Star Wars The Force Awakens: Behind the Scenes Documentary | Disney+

[Music] [Music] i'll be allowed to talk about that yeah absolutely okay here we go then am i allowed to talk about the process i said it out loud i can't talk about that i've locked it all away like in a vault it's an internal vault this would be on after the movie comes out so i know fantastic thank you you can talk about it by the way seriously and then when i do all the interviews don't say anything then [Music] i was just astonished i mean i i can't tell you i mean it was the last thing in the world i expected part of me thought oh my god no it's just a terrible idea i had a beginning a middle and an end and i can't really see anything that i could add to it i was surprised i mean you know you think really we waited this long i looked better like 10 years ago we could have done it then at the end of the first three films that we made i had no thought whatsoever about revisiting the character or whether there was any ambition to bring the three characters back again never gave it a moment's thought if i'd been asked at the time i probably wouldn't have imagined the potential for it the idea of the star wars saga continuing felt like a very unlikely prospect i think jj's hesitation was everybody's hesitation initially which is wow i want to do i don't think it's something i can do it's too much responsibility who's at risk here what's the outcome going to be who's going to survive this thing there were definitely tears from me along the way when i thought that i might not be able to do it i still thought that i was auditioning i thought this was the last test i remember being scared of showing up on set and having no ideas i just remember thinking oh my god we are about to shoot this thing and i'm not ready [Music] you don't realize you start working the star wars movie just how daunting that could be obviously i've been talking about retiring for several years now where i'm not in the film business anymore i don't have to run a corporation and it occurred to me one day that the perfect person to take over the company was kathy and it completely caught me off guard it was the last thing on my mind and i almost instantly said yes i just thought what an incredible opportunity to step into this amazing world that george has created i felt that i really wanted to put the company somewhere which would protect it when i first made star wars everybody in hollywood said well this is a movie disney should have made there's a lot of strength that is gained by this you know there's lots and lots of opportunities at disney that we wouldn't have in any other studio when the walt disney company bought lucasfilm they very much wanted to have a movie by 2015. so the most important thing was to start to pull together the incredible talent for the film and starting with someone like jj abrams first of all great news and that we have a director as of about an hour ago which seems to have hit the press already which is jks [Applause] when kathy kenny called and asked if i'd be interested in directing this film i fully intended to say no because i've been involved in other movies that were sequels and i just thought i didn't want to do that again but it was star wars i knew kathy when we were discussing it there was this one moment that i instantly had the chills considering which was a young woman what her story is i had no idea but saying where's luke skywalker it was so titillating the notion that this character who we all know would be discovered by some new young heroine was incredibly intriguing it just felt to me like that was a great starting point for a story the way i approached how we would go about making episode 7 wasn't any different than what we would do with any large tent pole movie today george really started the idea that you could put together an art department and begin conceptualizing well in advance and that was something that we definitely took to heart we brought in rick carter as our production designer who has a long history in working with me i think we should be considering how to create iconography that relates to this journey these two people are going to take in the next generation my approach to it anyway was to ask a very simple question first to myself and then of everybody up at lucasfilm which was how strong is the force what's its relevance now why make a star wars movie now i felt that that was the right question to ask and i think the explosion of the response from all the people lucasfilm including the artists were very enthusiastic about it and rick spent a lot of time with the art department that was industrial and magic what we would do is we would have sort of weekly check-in meetings with jj where we'd have a conference call you know video conference call and we would go through the art jj is very adamant that we kind of go back to the core aesthetics that made the original trilogy so great and a lot of that was driven by ralph and his sensibility and for us it's it's kind of going back home in many ways both for the visual look and the style of the movie the idea is not to copy the original films not at all but they should look like they're in the same universe so i'm kind of looking at the designs that are being done and seeing if it fits in with the films you know there's going to be a point in this first movie and of course in this whole trilogy of rediscovering the power of the force both negative and positive working with rick i asked him to join story meetings early because i wanted someone who wasn't a structuralist not a mathematical way of looking at a story it was about taking flight but he would bring in images based on our conversations that were incredibly inspiring some ideas in our story literally came from some of the imagery that they brought in we had these images that you could refer to and some of them became kind of iconic and they informed the real pre-production you know with everybody and they would then go off and then react to that and it was it was kind of interesting seeing the way the two things informed each other seeing somebody develop a script where almost in tandem someone was sort of illustrating it it was very familiar to come back here this is my fourth experience with luke's film and they've all been very satisfying larry kasden he was one of the first people that i picked up the phone and said larry we need you to come back in and be a part of this and he didn't miss a beat star wars is so much bigger and more powerful than i ever anticipated the reaction to empire was so incredible and has remained for all these years and when i was doing empire strikes back my head was spinning i really was unprepared for it and we wrote that script very fast now i'm