Colin Trevorrow’s Alleged Star Wars 9 Draft

How Colin Trevorrow’s alleged Star Wars 9 draft fixes Rise of Skywalker’s biggest problems.

Less than a month after Episode 9 hyperspaced into cinemas, an early draft of the movie, penned by original director Colin Trevorrow – who was fired from Episode 9 in 2017.

Firstly, how different is Trevorrow’s draft to the final product? For starters, it’s not called The Rise of Skywalker.
Instead, the alternate version is titled Duel of the Fates (a nod to the John Williams’ track used in The Phantom Menace) and the plot is the chalk to Abrams’ cheese.

Focusing on another of Palpatine’s grand plans, Duel of the Fates sees Kylo Ren – haunted by Luke Skywalker – discover an old holographic message from the Emperor instructing Darth Vader to seek out Tor Valum, the Sith who taught Palpatine the ways of the Dark Side.
Kylo takes Anakin’s place and heads to the Sith master for further training.
Meanwhile, The Resistance are hard at work trying to defeat the First Order by using a beacon – housed on the now-ravaged planet of Coruscant – to call on allies for help.
Rey continues her Jedi training, mainly in solitude, and Rose has a bigger role.

What’s clear from the “leaked” draft (verified by The AV Club) is how Trevorrow’s Episode 9 embraces the past, whereas The Rise of Skywalker is suffocated by it – a point that’s best demonstrated by Abrams’ treatment of Emperor Palpatine.

Most recently, new concept art for Episode IX has surfaced online that seems to show Colin Trevorrow's vision for the big Star Wars finale.
His movie, according to the leakers, would have been called Duel of the Fates. And by the looks of the art, Trevorrow had a very different Episode IX in mind.

It involves a Rebel uprising on an Imperial-occupied Coruscant, Rey wielding a double-sided blue lightsaber, and Luke Skywalker grabbing Kylo Ren's lightsaber with his bare hands. Very different indeed.

Rey follows a similar trajectory in Duel of Fates and The Rise of Skywalker: she struggles with the Dark Side, accepts help from dead Jedi, and becomes a neutral-ish Jedi who defeats evil.
The biggest difference between the two scripts – when it comes to Rey’s story – concerns Palpatine. The Emperor barely features in Duel of Fates and, therefore, does not get named as Rey’s grandfather.
However, what becomes clear from comparing the two stories is that Palpatine was not brought back into the fold for Rey’s benefit; the ultimate villain returned so Kylo Ren wasn’t the series’ Big Bad.

Duel of Fates does not redeem Ben Solo. The character, who’s haunted by Luke Skywalker throughout Trevorrow’s script, turns into a maniacal villain.
During the final act, Kylo blinds Rey with his lightsaber as they fight on the mythical Jedi planet of Mortis.
After that, Luke concludes that there’s no saving Kylo, and – with Yoda and Obi-Wan – they “extinguish” him.

The opposite happens in The Rise of Skywalker.
Ben Solo, after being killed and then healed by Rey, destroys/relinquishes all memory of Kylo Ren, throwing away his red lightsaber after a parental talk from Han Solo.
By the movie’s final act, Ben’s turned to the side of good and works with Rey to defeat Palpatine.
Ben then dies – as he does in Duel of Fates – but only after resurrecting Rey (with a smooching).

How come such a stark difference between the two scripts?
While Rey is tempted by the Dark Side through The Force Awakes and The Last Jedi, there was almost no chance of Disney allowing its leading hero to turn completely bad.
Ben was different; a pendulum swinging between good and evil, with the answer not being entirely clear.

We can only speculate about the conversations that happened at LucasFilm, but, judging by The Rise of Skywalker and Duel of Fates, the sticking point was almost certainly Kylo Ren and whether he should be redeemed.
As Rise of Skywalker was actually made, the answer over which way they wanted the story to go seems obvious. The question that Trevorrow couldn’t quite answer, though, was how to turn Kylo.
So, where do you start when turning Kylo? Using the foundations Rian Johnson built in The Last Jedi, the obvious answer seems to be to argue that Kylo’s subdued reasons for Rey could be enough.
Having them fall head over heels leaves you with two happy Jedi – and not much conflict.
Perhaps they battle General Hux together. But then, Hux isn’t exactly “final villain of the entire Skywalker saga” material.
You could introduce a new Sith Master, but there’s no real groundwork for that.

