THE RISE OF SKYWALKER
Whether it’s slaughtering a group of defenceless Tusken Raiders, or lopping the arm off a giant furry creature operating purely on instinct, the joyful adventures of the Skywalker family have had us transfixed for decades. It all ends here, with J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars Episode IX. Odds on Force Ghost Luke killing a herd of Bantha just for kicks? 10-1.
AFTER NINE FILMS AND 42 YEARS, THE STAR WARS SAGA FINALLY COMES TO AN END THIS DECEMBER. IN A WORLD EXCLUSIVE, EMPIRE SPEAKS TO THE DIRECTOR, WRITER AND PRODUCER OF THE RISE OF SKYWALKER — THE MOST ANTICIPATED FILM OF THE YEAR
It all started with a Jane Campion retrospective. the lincoln Center in New York was entering night two of an in-depth celebration of the Kiwi filmmaker’s work when, during a sold-out screening of The Piano, one member of the audience received a text message. He then received another. and another. Hunched down in his seat towards the middle of the auditorium, screenwriter Chris terrio glanced furtively at his mobile as yet another text pinged to life on his screen. It was from J.J. abrams. Just like the last. and the dozen or so before that.
It was 10 september 2017, and several hours earlier terrio had received the first in what would become a torrent of communication: “I’ve just signed on to episode IX,” it read. “We’re gonna write a new script. Would you consider writing it with me?”
“He didn’t even say the words ‘star’ and ‘Wars’,” recalls terrio, with a laugh. “He didn’t have to. I’d been about to go off and direct a small movie, but when you hear Star Wars, everything else goes away.”
terrio agreed on the spot, planning to join abrams in California as soon his schedule would allow. But the texts kept coming. throughout the afternoon, thoughts, ideas and questions popped up one after the other; abrams’ frantic thumbs tapping out the first seeds of story and flinging them across the country to his newfound partner. and so, with Michael Nyman’s haunting score swelling around him and a still-buzzing handset in his grasp, terrio stood up, shuffled apologetically along a row of seats, and walked out of the cinema, leaving Campion’s Oscar darling behind.
“J.J. is constantly brimming with ideas and, in the very best way, he’s very impatient about them! so we just started getting into it then and there. I got on a plane to la the next day.”
less than a week earlier, however, Episode IX’S future hadn’t looked nearly as certain. In development for the past two years under the auspices of Jurassic World director Colin trevorrow, the film had abruptly flown off the rails on 5 september, when it was announced that trevorrow was off the project. rumours of script disagreements circled, but regardless of the reason, lucasfilm had a serious problem: arguably the most important film in Star Wars’ history suddenly had no director, no story and a release date drawing nearer by the day. so lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy sent up a flare to the one man she knew without any doubt could safely take Star Wars over the finish line.
“Getting involved in IX came as a bit of a shock,” recalls
J.J. abrams. “I had completed VII, rian [Johnson] was doing
VIII, and I was not meant to do IX at all. But the opportunity to not just finish the trilogy, but to finish the story that George began — this trilogy of trilogies — was too compelling and too tempting to reject.”
after delivering The Force Awakens, then the third-biggest movie in history, abrams had taken a bow and walked away, returning to Bad robot and a pair of tv pilots he’d been meaning to write. It was here, in his self-imposed exile, that Kennedy
sought him out. Sure, it was an office just over a mile from Santa Monica pier rather than the grassy bluffs of Ahch-to, and Kennedy hadn’t so much climbed 500 hand-carved steps as punched ten digits into her phone but, like a vision of Episode VII’S final moments, there she was. Unexpected. Holding out something Abrams had thought lost and daring him to take it back.
“It’s exponentially the most daunting thing I’ve ever been involved with,” Abrams admits, eyebrows raised as if he still can’t quite believe the magnitude of the task. “But it was more exciting than it was anything.”
The director sits across from us in his suite at Beverly Hills’ Montage hotel, not far from where we last met, six years previously, when he’d just started work on a treatment for what would eventually become The Force Awakens. Abrams’ return as Star Wars’ Supreme Commander was announced just one day after Trevorrow’s departure, allaying the fears of both fans and shareholders alike: voices just a day before crying out in terror, now suddenly silenced. But with only two years to end a saga that had been four decades in the telling, it was clear from the outset he was going to need some help. And so he composed a text (then several more) and sent them flying towards a movie theatre 3,000 miles away, where the Oscarwinning screenwriter of Argo was attempting to watch a film.