coming back to a tradition that is bigger than anything i expected i had none of that doing empire strikes back so it's a very different experience we would all meet in a writer's room and it was michael art initially larry kast and jj myself and the development team it was very much a collaborative effort but it was michael arndt who was going to be putting together the first draft he usually needs about two to three years to immerse himself in something and then actually create a screenplay and we hoped and thought that this would maybe be one of those that would go a little bit faster but it didn't so when we had to make the transition to larry caston into jj it actually went pretty smoothly i i've collaborated with a lot of people and this was as much fun as i've ever had writing tends to be claustrophobic airless and tiring this was not the amazing thing about the process was that he took his iphone with the recorder on and we walked and we walked for miles and miles and miles i'd never done this before you know wandering around recording conversations it felt good to kind of be in motion because so much of the movie is in motion and then because of reproduction and everything we wound up doing that in new york in paris and london it was like heavenly and while the whole time we're like figuring out like what's the story going to be what's the next star wars going to be it was all to serve this one and only mandate that we had on this process which was that we wanted to tell a story that would delight us and that would give us that spark that feeling that you have when you watch star wars right now we're working off a very unique situation where we have incredible talent many of those people did all the star wars movies we're going to have each and every person reaching out and pulling in various people into this group so that they begin to take the baton a lot of stuff because i'm one of the only people around that worked on those original films i have a role in the show which is sort of like some sort of past legacy hand or honor or something well i have to say i feel very privileged to have been able to do all of them to this point and to continue on and do number seven seem very natural to me i've had fun with it and i feel very good about it for me in particular it was really trying to get my head around the sensibility of okay now that i've worked on the prequels i know what the original series are what is the next generation what is the next evolution a lot of people including myself have been so inspired about star wars and what has come before i started here when i was 17 years old with a dream to work in film and it's now 2015 we're making new star wars and i just hope it's inspiring kids i want to be involved in filmmaking the movie itself is a gandalf you know to this next generation of characters that are in the star wars world and behind the scenes there is a new generation led by you know kathy kennedy it's quite on theme for what the movie is bringing together the old and the new in a really seamless way the most important thing in the master apprenticeship kind of role that we were all in obviously george created star wars but all of us had to become in a sense students of star wars a real understanding of the history of star wars that was really important we needed to understand the rules and once we understood that then we could branch out approaching a movie like this is like approaching something that really happened in history it's a long time ago far far away but it really happened so there's an archive there's a place to go where you can actually see what happened so you can see the world that ralph mccrory created all the people that actually were instrumental in in visualizing what this galaxy could look like [Music] there was a feeling when i was a kid when i saw star wars for the first time that it was all practical and real i mean there were things like being outside the sand crawler and seeing those treads those massive treads right there it was a physical tangible real thing you knew it when you saw the movie so we wanted to go back and embrace the look of those original films which was all part of the feeling of how they were able to transport you into that universe [Music] we're trying very true to be almost like a period piece to really put the audience back 30 years after jedi so it's really doing a period science fiction film which is really fun i was lucky enough on empire strikes back to do some work experience within the art department but my father was the art director in fact in this book there we are this is the um a reproduction of the drawing that my father did for the snow speeder on empire strikes back i couldn't believe that when i first came in and spoke to him here at pinewood he said he was working on drawings that i'd done 36 years ago and you think i can't believe they were still have this stuff so it's wonderful that they had some of the drawings that we'd done all those years ago i love characters like this you know they feel like they're they're just sort of i believe them and they're all sort of blend in jj sort of through a creative challenge to us you know in some films in the past you would get a build list and you would say i've got to build this this this and this i think for jj the first priority is let's shoot it practically but we kind of had to earn our stars so you had to get that character to a point that he was worthy of going on the screen the progress is happening and i know that it might feel a little bit like real spinning and stuff but like the more you guys are inspired by ideas i'm telling you that there will be value in other places in the movie so it is very helpful he never really said that he would use anything anything that you make it's not a ticket to appear in the film was that we would show something to jj and we would impress him enough for him to say i can use that keep coming and so the interaction of those physical things actually creates something that's not artificial seeming doesn't seem arbitrary and then of course so that will be augmented by the visual effects you film what you can and you build what you can and then if you want to see more we have this wonderful magician of of ilm that will come in and say well of course we can see more it was great to hear that they were going to try and do as as much onset as possible because you know real is hard to beat we always try and augment our cg with live action elements it gives a greater sense of reality of course we've been used to being asked to do more and more and use our technology to the fullest so you have to take a step back and think how am i going to use technology in a way that is actually going to have it feel like a film from you