Abrams’ answer was to bring back Emperor Palpatine – a villain worse than Kylo who the young Skywalker could turn against. But, how do you make the formerly dead Sith relevant to the sequel trilogy story? Well, that’s easy: you make him the main protagonist’s granddad.

"Bringing back the Emperor was an idea J.J. brought to the table when he came on board," Trevorrow said, a month before The Rise of Skywalker reached cinemas. "It’s honestly something I never considered. I commend him for it. This was a tough story to unlock, and he found the key."

Frankly, bringing back Palpatine is a genius solution to LucasFilm’s Kylo Ren problem.
They wanted their main villain to turn good – so they needed a worse villain for him to fight.
You may not agree with the decision – and it’s hard to argue that The Rise of Skywalker is completely satisfying – but it certainly makes sense from a writers’ perspective.

“The dead speak!” begins the opening crawl.
How? Check Fortnite. Why? It doesn’t really matter. Palpatine’s back and there will be no further questions. He’s the Big Bad – then, now, and forever. Duel of the Fates changes that entirely.

In the alternate version, Palpatine’s poised as an ethereal threat, the former Emperor corrupting Kylo with words rather than being bafflingly resurrected.
A villain pulling the strings from beyond the grave is far scarier than one coming back from the dead to play puppet-master; a shade of subtlety that is sorely lacking from The Rise of Skywalker.

More importantly, the sequel trilogy’s new characters get room to forge their own paths in Duel of Fates instead of having to endlessly deal with what came before.
Kylo ignores Force Ghost Luke’s cries to return to the Light, and Ben Solo finally embraces his own mantra from The Last Jedi: “Let the past die, kill it if you have to.” In contrast, Palpatine becomes all-consuming in The Rise of Skywalker, and various secondary plots and characters melt away as the Emperor becomes the focus.
Even the sequel trilogy’s big mystery – the identity of Rey’s parents – becoming inexplicably tied to the Sith Lord.

Kylo’s tragic descent into becoming Duel of Fates’ Big Bad – without being redeemed along the way – feels far more earned and in keeping with the character.
The new revelation that he was the one who killed Rey’s parents (under Snoke’s orders) is more fitting than the kiss-and-make up conclusion of The Rise of Skywalker. Let’s just gently hand-wave away the genocide of millions across the galaxy, shall we?

The structure also feels vastly improved. Gone is the Sith planet of Exegol, sign-posted as the finale’s destination 10 minutes into Rise of Skywalker.
In its place, a series of classic Star Wars set-pieces, including BB-8 hijacking a Star Destroyer and Chewie riding an X-Wing. A series of daring escapades and suicide missions feels far more exciting than the paint-by-numbers MacGuffin chase we did get.

How George Lucas' Episode VII Outline Became The Last Jedi

George Lucas helped shape Star Wars: The Last Jedi because the film's plot was basically his story for Episode VII.

Johnson was in part following a plan laid out by George Lucas himself.
Indeed, Lucas had a hand in the story of The Last Jedi...

Johnson's movie used many of the concepts Lucas first had in mind for Episode VII, specifically the story of an older, broken Luke training a young, Force-sensitive disciple named Kira (later renamed "Rey").

We know that when Disney bought Lucasfilm and the rights to Star Wars, it also purchased Lucas' ideas for the Sequel Trilogy, which he had been planning to make himself before he decided to sell the franchise. He wrote a story treatment and planned to participate behind the scenes as a consultant when it came time to craft the story for what would eventually become The Force Awakens.

The earliest concepts for the Jedi temple on the planet that would become Ahch-To were ironed out during these meetings as well as visualizations of what an older Luke and young Kira would look like. Lucas even approved the design for a bell-shaped structure for the Jedi temple.

