggler and scoundrel: the 64-year-old former Happy Days star is Hollywood’s level-headed all-rounder-in-residence. But Solo: A Star Wars Story has been his own personal 12-parsec Kessel Run — a breakneck rip through some of the most treacherous blockbuster-making conditions around.
This time last year, Solo was in crisis. Its original directors, the Jump Street and Lego Movie duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, were taking their signature improvisational approach to the material. But on a production with this many moving parts, it had slowed down the shoot to a crawl, while the Star Wars tone was getting lost in the zany high jinks.
“Basically halfway through the meal [Kathleen Kennedy] said, ‘I think we’re going to have to make a change...” RON HOWARD | Director
For five months, everyone pressed on in hope, but things reached an impasse in June 2017, so Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy met Howard for breakfast in Los Angeles, to put some feelers out. “Basically halfway through the meal she said, ‘I think we’re going to have to make a change, and we’re building our list of candidates to quickly go to, so would you like to be on it?’,” Howard recalls.
His instinct was to say no: he had never taken on a half-finished film before, and “the whole idea made me feel a little uncomfortable,” he admits. But he agreed to read the script, and as he did, the prospect of taking on Solo started to feel like “an interesting test of my mettle”, especially as he hadn’t made a large-scale fantasy adventure since Willow in 1988. Two days after Lord and Miller were officially removed from the project, Howard told Kennedy he’d do it. Four days after that, he was standing on set.
I meet Howard the day after Solo screened at the Cannes Film Festival, on the Carlton Hotel’s seventh floor terrace.
Alden Ehrenreich, aka Han 2.0, is on the terrace too, contemplatively chewing on a grapefruit, while actor-comedian-rapper Donald Glover, who plays Han’s unscrupulous sometime-ally Lando Calrissian, is indoors reclining on a sofa. “Don’t get too relaxed!” a publicist advises Glover, only halfjokingly. Everyone laughs. Solo’s making-of story is a hard one to tell — at least for the time being, while the wounds are still fresh. But all three are here to tell it.
Not that theirs has been the only disturbance in the Star Wars franchise since Disney’s multi-billion takeover of Lucasfilm in October 2012. Rogue One, the first of the stand-alone Star Wars Story films, underwent considerable last-minute reshoots, during which the film’s co-writer Tony Gilroy informally took the reins from director Gareth Edwards. And two more directors, Colin Trevorrow and Josh Trank, have both been removed from their respective franchise entries at the pre-production stage.
But the Solo farrago was by far the most dramatic: partly because it became public at such a late stage in production, partly because it entailed the downfall of a directing partnership about whom no one — certainly not Howard, Ehrenreich or Glover — has a bad word to say.
“We did a lot of character work with Phil and Chris that was really good, which may not necessarily have happened with other directors,” offers Glover.