know 1977. what was important to us was to capture again that feeling that authenticity that we're looking for we've got so many different tools that can contribute to that feeling cinematically and obviously working with ilm has been a huge huge benefit i think the interesting thing about star wars and this and the kind of storytelling it is is it's a story that allows you to participate there are things that are relevant things you're identifying with certainly for all young kids when the movie came out they either wanted to be luke skywalker or they saw themselves as han solo and i think that was a part of our challenge was how are we going to bring new characters into this series that had that same kind of power and i think we have i mean i think one of the great things is we have a female lead what we were looking for was someone new and this character needed to be vulnerable and tough sweet and terrified and to find someone that no one knew who could do all these things took a lot of looking you always feel like you're going to run out of time you're like oh you know what but our casting directors nina gold april webster and alyssa weisberg just did an incredible amount of work and we were very lucky to find some great people but the truth is it wasn't until we found daisy that we just felt like she was capable of doing all of these things this character required where are we when we brought her in i asked her to do this one scene sort of this torture scene very sort of intense and she just blew my mind she's reaching this depth of struggle and tears were screaming down her face i thought this is unbelievable and i asked her to stop gave her a couple adjustments do it again and she just she did it again and i thought oh my god i guarantee he would have disappointed you cut out of my head the decision to have finn be a deserting stormtrooper was one of the biggest that we made i thought it would be incredible if we pulled our hero from the ranks of what has been essentially faceless indistinguishable automatons who no one ever gave any attention to really that someone had to be inside there john boyega was one of the biggest star wars fans among the cast and he auditioned i think nine times do you know how to fly a tie fighter you can find anything why are you doing this because it's the right thing to do you need a pilot i need a pilot there he was proof that just because you keep getting called back and it feels like it might not ever happen it actually can the conversation was kind of jj like really explaining to me how things would change and if i felt supported and what have you and he wanted to know about my background because we hadn't really talked about um my family he asked me whether i was ready and he was like do you realize how much of a big responsibility this is he said to me are you sure you want this and i was like if you believe in me then i think i'm okay with that because i think you're pretty cool and pretty good at what you do he goes well you're the new star star wars and then everything stopped you know when like you're waiting for something and then the words actually come and you're like uh okay he just said i'm the new star of star wars and he was like no no don't react don't react breathe breathe jj said you can tell your parents so i got into my sister and my mom were there and i was like i got stars and then it was like oh my god so yeah but i couldn't sleep that night at all it was really really hard just going through normal life without saying i was casted startled but yeah that is the story of how it happened for those of us that have been working on this now for almost two years it's incredible to realize that we're at this point right now we had a cast read through just before we started shooting it was really moving carrie and harrison and mark i don't think any of them ever imagined that they would be shooting any more of these movies ever again i can't say that i didn't have some reservation about it it wasn't hard to convince me it's just that i had not imagined the circumstance i was very nervous it was trippy to have harrison and mark and myself in a room together doing this again [Music] this was going to be the first gathering of this original cast new cast but the most important thing was to hear it and actually experience what is it like to get it on its feet in a read-through we'd never done that before a long time ago in a galaxy far far away star wars episode seven at the last minute i was asked to read the actual script usually the director does that but in this case he said he wanted to be able to observe and would i do that the falcon of the surviving x-wings roar past camera toward a planet with green flora and a copper seed this is dakar the ship's descending among massive mushroom-shaped trees that moment when we all sat in a circle and we saw all these faces you couldn't believe what you were seeing the young people and the veterans this is a moment that will never be forgotten hold on luke skywalker's incredible face amazed and conflicted of what he sees as our music builds the promise of an adventure just beginning the end [Applause] on the one hand you had this sort of out of body oh my god i'm in this place with this crew on the other hand you had the most sort of primal terror of oh my god it was also the beginning of production that moment is like when you're at the starting point of the wagon train you know and everybody's gathering you say who's that who's that i don't think we ever really felt like we were ready to go i know probably somewhere deep down they felt like is this gonna work we're going out to face who knows what the weekend before the day we started shooting i actually had a parent's weekend at our oldest son school and that was in hawaii so the night before shooting began was sort of a a race back to the location among the good things about that was literally not having down time to really worry about it what i remember feeling was incredibly hot it was it was about 120 plus degrees fahrenheit it was a beautiful beautiful desert location really incredible but tough for everybody that was in any kind of costumes that kind of thing it was a very tough way to start but it looks fantastic [Music] first day sunday it's hot it was absolutely amazing we walked to set i see this huge life-sized tire fighter crashed in the sand for me it was just amazing just looking around and taking it in and saying i am here we are about to film this movie and jj abrams with his enthusiasm and his energy coming in and saying that was starting star wars episode seven uh i just want to say the uh the obvious which is that we are here on day one of star wars episode seven yeah how incredible is that [Applause] you don't need