Among the early designs tossed around for Luke were ones that looked pretty close to what we got in The Last Jedi as well as one or two that were a bit radical, such as a bald Skywalker who looked closer to a Buddhist monk than a shaggy hermit. Kira's concept didn't stray too far from the plucky young heroine we got in Rey.

Lucas' biggest contribution to The Last Jedi was the Luke/Rey story itself, which he'd originally planned for Episode VII, as confirmed by Lucasfilm Story Group member Pablo Hidalgo on Twitter (via Comicbook.com). The idea played out much like what we saw in Johnson's movie: Luke is down and out on a distant planet thirty years after the fall of the Empire. A new hope named Kira finds the old Jedi Master and they begin her training. We would have seen Luke struggling with his failure to stop the Jedi Killer (renamed "Kylo Ren") from destroying his Jedi Academy.

"[Luke] always had this potential dark side within him, being that his father was Darth Vader," explained Lucasfilm executive creative director Doug Chiang of the character's arc in the early days of Episode VII. "So he is really struggling with that. He ended up secluding himself in this Jedi temple on a new planet, and he's just there meditating, reassessing his whole life. Gradually, over the arc of the movie, he rediscovers his vitality and comes back to himself."
Eventually, Luke would have regained his mojo while teaching Kira the ways of the Force and rejoined the fight. That's basically the skeleton of The Last Jedi's plot.

Lucas also had a part in crafting the Kylo Ren storyline, including the fact that the villain was to be revealed as Han and Leia's son.

Hidalgo also mentioned a character named "Skyler" in his tweets who eventually became Finn.
It was screenwriter Michael Arndt's idea to push this story to Episode VIII. While Arndt was eventually replaced by Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan, who co-wrote the final draft of The Force Awakens, he came up with the basic structure of the plot, which involved the search for Luke Skywalker and "a victory lap" for Han Solo.

We'll never truly know what Lucas intended to do with the sequels, yet he was a part of the process early on and the Sequel Trilogy still carries part of his vision.

At least one person involved with the sequels, Mark Hamill himself, is a little disappointed that Lucas hasn't been more involved with the franchise going forward, according to an interview with Metro.
“What I wish is that [Disney] had been more accepting of [Lucas'] guidance and advice," Hamill told Metro. "Because he had an outline for ‘7,’ ‘8,’ and ‘9’. And it is vastly different to what they have done.”

What To Learn From ‘Star Wars: Life Debt’

The newest novel continues to dig into what remains of the Empire following the Battle of Endor, the state of the fledgling New Republic, and the lives of key characters.
It lends some much-needed background to a whole host of mysteries in The Force Awakens, while teasing at what’s to come in Episode VIII.

By the time Life Debt picks up, the Empire has been shattered by their defeat on Endor.

Han and Leia tied the knot on Endor
Han and Leia were got married pretty much after the final scenes of Return of the Jedi. Leia is already pregnant with the couple’s first child, although many of their friends and colleagues in the New Republic are unaware of that fact yet.

Leia is very much attuned to the Force
Leia never did formally train to become a Jedi with Luke in The Force Awakens. But that doesn’t mean that she lacks the ability.
In Life Debt, we see her meditating while pregnant, trying to stretch out and feel the Force. During this meditation, she connects with her child, knowing immediately that she’s going to have a son.
She becomes filled with joy and hope at the prospect of this, making our knowledge of Ben Solo’s eventual fall into darkness that much more tragic.

The liberation of the Wookiee homeworld
Most of both Death Stars were built on the backs of Wookiee labor. Back on their home planet, they were imprisoned in camps while the Empire strip-mined their lush forests for resources.

There are still pockets of Imperial power still fighting off a New Republic that’s spread all too thin.
That left Kashyyyk under the yoke of one of those factions.
It’s not long before Han and Chewie catch wind of an opening, and make for the planet’s surface to liberate the Wookies once and for all. For Han, this is a personal mission—he resigns his commission and goes off with Chewbacca to liberate his partner’s home.