“I’ve admired Chris Terrio’s writing for a long time. I called on him because I knew it would be a challenge. But I didn’t know it would be quite as challenging as it was.”
In a time when vast, interconnected stories have become commonplace, and breadcrumbs to the payoffs in Avengers: Endgame can be traced back ten or even 20 films, it’s hard to believe that the Star Wars sequel trilogy didn’t have its course firmly locked in before Episode VII ever left the spaceport. But, just as Abrams himself left neither chart nor compass for Rian Johnson to navigate with, so he began work on The Rise Of Skywalker with nothing to guide him but his wits. It is, by Abrams’ own admission, his preferred method of working. An instinctive storyteller by nature, his impulse is to do what feels right in the moment, rather than slavishly adhere to some pre-ordained master plan. Very appropriately for a franchise so rooted in this exact philosophy, Abrams’ inclination has always been, as Alec Guinness once sagely advised, to stretch out with his feelings.
“You can’t plan everything in advance — which my ‘Revenge Of The Jedi’ poster proves,” he says. “You have a better idea and then you implement it. When I was working on VII, I’d be lying if I said I knew everything that was gonna happen in VIII and IX. I had some ideas, but we had a release date that required us to work on VII!”
So Abrams and Terrio started from scratch. They spitballed ideas during the day, swapped rapid-fire texts at night and, piece-by-piece, set about exploring the fundamental questions
this final movie had to address. Not least of all the aftermath of The Last Jedi, in which Rian Johnson, continuing Abrams’ story, had made some rather significant changes.
There’s A well-worn dramatic principle most commonly ascribed to Anton Chekhov that insists if you see a gun in the first act of a play, it must go off by act three or you’re simply wasting the audience’s time. The same, it appears, is true of dark side degenerates as, despite being sidelined in The Last Jedi, Chekhov’s Knights of Ren will finally go off in The Rise Of Skywalker.
The Knights — from which Kylo draws the latter part of his name — are a nightmarish squad of enforcers who do the bidding of the former Ben solo. A rag-tag band of thugs and killers decked in black just like their leader, though far more battleworn. Armoured in disparate styles — one sports a cowl, one an angry welder’s mask, another a checkered draughtboard faceplate — they pack a similarly eclectic arsenal, from multi-barrelled assault cannon to oversized, anime-style sword, poleaxe and a wicked-looking mace.
Referenced portentously in The Force Awakens and glimpsed so very briefly during Rey’s vision on Takodana, the Knights and their role in Kylo’s fall from grace were set up as a major piece of the Star Wars puzzle. That is until Johnson, who clearly didn’t share Abrams’ interest, dropped the idea, sweeping them briskly under the rug next to the mystery of Rey’s parentage and the bisected corpse of supreme leader snoke. “let the past die,” instructed Kylo Ren in The Last Jedi. “Kill it, if you have to.” A sentiment, one could argue, that cut to the very heart of Johnson’s film.
“we thought about that line a lot,” says Terrio. “Rian did something that any good second act will do, which is create the antithesis. In The Force Awakens luke skywalker is a myth Rey’s obsessed with and there’s a warm embrace of the past. what Rian suggested is the past is a mixed bag and you can’t rely upon it to tell you where to go in the future. what we’re doing with Episode IX is trying to create a synthesis between those two points of view.”
And so, just as the investigation into Rey’s lineage looks set to be reopened, so too are the Knights back with a vengeance (not to mention Abrams talisman Greg Grunberg as pilot snap wexley). with Johnson’s tenure over, we’re playing in Abrams’ yard once more, although our suggestion that he might somehow be trying to course-correct is given short shrift.
“I never found myself trying to repair anything,” Abrams interjects. “If I had done VIII, I would have done things differently, just as Rian would have done things differently if he had done VII. But having worked on television series, I was accustomed to creating stories and characters that then were run by other people. If you’re willing to walk away from the thing
that you created and you believe it’s in trustworthy hands, you have to accept that some of the decisions being made are not gonna be the same that you would make. And if you come back into it, you have to honour what’s been done.”