anything like that you don't need anything you need a bag where is your helmet okay very good you can go yeah you're wonderful let's get your deep background excellent all right should we uh reverse one more time i just remember i was told that oh daisy's doing her first scene so i was just like okay let me go down and go see it what was the first thing when i was scrubbing the thing my arm was aching i know i was just relaxing and you were just working so hard and you were just doing this my arm was achy and i kept not being able to get it right oh my god when we got the first actual scene it was exciting to see what she was doing and to hear her interaction with jj here it is these are the dailies from the first day of the new star wars film this is where daisy's character lives and we're getting ready to shoot her outside of her at at home we've built as much of it as we could afford and we have a lot to get in the little time we have at dusk we just love if you can put it on because it sort of like makes you feel good you sort of like in a weird way relate to what the rebellion did when you put it on it feels like you settle in more almost okay can you put it on abu dhabi was really hard at the beginning i obviously never worked on this scale on anything and because the first day was just me it felt like quite a lot of pressure acting daisy my god you could literally feel sand burning through your shoes which was crazy then obviously finn has to be in the stormtrooper outfit so let's just say it was a combination of sweat passion ice cubes and a lot of water a lot of acting involved but at the same time not a lot because it's hot i'm exhausted the location we ended up on was just so stunning the sand dunes were breathtaking so to be able to shoot widescreen cinema out there was for me what i personally love to go to the cinema for is to see locations places i don't get to see all the time what was made clear to me very early on was that it was going to be shot on film which is something that i love i love working with film when you're making star wars there's really no choice but to shoot it on film you have to because the originals were shot on film and it's very much part of how we remember them looking and feeling there's something that you need to capture on celluloid no question when you brought me today is worth one quarter portion it's about 40 degrees i guess so it's hot in there but it's star wars i burned the star i've worked with jj many times when i heard that he was doing star wars obviously i was immediately on the phone like what what are you what what i said i've got to come visit and he said yeah maybe you should do a voice in it or something you know like be a droid because i kind of thought that being in it as me as my face i think people go oh it's him from star trek and they might spoil it so i was kind of torn because i was desperate to obviously at least be part of it in some way and then we discussed the idea of me playing a character who was in full prosthetic which meant i could have my space cake and eat it that's mine we might in that one jumper in abu dhabi it was more cardio than anything else and so a few weeks before the abu dhabi shoot we were on the treadmill doing interval running and what that did was just copied what happens on set we would run super fast we'd be running with the camera a 20 second take we'd breathe for a bit and josh will be like let's go again without the guys we're training with there's just no way neither me or john would have been able to get through abu dhabi give me a shake keeping the girth it was really hard the actual hardest bit was when it was soft and hard sand and one of the last runs was just a mix of the two and that's just like a killer on the legs like it was almost a relief when there was explosions because you knew like there was only so many times that you could do the running [Applause] [Music] and action bb8 [Music] [Applause] we just ran bb-8 from the gates to escape from the tie fighter attack and uh i wasn't quite expecting that today it was very conscious on our part that there would be a new droid who's a major part of the story and he's funny and sweet i didn't go through the film thinking oh this is going to be iconic oh bb-8 is like our version of r2 i never really thought of it like that i was just like oh you're so cute and as you're walking you're going to kind of glance at him sort of slightly annoyed that he's convinced you to take him he was the first character i had to build scenes with and i was nervous because it's not a human being but because of the puppeteers he comes alive dave's doing the head and brian's doing the leds on the body and i've got the drive system this version of bb-8 is the puppet version and he is fundamentally a rock puppet and i have control of him here i can just do the gross body movement on the ball and this has been the model we've used most of all as you get a really instant and organic performance with it what about the droid what about him i asked jd if i could have a bit more with bb-8 because i think it's such a nice bond it's such a nice relationship he's this tallest man i guess that is the first constant that rey has ever had you're welcome thank you so much it's been the most fun the greatest adventure uh i i cannot believe that we've done the shoot here in abundance we can't thank you enough we will uh we will be forever thank you thank you thank you uh we'll see you next time [Applause] slate one take one we're actually in pinewood studios and this is one of the stages that we shot on one of many actually in large part this is the home of star wars because so many of the movies were made in england it's pretty great returning to the uk and setting ourselves up at pinewood and working with these crews and working with generations of people who go back to the early days of star wars the crews were not only amazing but a lot of the crews had parents who had worked on the originals so it really felt like a homecoming working at pinewood was another incredible experience in this this was a studio where some of the great movies of all time were shot this is the studio where the james bond films were made that you can't help but have reverence for the actual studio we have pretty much every large stage at pinewood and we filled them up and we'll fill them up several times on this movie you know switching them around to other sets you have a massive amount of construction in office and warehouse space here as well we have both back lots that have big builds on and we've been here for a long time we started building months months in advance and filming [Music] [Applause] we were very fortunate when we got oscar isaac to play poe's character because the role of han