The identity of Supreme Leader Snoke?
We see the rise of an enigmatic and mysterious fleet admiral, Gallius Rax (better known as The Operator in the first Aftermath novel). As a child, Rax was taken under the wing of Emperor Palpatine himself. He now works behind the scenes to build a stronger, less bloated Empire in his own image.

The clues all seem to point toward Rax as Snoke: He spends considerable effort rescuing Brendol Hux from the clutches of the New Republic, setting the table for Hux’s son to rise through the ranks by the time TFA picks up.
After discovering a young Rax stowed away on his shuttle, Palpatine notes that he senses a purpose and destiny in him.
The vision of the Empire that Rax holds is all too similar to the one Snoke seems to have for the First Order.
Rax was the one who eventually leads the Empire’s final stand in their defeat on Jakku (which could explain Snoke’s horrible scars).

The Shadow Council has big plans for children—mainly through Brendol Hux, who Rax orders rescued from the beseiged Arkanis Academy, where he was in charge of training young Imperial minds.
Rax also orders the safety of Brendol’s illegitimate son, Armitage on the logic that “the Empire must be fertile and young.”
This is presumably a predecessor to the younger Hux’s own belief in training loyal soldiers from childhood to adulthood rather than breeding a clone army, which leads to kids like Finn being taken from their families and brainwashed into being adherents of the First Order.

General Hux in his younger years
Gallius Rax expended considerable resources rescuing Brendol Hux, a man known for his talent in training Imperial soldiers. It was a move that seemed like a precursor to the First Order’s legions of brainwashed Stormtroopers, taken at birth, given a number designation, and trained as weapons.
In order for that timeline to logically shake out, that means the First Order would have had to begin this program right around the time Life Debt takes place, and offering even more evidence in support of the “Rax = Snoke” theory.

Brendol’s son, Armitage, eventually grows up to be General Hux, the de facto military leader of the First Order in The Force Awakens.
He wasn’t always the intimidating, albeit inexperienced, force we saw in TFA though. At a dinner with the rest of Rax’s Shadow Council, Brendol describes his son as “a weak-willed boy, thin as a slice of paper and just as useless.”
Clearly young Armitage exceeds his father’s low expectations, eventually rising to heights that no one could have predicted.

Maz Kanata goes on a search
Maz Kanata makes an appearance in Aftermath: Life Debt. Her castle/bar allows everyone in it, so long as they don’t fight.
“ALL ARE WELCOME (NO FIGHTING)” is on the wall, and she even has a prison for brawlers.

An Imperial and a Rebel get into a fight, and they end up locked up. Maz releases them, but says to a droid that predates even her,

“Peace has not returned to my heart. Something is off balance. Some stirring in the Force has made the water turbid. Hard to see. But I think it best we be prepared.” And Maz gets in her ship to travel around and “See just what I can see.”

(This could be the journey that ends with Luke and Anakin’s old lightsaber moldering in her basement.)

A Dark Side Cult is in open rebellion
On Corellia, a group called the “Acolyte of the Beyond” is active, calling themselves devotees of something “greater than the Empire.” One is captured by the police while (essentially) spray-painting “Vader Lives” and says that, in this group, you have to “earn your mask.”
After shooting up a police station, the acolytes raid an evidence locker, and come out wielding a familiar red-bladed lightsaber. Upon their exit, they ominously describe their movement as “the revenge of the darkness,” laying the groundwork for what sounds an awful lot like the Knights of Ren.

Luke’s training
Luke’s presence in Life Debt comes through the meditation training he’s been giving Leia to help hone her Force sensitivity. She uses that training to guide her to Han after he goes missing, and notes how powerful that feeling is—a precursor to her feeling his loss through the Force 30 years later in The Force Awakens.

By the end of the book, Kashyyyk is safely in New Republic hands—thanks to the help of Leia, who chases after Han in the Falcon when he goes missing.