And what has been done is significant. Luke Skywalker is dead, passing on his knowledge and the mantle of last Jedi to Rey; The Resistance has been all but wiped out; Snoke is gone; and Kylo Ren — now Supreme Leader Ren — is more broken than ever, riven by conflict through the unlikely bond he forged with Rey. Bold and decisive, Johnson’s decisions changed the board entirely, his sharp turns and gear shifts delighting some while earning the ire of others.
“Any time you are telling a story that people deeply care about, there is bound to be discussion and debate,” says Kathleen Kennedy. “That is something that has always been fundamental to the fabric of Star Wars.”
For Abrams and Terrio, meanwhile, the new landscape also brought with it new possibilities.
“Some of the most interesting scenes in The Last Jedi are the conversations between Rey and Ren,” says Terrio. “We’ve tried to pick up that complicated relationship that really has been present ever since the interrogation in Episode VII. When Ren takes off his mask, there’s a nakedness about him with Rey that he doesn’t express to anyone else. Rian developed that in fascinating ways and we’ve been able to develop it even further.”
Ren, left pointedly bare-faced by Johnson throughout VIII, now hides his face once more. It’s a development that, while not a rebuke to The Last Jedi, demonstrates the different touchstones that resonate with each director. Although, Abrams expands, reuniting Kylo with his mask is about more than just sinister aesthetics.
“Having him be masked, but also fractured, is a very intentional thing. Like that classic Japanese process of taking ceramics and repairing them, and how the breaks in a way define the beauty of the piece as much as the original itself. As fractured as Ren is, the mask becomes a visual representation of that. There’s something about this that tells his history. His mask doesn’t ultimately hide him and his behaviour is revealed.”
Ren’s temptation by the light, like Rey’s temptation by the dark, forms the spine of a moral ambiguity that Johnson built on in VIII and very much carries over to IX, bringing with it a sense that George Lucas’ more clearly defined duality might be a relic of a simpler time. Neither light nor dark, The Rise Of Skywalker and its characters exist more within what could be considered the grey side of the Force — something underscored by the tantalising footage of ‘Darth Rey’ (complete with cowl, hangover pallor and double-bladed red lightsaber) that closed Abrams’ D23 Expo footage presentation in Anaheim in August.
“I’d rather let that one lie,” he deflects, when pressed on the subject. “But I will say that the movie has a number of things that you wouldn’t expect to have happen and that you wouldn’t expect certain characters to do. There are surprises along the way.” He smiles, mischievously. “And that’s one of them.” THE VALLEY OF The Moon in Southern Jordan has seen its share of action. Cut into the red sandstone cliffs near Aqaba, the striking lowlands known in Arabic as Wadi Rum have been visited by both real and fictional Lawrences of Arabia, stood in for the face of Mars, been the birth place of the Alien in Prometheus, and will next year double as the eponymous desert planet in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. It’s no stranger to stormtroopers, either, having played host to the ill-fated Jedha outpost in Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One.
Today, though, Wadi Rum is a different part of the galaxy entirely, standing in for Pasaana: a new locale in the canon, and home to the bedouin-like Aki-aki: a nomadic race of walrus-like aliens with twin tentacles dangling from their maws in place of tusks.
Pasaana, along with the nippier climes of snow planet Kijimi, is one of several new worlds visited by The Rise Of Skywalker. But most importantly, it’s a place where the heroes we’ve become acquainted with over the past two films will come together at last.
“The heart of Star Wars for me is the group of unlikely bedfellows on a breakneck adventure,” says Abrams. “And in Rise Of Skywalker
it’s the biggest and most dastardly threat the galaxy has seen. The opportunity here was to have this group that has now become a surrogate family have to deal with this massive horror: the war to end all wars. Not just on the outside, but on the inside, which is to say it’s meant to be as much of a challenge personally as it is physically.”
Abrams’ war of wars has been well equipped: The First Order is stacked with new brass in the form of Richard E. Grant’s Allegiant General Pryde, neo-fascist ranks swollen by triangular-winged TIE Daggers and blood-red garrisons of newly commissioned Sith troopers, their angular crimson armour giving a fresh twist on the faceless squaddies — much to Hasbro’s delight. The Resistance, too, will see its share of reinforcements, including Billy Dee Williams’ Lando Calrissian — reprising the role after 36 years. Even General Leia Organa will return: the late Carrie Fisher making an appearance thanks to the discovery of unused footage that somehow fit the narrative perfectly.
