Star Wars: the next generation
JJ Abrams brings the dead back to life, and puts the late Carrie Fisher into the latest instalment. 'The story was telling us we needed Leia,' he decided
“Was the room shaking before, or was it just me?” asks Jeffrey Jacob Abrams, known to all as JJ, as he bounds in and pulls up a seat.
It was, in fact, the former: moments earlier, the Beverly Hills hotel in which we are talking was convulsed by a seismic spasm, big enough to send a shiver through the furniture but not to spill our coffee. In Los Angeles, on a morning the colour of mouthwash, Abrams’s own energy level has been calibrated to the exact midpoint between caffeine and earthquake.
That seems doubly impressive considering the 53-year-old director has spent the past two years working on Star Wars:
The Rise of Skywalker, the third instalment in the space-fantasy series’ so-called “sequel trilogy”, and the ninth and final episode in its central narrative thread.
It was Abrams, brisk and quizzical, with thick glasses and a head of gel-tamed curls, who revived Star Wars in 2015 with
The Force Awakens, a spiritual encore to George Lucas’s worldchanging 1977 original. And when Episode IX’s initial director and co-writer, Colin Trevorrow, fell victim to Lucasfilm’s ever-swinging “creative differences” scythe, the studio’s president, Kathleen Kennedy, turned to Abrams to fix things fast. (It was his wife of 23 years, the PR executive Katie McGrath, who persuaded him to go back, describing the onerous offer as a “gift” that would allow him to tie up the story he’d started.)
Abrams works under such a smog of secrecy that you may wonder, as I did, why he would agree to an interview about one of the decade’s most hotly anticipated blockbusters almost two months before he’d even finished it.
The Rise of Skywalker had to grow in the shadow of tragedy. The initial, abandoned version of Episode IX had been worked on for 10 months already when Carrie Fisher, the actress who played Princess Leia, died at the age of 60 in December 2016.
It’s understood that Leia’s planned central role in the Trevorrow script was one focus of the subsequent fallings-out over how the film should be reworked.
Abrams says he was given a “clean slate” when Kennedy reenlisted him in September 2017. But as he and Chris Terrio rewrote the script over five months, however they wrangled it, “the story was telling us that it needed Leia”.
In some early discussions, it was suggested by more than one involved party that Fisher’s role should be recast, though Abrams chivalrously declines to name names. (“If the room was still shaking, I would tell you,” he deadpans.)
The prospect of resurrecting the actress via computer graphics was also mooted. Abrams shot down both suggestions.
“I knew a CG Carrie would have been a disaster,” he says. “Even if it had looked great, it would have felt wrong. And we couldn’t just say the character was off somewhere, or had passed away between movies.”
He found a solution in abandoned footage from The Force Awakens.
He and Terrio then wrote new scenes around Fisher’s performance into which other cast members could be grafted.
Abrams is uncomfortable with his reputation as Hollywood’s go-to guy for franchise defibrillation, even though it’s well earned. Before Star Wars, he resuscitated Star Trek and Mission: Impossible - the latter was his first film, after creating the television series Felicity, Alias and Lost.
“I never look at what I do from the perspective of ‘Oh, this needs repairing ’ , ” he says.
Born in New York in 1966 and raised in Los Angeles, he was the child of television producers: his mother, Carol, who died in 2012, won a Peabody Award for her film about the first racially integrated school in Little Rock, Arkansas, an achievement Abrams talks about with a glow of pride.
Aged 13, he befriended the guards at the Paramount Studios lot where his father, Gerald, had an office, so he could sneak on to the sets of sitcoms and watch the actors rehearse: “Robin Williams in Mork & Mindy, Ron Howard and Henry Winkler in Happy Days,” he reminisces.
Aside from studio sets, his other childhood obsession was magic, and he would practise tricks in his bedroom for hours before testing them on relatives and classmates.
His Damascene moment came during a Happy Days rehearsal: he was the lone occupant of the live-studio-audience seating, watching the crew cycle through lighting schemes and sizing up imaginary shots through his fingers. “They would say, ‘OK, dusk,’ and all of a sudden, ‘Pshh, pshh’” - he makes the universally understood sound of a large light turning on - “it would be dusk. And then night, then breakfast time. And I realised the movies were magic tricks.”
Inspired, he took up the Super 8 camera given to him by his parents and made a series of effects-heavy shorts, including one called High Voltage, “about a complete loser at school who gets electrocuted and uses his newfound powers to get the girl”.
It was selected for a local teen film festival and Abrams, then 15, got his picture in the Los Angeles Times standing beside Matt Reeves, the future director of 2008 monster movie Cloverfield and the forthcoming Batman reboot. “Beardless Wonders of Film-Making”, the headline read.The article caught the attention of one Kathleen Kennedy, who was then working as an assistant to Steven Spielberg.
She got in touch the next day to ask if Abrams and Reeves would be interested in repairing her boss’s old student films.
The two eagerly accepted, and spent days lying together on the floor of Abrams’s room, peeling off Spielberg’s original sticky-tape splices and fitting the film strips back together exactly as the master had cut them in his late teens.
Like George Lucas, Spielberg was a titan to the young Abrams: he describes the experience of seeing Star Wars: A
New Hope and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in a single year as “the one-two punch of a cinematic lifetime.”
Recalling Spielberg’s trust in him, Abrams says it “still makes not an ounce of sense”: “I wouldn’t give anything of value to a 15-year-old that was my own child, let alone a stranger.”
But in reconnecting those cuts Spielberg himself had made two decades earlier, Abrams felt a kind of magic in the imitative act.
He wonders how it would have felt to make blockbusters in the ET days, a “less contentious and divided moment, when people felt excited about something that was made only to entertain them”.
But he sees Star Wars’s message of strength in diversity as more timely than ever. “Clearly one of the great things about Star Wars is the idea that some average farm boy can leave home and in two hours be part of a family he loves that includes a princess, a rogue gunslinger and a Wookiee,” he says. What feels right for him once
Star Wars has been put to bed? We talk about Spielberg’s extraordinarily wide-ranging career, and Abrams marvels at his move from Jurassic Park to
Schindler’s List in the space of a year (1993) that he was somehow able to supervise dinosaur special effects for the former while shooting the latter on location in Poland, mentally immersed in the Holocaust.
I ask Abrams if he could make the same kind of transition. His brow furrows. “I do feel that, with Hollywood being in a place of reboots and remakes, and I know I’m as much to blame for this as anyone, that the next wave is critical,” he says.
“Original storytelling, new worlds and new characters have to balance the sequels. And I would hope to be part of that wave.”
Could he manage the gravity of a Schindler’s List-like project? “Sure, I would hope so,” he says.
• Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker will start screening at Hemingways in East London on December 20. There will be a pre-screening on December 19.