Han and Chewie decide to forge paths alone
Even though we know they eventually get back to their smuggling ways, Han promises that Chewbacca will play a big role in his future son’s life:

    “No. No! You have to stay here. We fought like hell for this and now. . . this is yours. Okay? All yours.
This is home. You got people here and I want you to find them, You hear me? That’s my last demand. No arguments.”
Chewie rumbles but Han reiterates, more firmly this time: “I said no arguments. You be with your family.
I have to go start mine”

    “I’ll be back. We’re not done, you and I. We’ll see each other again. I’m gonna be a father and no way my kid won’t have you in his life.”

    One more bark and yip as Chewie pets his head.

“Yeah, pal. I know.” He sighs. “I love you, too.”

What Kylo Ren Was Thinking In That Pivotal Han Solo Scene

Potential spoilers and plot leaks thinly veiled may follow below...

JJ Abrams Finally Explains What Kylo Ren Was Thinking In That Pivotal Han Solo Scene

from J.J. Abrams' The Force Awakens commentary, the director stated that when the father and son met on that bridge, Kylo was actually being convinced by Han to walk away from the dark side. However, he eventually realized that there was no turning back from the path he had chosen.

In Abrams' words:
     
People have asked me if I think that Kylo Ren was just playing with him the whole time, if
he meant to kill him from the beginning. And the truth is, I think Kylo Ren, in this moment, is
actually being convinced to walk away from this. Snoke is, as Han says, using him, and I think
that somewhere Ben knows this. But I think that he can't accept it. Deep down, he has gone too far.

J.J. Abrams continued by saying that he received help from Jon Kasdan, son of longtime Star Wars writer Lawrence Kasdan, to make sure there was a lot of "raw emotion and uncertainty" in the scene. The video ends with the director wisely pointing out that any time two Star Wars characters meet on a thin bridge without any safety railings that's "10 miles above the ground," it won't end well.

Senator Leia: Bloodline; Early Days of the First Order

The New Republic now finds itself divided into two factions: The Centrists and the Populists, an idea given to author Claudia Gray by Episode VIII director Rian Johnson.

Centrists favor a strong, unified government, believing the defunct Empire’s vision of unity to have been a good idea corrupted by the evil of Emperor Palpatine.
The Populists, living in fear of another Palpatine seizing power, generally support a hands-off approach to governing that allows individual systems their own autonomy. We find Leia on the Populist side of the debate,
driven by her own experiences as the commander of the Rebel Alliance.

With his home world of Kashyyyk finally liberated, Chewie has returned there to settle down and raise a family.

This leaves Han to own devices, and although he’s still married to Leia, he’s out training and mentoring young
racing pilots while she remains on Hosnian Prime to help run the Senate. (There’s no mention of the Millenium Falcon either, meaning it’s already been stolen from its original owners.)

Han and Leia have already sent Ben away to train with Luke, where the pair is apparently out of contact with the rest of the outside world. We know that Leia looks back on sending Ben away as the moment she and Han lost their son for good, so one can reasonably assume there were issues with him that preceded his Jedi training with Luke.
Additionally, Leia hasn’t yet told her son he’s the grandson of Darth Vader, a revelation we imagine shakes his world sometime in the next six years.

The early days of the First Order actually come courtesy of a Centrist Senator in the New Republic, secretly utilizing illegal cartel money to build and fund the military force. Much of Bloodline involves Leia investigating this, unaware that she’s actually uncovering the next great threat to the entire galaxy.

Bloodline shows Leia involved more in politics than connecting the Force though, creating a curious situation, where she eschews her potential to be a powerful Jedi in favor of governing the galaxy as a Senator.
 








The novel shows us Leia reflecting on this very dilemma, telling us about how she felt the place she could do the most good for the galaxy was in rebuilding its government, not going off to become a Jedi. We find her at a time where she’s jaded and frustrated by the Senate’s inability to cooperate, and yet still, she’s also one of its most respected and influential members. Obviously, her frustration leads to her leaving the Senate to form the Resistance.

Senator Leia's 'Force Awakens' Backstory: Resistance Origins in 'Star Wars: Bloodline'

The story, set just six years before the events of The Force Awakens, focuses on Princess Leia Organa in her role as senator in the New Republic.