in the first three movies he's the one that draws your eye because you don't know what he's going to do it's an archetype that all of us like we wanted someone like that to be in this group there's definitely elements of han solo in poe you know the cockiness of of a fighter pilot because fire pilots are i mean these guys are incredible the amount of things that have to be going on in their head at once originally poe was going to die early in the film and that was the script that oscar saw and one of his issues wanting to do this movie was that he made like four movies in which he died early on and he was sick of dying early on week or so later jj wrote me he said gotta figure it out posing the rest of the movie now and so this idea that poe comes back was something that was added later which obviously for me was incredibly exciting and and fantastic i get to live going forward you know what he'll add to the fight against the first order will be really exciting to see where that goes stormtroopers are formidable now they have all sorts of new weaponry they have a new way of fighting and they're vicious and quite scary when you see them on the set and running out of those transport vehicles it's frightening i'm the crowd second lady on the movie and when i heard that jj was interested in getting some girls into stormtroopers costumes i was like well i'm kind of tall i'll give that a go moving your arms it's not too bad moving your legs it's okay i guess it's not i can start to feel like on my back a little bit of weight some of the boys yeah like a heavy rucksack going on that was really exciting really exciting i was a bit worried about getting up the hill because once the momentum has gone from going down the slope going back up again is pretty tough i'm absolutely loving it it's like i feel like a child playing goodies and baddies shooting lots of people it's great [Music] captain phasma is the first female star wars villain i find it very heartening that a franchise like star wars it makes it a progressive character makes it a modern character a new relationship with a female character which isn't about her being sexualized it's about us responding to the choices that she makes this just rests on the shoulders i was talking to michael kaplan who i've idolized since i watched blade runner about how he came to the design of captain phasma they did these beautiful illustrations of kylo ren in silver jj said i don't see kilo ren that way but i love the idea weeks went by and kathy came in and she said what is that pointing at the knight in shining armor she said that's amazing she said that has to be in the movie so that's how captain phasma came to be i was told that i was going to absolutely love my costume and they put the helmet on me i looked in the mirror and i think i just giggled quite a lot i thought it was great that they had not feminized the almond i thought that was fantastic but i thought it's good to know there's a woman in there so maybe subtly i can let that come across in the way that she stands in the way that she holds her body it isn't sexualized but there is something occasionally of a femininity to give this character a little bit more of an identity the name came because looking at the chrome design of phasma's uniform it reminded me of the movie phantasm and there's this chrome ball in don cosperelli's film this kind of devil ball with spikes on it i always loved the design of that so when we were looking at this i thought you know phantasm and phasma it was a weird name but it felt like a fun star warsy name good excited kill them all people want to tell you what your character is and they have like such a vocabulary for those movies everyone likes to tell you you're a villain i don't think villains think of themselves as villains i think they probably really think that as more being right that they feel justified and i think that makes somebody even more dangerous the villain in training is interesting for me because in talking about villains and star wars you don't and can't get better than darth vader it's sort of the thing they had created an image that was unmistakable you don't need any explanation the guy walks through the smoke you get the whole thing and he's the most threatening villain of all time the idea that this is a character who is influenced by that darkness started to allow a masked villain which feels essential in a star wars universe to take form and not feel like we are being naive and acting like there wasn't a darth vader maybe putting on the mask makes him feel more powerful it makes perfect sense that this guy has had a huge impact on everybody and yes this figure looms large for our villain too there's so many nods to vader and how you first meet him and i think jj was after something more youthful and unpredictable and someone who isn't polished and even in his lightsaber it's not quite finished you know and his uniform is not quite perfect he was by far the most difficult character to nail down jj was our barometer he looked at hundreds of sketches and the design that we had in the helmet suddenly we thought of it as being chromed i like the idea of light being reflected it was an interesting process that i've never done before to be able to tell a lot of story without actually being seen and then what is the difference when he takes off his mask what do you find instead of this menacing figure that you're used to or someone that's kind of like more mustache twirly and obvious that it was actually someone more human jj always wanted him to have a cape and a hood i had a pattern so that there would be a lot of movement when he was fighting there's chips taken out of it it's not perfect it's less manicured that costume putting it on it was like such a an event i was so pissed by the time you know we were ready to start shooting that i felt totally ready the million falcon is as much a returning character in this movie as any of the people and there's a very weird feeling about going back to something you know so well it's a little bit like if you were to say i'm gonna open this magic door and behind that magic door is your bedroom at nine years old that kind of a feeling of it's yours and you know it and so when you go back to it it can't not look the way you remember it it has to be what you know so our art director mark harris who worked on empire was like a scientist forensically recreating the falcon mark harris went through every known photograph of the falcon we studied that every nut and bolt i mean it's what you dream of as a kid to play with stuff like that i love building and to make something like that every day i come to work smiling and it's made in waves we had to make it piece by piece by piece so we knew it would all