The action itself has been teased in the barest glimpses: Rey and Kylo duelling on the wreckage of a Death Star; Rebel X-wings and
blockade runners fleeing destruction; a sky bristling with Imperial Star Destroyers, their numbers great enough to block out the stars.
The presence of Old Empire firepower, easily overlooked, points to The Rise Of Skywalker’s biggest curveball to date. Back in April, when Abrams showed the first trailer at Star Wars Celebration in Chicago, the reveal of the film’s title was almost eclipsed by the familiar cackle of the original Emperor echoing over those final frames. When Ian Mcdiarmid himself walked out to demand, in full Palpatine rasp, that the projector “roll it again”, all present lost their shit in unison. How could this be? Is he a clone? A Force projection? Did he survive that fateful plummet down the Death Star shaft? Could Palpatine have been telling Anakin the truth when he spoke of Darth Plagueis The Wise’s cure for death? Irrespective of the fine print, Star Wars’ biggest of bads is officially back in business.
“Some people feel like we shouldn’t revisit the idea of Palpatine, and I completely understand that,” Abrams concedes. “But if you’re looking at these nine films as one story, I don’t know many books where the last few chapters have nothing to do with those that have come before. If you look at the first eight films, all the set-ups of what we’re doing in IX are there in plain view.”
The sheer scale of the task he’s undertaken cannot be overstated. Star Wars has been, by far, the most enduring and influential story of the modern era. Having to put the capstone on a saga that has shaped both childhoods and adult lives for several generations is something neither Abrams, nor producer Kathleen Kennedy, looking ahead to what the future holds for Star Wars, take at all lightly.
“We don’t have a crystal ball,” says Kennedy. “We tried to look at Solo and see if we could do two movies a year, and we found, ‘Hmm, that’s not going to work.’ So we backed off of that a little. But that doesn’t mean we don’t think about lots of different stories. That’s the exciting thing about this universe.
“It’s been an honour to inherit and continue this iconic saga that has touched audiences for so many years, and we feel the weight of that every time we set out to tell these stories.”
The wider universe will, of course, live on. Whether through
The Mandalorian on TV, or all-new movie sagas currently in development by Johnson and Game Of Thrones’ David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. But for the core story, what for so many people
is Star Wars, the final destination is now in sight.
“I’ve always loved the start of something,” says Abrams, “because of what it promises. Endings are hard. A great ending not only needs to honour everything that’s come before but, whether it’s a novel, a series or a film, you want to have it feel like it could end no other way.”
And so it comes back to feeling. In a world of meticulously planned franchises and strategic, multi-phased rollouts, Star Wars, at its core, has always trusted in The Force. Abrams had not expected to be here, had not expected to finish this tale. But now, as he places the final pieces of the puzzle, he feels like it was always meant to be. There’s a symmetry to him being the one to deliver
The Rise Of Skywalker, just as there is in the fact that, faced with this
near insurmountable challenge, his impulse was not to assemble story groups or worry about the top-down view, but to switch off his targeting computer, let go his conscious self and act on instinct.
“This story is alive, and you have to listen to it,” he says. “When you land on something that gives you the chills, that’s the only way you know if it feels right. You can deconstruct it all you want and try and make sense of how you found it, but somehow it finds you.”
He pauses, reflecting for a moment. “I don’t know how to explain it. Just the way I can’t quite explain how we had this footage of Carrie that we’re using. You can say, ‘Oh well, it’s just luck, it just happened to be,’ but it feels like something else. And I neither can nor want to explain any of it.”
Just as every saga has a beginning, so too will this one find its end. Abrams and Terrio have taken Lucas’ vision to its conclusion, and the story that began on 25 May 1977 will end on 19 December 2019.
“It’s been a pretty crazy ride,” reflects Terrio. “When I was a kid watching Return Of The Jedi on loop, I felt like I was the only person Yoda was speaking to. And then there I was all these years later, sitting in a tent in Jordan doing this film. You have this highly personal relationship to Star Wars, and then, suddenly, you find yourself right in the middle of it. That feeling is sort of indescribable.”
It’s one that, at the very least, is almost certainly worth having a movie interrupted for.