Leia, who eschewed becoming a Jedi like Luke, is fed up with the squabbling politicians, split into the intractable factions of Populists and Centrists following Mon Mothma’s departure as chancellor.
Leia would rather leave behind the government pettiness on Hosnian Prime and go travel the universe with hubby Han Solo. Since the event of Jedi, Han helped out Chewbacca with a sticky situation on the latter’s home world of Kashyyyk.
Chewie has remained on his planet with his family, while Mr. Kessel Run has formed his own championship racing team.

Although theirs is a long-distance relationship, Han and Leia are still very much in love, and he plays a big part in Bloodline.

Joining Leia on Hosnian Prime is her chief of staff, Greer Sonnel, one of Han’s former racing protégées; teen intern Korr Sella (who appears briefly in The Force Awakens as Hosnian Prime later gets vaporized); ace X-wing pilot escort Joph Seastriker; savvy political rival Ransolm Casterfo; and the scheming Lady Carise Sindian. Bloodline also name checks several classic characters (including Lando).

The book’s title is a direct reference to Leia’s parentage. Luke and Leia have learned that
their mother was Padmé Amidala. But much of the novel focuses on Leia’s two very different
dads.

Leia receives a lovely holocron message recorded to her by Bail Organa, her adopted father but the man she really considers her paterfamilias. However, the message also reveals the secret of Leia’s true father — something she has kept hidden from everyone but Han and Luke.
Even her son, Ben, doesn’t know. Then, her adversaries in the Senate find the holocron and play it to devastating results.

As the political intrigue plays out on Hosnian Prime, Leia also tries to piece together the provenance of a shadowy outfit operating on the fringes of the galaxy and to make sure it isn’t a threat to the hard-fought peace.

Han Solo: Star Wars The Force Awakens Jungle Mission

Star Wars The Force Awakens
Jungle Mission Han Solo goes to visit his old friend Maz.

Han Solo: Star Wars Force Awakens Black Series (Starkiller Base) Action Figure

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Star Wars Vanity Fair: The Empire Reboots!

 

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.

Jakku set with director J.J. Abrams.

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.

A colorful array of galactic travelers, smugglers, and other assorted riffraff fill the main hall of pirate Maz Kanata’s castle. Photographs by Annie Leibovitz.

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.

Han Solo, Chewbacca, Luke Skywalker: Power of the Force Death Star Escape Action Figures

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Star Wars Spectacular Vanity Fair: The Ultimate Photoshoot

Opening May 19, Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith (Twentieth Century Fox) is set on eight different planets, with an entire army of Wookiees, more than 2,300 special effects, and what promises to be the ultimate lightsaber duel. As the final installment in this six-film, 33-year epic heads to theaters, Annie Leibovitz shoots the movie’s on-screen and behind-the-scenes heroes.

Lucas had no way of knowing that the idea he was beginning to scratch out in his cramped handwriting would eventually make him the multi-billionaire head of his own little empire, or that it would occupy him, on and off, for the next 33 years.

With the May 19 release of Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith, he will finally be free of his grand task. This is the sixth—and, he says, final—Star Wars film, the one in which Anakin Skywalker, played by Hayden Christensen, completes his transformation from a wayward Jedi knight to an evil Sith named Darth Vader. As such, he suits up in the famous black armor and helmet, a revised version of which was made for Christensen out of leather and fiberglass. Revenge of the Sith is the movie that will connect the effervescent original Star Wars trilogy of the late 1970s and early 80s to the latter, denser installments.

“It’s the missing link,” Lucas says. “Once it’s there, it’s a complete work, and I’m proud of that. I do see it, tonality-wise, as two trilogies. But they do, together, form one epic of fathers and sons.”

Pre-production work began just a few days after the May 16, 2002, release of the last installment, the melancholy and ambitious Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones. The new movie will have scenes set on eight different planets—including the Skywalker home of Tatooine; the urban, Blade Runner—esque Coruscant, seat of the Jedi; and the lush Naboo, native world of the lovely princess turned senator Padmé Amidala (played by Natalie Portman) as well as the senator turned evil emperor Palpatine (played, with perfectly elocuted gusto, by Ian McDiarmid). There will also be never-before-seen worlds, including grassy Alderaan, the peaceful home of Princess Leia.