work and the last piece to be made living on was actually the curved sofa which we took a long time to actually get that right even down to the texture there were benchmarks for everybody when we hit those moments in this story that were a huge recall to what the star wars series has meant to everybody i think probably one of the most memorable moments was when we were shooting on the millennium falcon to be on a stage where you're actually seeing the millennium falcon that feels sort of dreamlike it brought some people to tears literally oh my gosh i'm literally shaking like this is insane i told you you're in star wars i just remember running up the rap just giggling i just i went through that whole place messing it all up and all the props people and the guys on set were just kind of like okay can you control him because i started running i went to the cockpit you know the little ball thing the jedi training ball i got that out i'll start rolling that around oh so fun so i walked onto that set completely overwhelming i really am at sixes and sevens to say the least and then they introduced me to harrison ford i had nothing to say i'm getting horrible days out here i feel like i should play chess now be careful not to taking on the redux of the chess set the idea that i pitched to jj was that we pick up the the chess set where we left off and we pretty much go back to that frame where the little guy is getting back up and the big guy is coming to grab him again and the little guy like fun boxing felt like coming full circle again he just stepped back into 1977. my favorite personal story i was shopping at a random department store and sure enough who do i run into with harrison ford i tapped him on the shoulder i said mr ford so my name is darren i'm one of the production designers and stars i'm actually building millennium falcon right now and he goes the toggle switches and i go toggle switches he goes when we built it the first time none of the toggle switches had any springs in them it bought broken switches because they were much cheaper so if you stood there long enough the switch which was in this position and you moved to this position would slowly come down behind you while you were standing there because there was no spring in it no budget for springs and you can put the springs in the switches this time he says yeah boss we got the we got the budget for that as cool as it is and as beautifully done as it is you very quickly realize the scene is not going to be good just because it's there the story has to be working for that very cool location to not feel squandered and so it was really important with han solo to be introduced in a way that felt worthy of these sets that were being built and also well i want the fans to feel like we're doing this right from the beginning and is this going to serve them everyone was waiting for the line which was chewie we're home and we had given it the whole day because jojo really wanted it to be perfect han and chewie entering the phone i turned around and there must have been 200 people standing behind me all staring at the monitor wanting to see harrison come into the millennium falcon for the first time that was a huge moment and camera action [Music] we're home [Music] dear peter is present on the set offering his invaluable experience and advice and it was great to have him there getting back to the old days the old ways of doing things and it's great i wasn't walking very well because i tore a tendon in this knee about 10 years ago that meant a knee replacement because peter's knees are not good for many of the scenes jonas who was a kind of stunt chewie is in the role when i put on the suit i start rehearsing i start doing what peter does and like there's a little little wobbles and his chewy like awkward things that he does awkward but lovable also i have had words with him about what he does and what he doesn't do and being relatively the same height does help i think i'm a little bit shorter than peter was at his prime at this point i'm seven feet i believe he's seven two pizzas okay yeah all right i'm glad that they've gave them the opportunity to be able to come and do as much as possible and get the old gang back together again well you tell them han solo just stole back the millennium fog for good i'm about to shoot the scene where it's a little private moment of him in the cockpit this is a kind of sweet little privileged moment to see him alone taking it in reunited with the ship that he loves so much [Music] i've been away so long i looked at and said this doesn't look right this was this here and they said yes i don't remember that okay i've spent a lot of years here and it was fun to see it again there are things i remember about the cockpit and some of the funny stuff we went through without precise calculations we fly too close to a store they're bouncing to a super market and then [Music] and after a beat of stopping and looking we'll cue the music again and you'll start playing the music again we wanted to develop a whole story that the castle was a place where people could come to escape and find a home with mass it's a communal place to make deals plan heists hey mars mars she's four feet tall but she runs the joint and everybody knows that she's a woman who challenges people to find their purpose you've been running away from this fight for too long maz was a character that you meet at the moment in the film when things kind of come to a necessary pause and she was inspired by a teacher that he had jj had this legendary teacher named rose gilbert they're like maz's character's going to be rose gilbert we've had pictures of rose gilbert all over our workstations when we were drawing i definitely think that the spirit of her is very much present in that character we initially talked about doing her as a character that was going to be performed with a puppet then we talked about doing it as a animatronic character and then we realized a we hadn't found the design early enough that we all agreed on and b it felt like it was actually going to be limiting i know that jj has been fascinated with motion capture and it was something that he was really keen to have in his film the embracing of the old god of doing things and the new cg has gotten to a place where if you have a good enough team doing it and we have the best in the business at ilm then you're able to have it be indistinguishable from what's real [Music] everything feels so real and then there's me in this head cam walking around covered in dots there's 104 dots put on my face every morning it was the most alienating thing in the world because there are lights shining on my face everybody is drawn to look at me and you're still trying to figure out how on