The Empire reboots with an exclusive first look with photos by Annie Lebovitz of the old heroes, the new heroes and the high stakes! How a new generation is shaking up Hollywood's biggest franchise.
Abrams, a boyish 48, with wiry hair and black-framed nerd glasses, was seated in a small, plush screening room with a dozen or so associates, including visual-effects supervisor Roger Guyett and Abrams’s longtime producing partner Bryan Burk. The group was teleconferencing with Industrial Light & Magic, the San Francisco–based effects company, as well as a second unit in London, with the artists and technicians represented on-screen by their works in progress and on the sound system by their disembodied voices. It was a session you might think would be tense, even fraught, given the stakes on this film, the first Star Wars movie in 10 years and the first ever without creator and fanboy lightning rod George Lucas, who three years ago sold his production company, Lucasfilm Ltd., along with all rights to Star Wars, to the Walt Disney Company.
The crew of the Millennium Falcon.
They should also be heartened by the cast Abrams and Lucasfilm have assembled, which includes Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill, reprising their original Star Wars roles as Han Solo, Princess Leia, and Luke Skywalker for the first time in three decades, as well as an impressive list of young newcomers to the series, including Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, Lupita Nyong’o, Andy Serkis, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, and Domhnall Gleeson—plus Max von Sydow, imparting the same kind of old-school Euro-gravitas that Sir Alec Guinness lent the original. Anthony Daniels and Peter Mayhew will also be back, wreathed in metal and in mohair and yak fur respectively, as C-3PO and Chewbacca.
In preparation for selling the company, Lucas had decided to make more movies.
He sketched out ideas for episodes VII, VIII, and IX, to be set initially several decades after Return of the Jedi, and approached Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill about re-upping. He shared his story outlines with Disney during their courtship phase. But after the deal was done, “Disney and Kathy decided they should consider other options,” as Abrams (not then involved) diplomatically put it. He said Lucas’s treatments had centered on very young characters—teenagers, Lucasfilm told me—which might have struck Disney executives as veering too close for comfort to The Phantom Menace and its 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker and 14-year-old Queen Amidala. “We’ve made some departures” from Lucas’s ideas, Kennedy conceded, but only in “exactly the way you would in any development process.”
By mid-January 2014, Abrams and Kasdan had a draft, most of it hashed out in plein air conversations recorded on an iPhone as they walked and talked for hours at a time through cityscapes that changed according to the vagaries of Abrams’s schedule.
Discussing the shoot, Abrams was quick with praise for his young cast but seemed most excited by his encounters with ghosts of Star Wars past: “The whole thing was as surreal and impossible as you can imagine. I mean, walking onto the Millennium Falcon set?” (That would be Han Solo’s iconic spaceship.) “To be on it, it’s insane. There were people who literally cried when they walked onto that set. It’s a strange thing, the effect it has.”
Abrams has known Harrison Ford for years.
Abrams was also acquainted with Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill, and so, he said, when they all met for the film, along with Kennedy, with whom he went even further back, “there was a bizarre feeling of everything coming together in a way I never could have anticipated.” And yet, Abrams added, he was “terrified at the prospect of directing Harrison as Han Solo. . . It wasn’t just about directing one of the great actors in film history. It was about directing one of the great actors in film history playing a character that was certainly one of his two defining characters.” Abrams had met with Ford during the script process. “We talked about what we were thinking for the story, and he liked what he was hearing. He was excited to get back in those shoes again, which was really interesting because I thought he hadn’t been a fan. I kept hearing those rumors when I was a kid.”
The shoot would take nearly six months, from mid-May through early November, with locations including Abu Dhabi, Ireland, Wales, and an R.A.F. base in England.
By all accounts things went smoothly aside from one serious hiccup, a month in, when a part of the Millennium Falcon set fell on Ford and broke his leg. Production was held up for two weeks, but in Abrams’s mind there were unexpected blessings. “In a weird way,” he said, “it was the greatest gift to the movie that, once it was clear Harrison would be O.K., the way that the crew came together. I’ve never seen a crew bonded like that. And when Harrison came back, when I say he came back better and stronger than ever, I can’t overstate that. There was a fire in his eyes that you see in the movie.” The hiatus also gave Abrams time to take stock of what he was doing and rethink some sequences that normally would have had to be fixed in post-production or via expensive re-shoots.