Digital cameras started rolling, in blue-screen-lined studios in Australia, on June 30, 2003. Rick McCallum, the film’s producer, took a second unit around the world—China, Thailand, Switzerland, England, Tunisia—to shoot backgrounds that have been digitally tweaked by Lucas’s special-effects craftsmen at Industrial Light & Magic. As early as 2001, when Sicily’s Mount Etna erupted, McCallum and his crew made a special trip to capture the lava-drenched environment necessary for key scenes having to do with Anakin’s fall.

When completed, the new film will comprise some 2,300 separate shots, each of which has at least one special effect—a record number that surpassed the 2,000 effects shots in The Phantom Menace and dwarfs the 1,400 in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

He came up with his first hit, American Graffiti (1973), on a dare from his mentor Francis Ford Coppola to do something funny and conventional.

“It led me on a path 180 degrees from where I was going,” Lucas says. “Somehow, I became really successful at it. But I’m destined to go back the other way.” He laughs. “I’ve earned the right to fail. That’s basically what I’m going to do. I’ve got enough of a fund set aside for my old age. From now on, I’m going to make movies like THX that nobody wants to see, that aren’t successful, and everybody will say I’ve lost my touch. I mean, I love doing Star Wars, and it’s a fun adventure for me, but I’m ready to explore some of the things I was interested in exploring when I was in my late 20s.”

He merely “understood what people liked to go see.” Further, in talking up his planned return to experimental film, he strikes the tone of a man ready to do penance for years spent in the wild. But in a more defiant mood later on during our interview, he sounds convinced that what he has put up on screen isn’t merely kid stuff, and suggests that it should be classified as enduring popular art. In the same breath that has him mentioning Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci as pop artists of their day, he says, “The interesting thing about Star Wars—and I didn’t ever really push this very far, because it’s not really that important—but there’s a lot going on there that most people haven’t come to grips with yet. But when they do, they will find it’s a much more intricately made clock than most people would imagine.”

Lucas expanded on the notion of Anakin’s divine origin. (Warning: The following may or may not be helpful to the uninitiated.) “It was a virgin birth in an ecosystem of symbiotic relationships. It means that between the Force, which is sort of a life force, and reality, the connectors between these two things are what we call mitichlorians. They’re kind of based on mitochondria, which are a completely different species, a different animal, that live inside every single cell and allow it to live, allow it to reproduce, allow life to exist. They also, in their own way, communicate with the Force itself. The more you have, the more your cells are able to speak intuitively to the Force itself and use the powers of the Force. Ultimately, I would say the Force itself created Anakin. I don’t want to get into specific terms of labeling things to make it one religion or another, but, basically, that’s one of the foundations of the hero’s journey.”

Lucas has scattered a lot of his own autobiography throughout the series.
Anakin Skywalker, a slave boy on Tatooine played by child actor Jake Lloyd in The Phantom Menace, builds his own Podracer in his spare time—just as the mechanically inclined Lucas himself, in his teenage years, souped up his own two-cylinder Fiat Bianchina.
In Attack of the Clones, Anakin’s sweet and accommodating mother is taken hostage and abused by the vicious, nomadic, desert-dwelling Tusken Raiders. Anakin reaches her when she’s on the verge of death—perhaps an echo of Lucas’s childhood, during which his mother, Dorothy, was often bedridden with a mysterious illness (probably pancreatitis, reports Lucas biographer Dale Pollock).
In the original trilogy, Luke Skywalker is ordered by his foster father, Uncle Owen Lars, to stay home and work in the family business (moisture farming), just as Lucas’s own father, George Lucas Sr., a strict small-town businessman who called Hollywood “Sin City,” scoffed at his son’s desire to attend film school and wanted young George to join him so that together they could rule Modesto’s office-supplies business. Both Luke and Anakin suffer horrible injuries, as Lucas himself did in 1962, when he was nearly killed in a car crash that flipped his Fiat “four or five times” and ended his dream of becoming a professional racecar driver, writes Pollock in Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas.
“I put parts of myself in all of it, same as I did in American Graffiti, whether it’s Anakin Skywalker or Luke Skywalker,” Lucas says. “I kind of want to be Han Solo, but that’s not as much me as the Skywalkers are.”