earth you're supposed to be a completely different person in this suit [Laughter] the principal photography for me has been like a technical rehearsal and then there's a whole other process in a volume where we zero in on my performance and get the nuances of that i became part of this whole thing from two different angles as an overseer if you like or a consultant to do with performance capture and of course i was also playing the part of snoke the nemesis character and general and leader of the dark side in this particular version if skywalker returns the new jedi will rise one of the things that jj was very very keen on was not to fall into the trap of over characterization you know pushing it too far it can end up being their caricature if you're not careful we will stop them before they reach skywalker go oversea preparations yes supreme leader i was 25 foot up sitting on a throne very divorced from the rest of the actors my voice coming through speakers it's not like you're standing next to another actor and relating to them in in a more direct way so it is easy to push the character really too far it doesn't feel yet andy has been a great support he has encouraged me as much as possible to let go of the oddness of the things i'm wearing and just find the character as i would in any other circumstance solo what is she doing i don't know very good [Applause] so we're on e-stage which is the resistance base and it is one of the first tests we actually designed and originally was conceived when there was more of a jungle up above but the idea of the roots was something that i loved so much feeling that it was really underground and part of it is that sort of obviously the kinship with the original star wars jungle base we would have vines and roots intertwined with cables and the kind of makeshift face that the resistance has so at the very beginning of this you say it's a death star and then you say wish that were the case uh maybe four feet above the center of the table that expands to a big sphere that would basically be the diameter of the circle the scene that made me feel like oh my gosh this is crazy it's when all of the casts are around that table planning i just want to say one more thing the moment that meant the most to me personally was akbar was on set steps and you know security's been so tight we're not allowed to take pictures or anything but i had to take a picture of akbar on set and show it to my brothers because we loved akbar you know it's a trap how is it possible to power a weapon of that size it uses the power of the sun you see general akbar speaking and you couldn't buy this as a star wars fan it doesn't get any cooler than that i can shut down the shields but i need to be there on the planet i mean that scene was incredible though poe dameron's death harrison was there c3po princess leia r2d2's in the corner this is r2d210 uh this is lee which is oliver both guys responsible for making the r2d2s on the film we brought in fans who were also people working in the business so we had different degrees of obsession i just studied electromechanical engineering and needed a hobby so i joined the r2 builders club in 2003 and it wasn't until 2007 i actually had my r2 almost finished i went to star wars celebration europe and we had backstage passes and i was very cheeky and asked kathleen kennedy if they weren't making a film and they needed any droids contact me and then a few months later i got an email and here we are oliver kindly invited me to join him on board with this job coming here on a daily basis five days a week i don't take it for granted any second i'm here you know it is unbelievable anthony daniels came over mid-shoot and said you know what a good job we've done and how they compare to the old ones he was impressed which was a big compliment someone's worked with so many r2d2s bb-8 you're wasting your time in the first film in episode 4 3pr his left leg was silver and the idea was that 3po had a history star wars didn't just happen out of nowhere it wasn't page one of a new story but you are kind of tuning into it oh chapter here move forward and jj takes that idea several notches higher i wanted to make sure that when you saw 3po in the force awakens that you knew it was from this era and this moment i wanted to mark him in a way 3pm he has a red arm because something's happened to him in the last 30 years the rebels have had all sorts of dramas and one of his was clearly losing a limb and then oh hey here's here's one it's not the right color but we'll spray it later and the idea was he's been burdened with this damn red appendage and by the end of the movie he's gotten his arm back you know he's got his proper armor installed the story as to how he got his red arm is actually going to be in a comic book that they're doing as a separate piece destroyed maybe the one chance we have a finding my brother she hadn't acted in a while you know i think she was nervous going into this it was basically the worst day i've ever had on a film set in my life then it ended and i got to go to sleep and come in another day and it was better once we started to do it she seemed to fall into it very easily to bring a character to life that you hadn't played in 30 some years i mean i understand for all of them how daunting that could be jerry's an amazing and unique person i'm trying to be helpful when did that ever help and don't say the death star we don't see each other that frequently when we're not working so it's fun to catch up and they've written some really interesting scenes for us you could always see him clearer than i did i don't know what i saw can you imagine those two people together they were good initially and then they reverted to type i went back to the only thing i was ever any good at we both did it's about these two people who loved each other who came together but whose natures were always very different you know the idea of han remaining in one place is hard to imagine the idea that leia would stop fighting for the cause and a greater good that's hard to imagine but they had this kid who was born with equal parts good and evil he is someone who is broken forgive me i feel it again there's nothing more powerful than genetics if you really imagine the stakes of him in his youth having all these special powers and having your parents kind of be absent during that process on their own agendas equally as selfish he's lost in the world that he was raised in and feels that he was kind of abandoned by the people that he's closest with he's angry because of that i think and he has a huge grudge on his shoulders but it's more than just having sort of a bad seed as a kid snoke had targeted this kid who knew that this kid was going to be incredibly powerful