In the next movie, at least, Anakin will attain true villain status, which will give Christensen the chance to turn in a more easily accepted, love-to-hate-him performance. Lucas cryptically suggests that Anakin’s grief over his mother (or perhaps over someone else close to him who ends up dead) is what will drive him into the embrace of the Jedi’s enemies, the Siths. Lucas hints strongly that the fiery, lava-spewing place guarded by spiderlike androids in the Revenge of the Sith trailer released last fall is hell itself.

Lucas says, “you basically get somebody who’s going to make a pact with the Devil, and it’s going to be a pact with the Devil that says, ‘I want the power to save somebody from death. I want to be able to stop them from going to the river Styx, and I need to go to a god for that, but the gods won’t do it, so I’m going to go down to Hades and get the Dark Lord to allow me to have this power that will allow me to save the very person I want to hang on to.’
You know, it’s Faust. So Anakin wants that power, and that is basically a bad thing. If you’re going to sell your soul to save somebody you love, that’s not a good thing. That’s, as we say in the film, unnatural. You have to accept the natural course of life. Of all things. Death is obviously the biggest of them all. Not only death for yourself but death for the things you care about.”

The Darth Vader costume is not just a black shell meant to look scary—it’s a life-support system made necessary by the near-fatal injuries Anakin has suffered. Although the duel doesn’t end in a knockout victory for Obi-Wan (who is slain by Vader in A New Hope), it has positive repercussions in the galaxy first dreamed up by Lucas three decades ago.

“Anakin, as Skywalker, as a human being, was going to be extremely powerful,” he says. “But he ended up losing his arms and a leg and became partly a robot. So a lot of his ability to use the Force, a lot of his powers, are curbed at this point, because, as a living form, there’s not that much of him left. So his ability to be twice as good as the Emperor disappeared, and now he’s maybe 20 percent less than the Emperor. So that isn’t what the Emperor had in mind. He wanted this really super guy, but that got derailed by Obi-Wan. So he finds that, with Luke, he can get a more primo version if he can turn Luke to the Dark Side. You’ll see, as this goes on, Luke is faced with the same issues and practically the same scenes that Anakin is faced with."

“You learn that Darth Vader isn’t this monster,” Lucas says. “He’s a pathetic individual who made a pact with the Devil and lost. And he’s trapped. He’s a sad, pathetic character, not an evil big monster. I mean, he’s a monster in that he’s turned to the Dark Side and he’s serving a bad master and he’s into power and he’s lost a lot of his humanity. In that way, he’s a monster, but beneath that, as Luke says in Return of the Jedi, early on, ‘I know there’s still good in you. There’s good in you, I can sense it.’ Only through the love of his children and the compassion of his children, who believe in him, even though he’s a monster, does he redeem himself.”

The six Star Wars movies form the biography of Darth Vader—something Lucas claims he wasn’t consciously aware of “until 1998.” It’s strange to think that this filmmaker with a popcorn reputation has spent 33 years telling the story of a failed, pathetic monster who isn’t redeemed until his last few breaths.

 Box office statistics would seem to belie Lucas's claim of being at heart, part of the avant-garde.

The Iron Man.

Oh, my! Good heavens! It's Anthony Daniels!

Playing the droid C-3PO has been a "humbling" and sometimes "isolating" experience, according to the actor, who says that, when he's in costume, cast and crew sometimes forget there's a human being under all that metal, treatring "him" as "it."

Daniels is proud of his long association with Star Wars. I'm the only actor to be in all the films," he points out.

Han Solo: Star Wars Vintage Action Figure

Kenner Vintage Star Wars Han Solo Action Figure 

From 1977

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