in the forest and wanted him as an ally so this mother and father had a target for a son someone was watching their boy and these parents aren't there enough to guide him to his father there's still light in him i know it foreign the fun of celebrating the return of these characters that we know is certainly a part of this movie but i never felt like we were telling a story about leia luke or han necessarily it felt like a story about a generational handoff that this was really a story about rey about finn about poe about kylo ren and you can't have that hand off without cost background you know no matter how much we fought i've always hated watching you it needed to serve this purpose of giving our new characters the mantle and that was a big scary decision if you see our son bring him home so we had to deal with that and there was a lot of discussion about it and jj i went back and forth and talked about a lot of different things and this is where we came [Music] [Music] it was the scene that i think that terrified me the most and yet it was an absolutely critical part of the story and mostly perhaps for the villain of the piece his destiny is resolved in a powerful and effective way and then three two one two and that's yours i remember a specific time walking on set with harrison and him saying you know look what we get to do for me that was like an amazing moment because he's someone who's accomplished so much he's just as in awe of the process and and feels so lucky to be involved in it it's a very inspiring thing i enjoyed playing the character in the first i enjoyed playing the character in the second by the time we got to the third i thought there was possibly no useful purpose for this character except as a human sacrifice it's not that i wanted han solo to die i wanted han solo to be able to lend some significant emotional weight to the story i was resolved to be useful and to pass on responsibilities to others and get out of the way i would like when you say the other detonator you should be honest you should hold that thing up yeah make sure it's like that we spent a lot of time keeping as few people as possible on the set and you know it's a serious scene it was emotional it was emotional for the actors both harrison and adam driver [Music] i wanted to avoid that scene as much as possible and then it was also very excited to do it but to go to that place uh would have brought up in myself was a lot [Music] we're not kidding here this is serious stuff and we wanted it to be right you have all these things they're going on your head but that really goes away when you're staring across from that other person [Music] the unique and very deeply emotional and troubling way in which han solo meets his fate i thought gives incredible opportunity and helps realize the full potential of the character that adam driver plays he was so generous that there really wasn't much i had to do other than respond to him [Music] i don't even want to think how people are going to react to that it was a necessary component this is not just the force awakens in a young woman this is the dark side of the force awakening in the villain [Applause] [Music] so ladies and gentlemen this is a moment for you to acknowledge it wraps a man who uh he was a hero to us before this movie but he's even more so today and i cannot thank the gift of you in this movie [Applause] [Applause] luke skywalker was for me always the way into star wars this movie was always very much about getting to him if you imagine a place where the jedi order could have actually first emerged that's what led me to skellig island at the end of this movie because this is a place that emerged in 600 a.d as a christian retreat from the world it's an ancient site of a monastery and it's like nothing you've ever seen ever and only 50 people go into the island it's a very small island and they were 600 and some steps to the top and everything had to be brought up you know by hand once you get up there boy it's so beautiful and so magical there was a point where i was as off to myself as you could be and i was sort of far down the path and the ocean beyond and this feeling came over me that hadn't happened since tunisia on the very first one because i was there out in the desert and i had this really strong feeling that i was in another worldly place because you really felt i'm there skellig was the first meeting of ray and luke and so late on there's such a big buildup [Music] there's a real ambiguity as to what his reaction is i think he has great reservations he's really conflicted who knows we'll have to wait and see while this was never his story this movie it was all about him it's all about how critical luke is to the continuation of this amazing story so what i'm most excited about is the story of luke skywalker and where it goes [Music] i think for many people a marker is star wars i know it's a film but actually it means much more than that for me star wars seemed like a kind of universe that might accept me there might be a place for me in that universe people love it so much it is a family experience that's what it is it's not even a movie just families do star wars together it's a verb i don't think there's anything quite like it in the history of film but we have the opportunity over decades to take the same material use it again and add something to it and revoice it and rework it it's been a challenge and it's been fun and it's been certainly a privilege i think in the end i have to say that i just feel very grateful this is like an opportunity to thank everyone for a lifetime of support of love if it weren't for the fans we wouldn't be sitting here and i've never forgotten that the other day i was looking at that original poster and i was remembering there was something about star wars that made me feel like anything was possible that like when you see that star field it felt like every point of light was a story the values that people place in these stories is deep and abiding these stories have been passed down in families from generation to generation it becomes valuable as a family experience and so it's passed down like family history if you enjoyed this episode and frankly even if you didn't don't forget to subscribe and if you want to help spread the word please give this video a thumbs up and tell your friends to subscribe please check out the official star wars coffee merchandise and don't forget to check out all of the content playlists on this channel including the rise of skywalker the mandalorian and much more

Channel: Star Wars Coffee

Views: 45,898

Keywords: Star Wars, star wars leaks, star wars plot leaks

Id: p7AevwcgeZw

Length: 69min 54sec (4194 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 27 2021