Per a tweet from one of the technicians, it seems Saturday, November 14 was the final scoring session for The Force Awakens with John Williams. (via)
Calling all knitters: Free pattern for The Force Awakens hat
You know you want to make this: A free pattern for a The Force Awakens knit hat by Hannah L on Ravelry.
Get The Force Awakens look: Chewbacca
Allure already took a look at Rey, but now we get the film’s real diva: Chewbacca. Maria Cork, creature department hair supervisor, has the scoop on Chewbacca’s many products.
Roundup: The broadsaber is venting, and other things we learned about The Force Awakens this week
Between Wired’s J.J. Abrams interview, Entertainment Weekly and all those TV spots, we seem to have officially entered the “faster, more intense” phrase of The Force Awakens marketing. (No, you haven’t seen too much, calm down.) Here’s some stuff that got sidelined:
→ Settle your bets: The crossguard blades on Kylo Ren’s lightsaber “are raw power vented from the primary central blade,” per the description on display at Disneyland’s Star Wars Launch Bay. (IGN has a tour.) We already knew he built it himself, but the design is “ancient.” (via Reddit)
→ Speaking of Kylo, we haven’t seen much of Adam Driver lately, but he did tell Vulture that he found SDCC to be “intense” and “surprisingly moving.”
→ The Force Awakens is skipping some early award shows, says The Wrap, but the only one here you may have heard of is the Screen Actors Guild Awards. It will be out in time for consideration for the Academy Awards.
→ Variety says there was indeed new music from The Force Awakens in the Shondaland spot.
→ The cover for The Force Awakens novelization has been spotted on the Random House catalog (by Roqoo Depot first, I believe) and it’s… The poster. ‘Kay.
And in other movies…
→ Could Episode VIII return to Ireland? We know they’ve already shot on Skellig Michael, RTE thinks they’re looking at another location in County Kerry as well.
→ Jedi News claims to have the codename for Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s Han Solo spinoff.
Video: Fourth, err, second TV spot for The Force Awakens
With, yes, a few more new seconds of the film.
UPDATE: The official high res version has now been uploaded to the official Youtube.
Roundup: The Force Awakens’ running time and everything else we learned from EW’s big feature
My issue of Entertainment Weekly finally arrived, and I’m happy to report that we’ve already learned pretty much everything that’s in it regarding The Force Awakens from them online, save one: The final edit is locked, and it’s going to be two hours and 15 minutes long.
If you need to catch up, here’s our coverage of what EW’s put out this week:
→ Most everything from the main article gotten broken out, but Anthony Breznican’s interviews with Harrison Ford about Han and with Daisy Ridley and John Boyega get their own spreads in the magazine.
→ Don’t call her Princess: Leia Organa has a new title. And of course, there’s the inevitable talk of Luke Skywalker and why he’s been laying low in the publicity materials.
→ Perhaps the greatest wealth of The Force Awakens info can be found in the photo gallery. More on Rey’s speeder, jackets, Adam Driver’s lustrous hair, ladies in armor, First Order indoctrination, Bobbajo and more.
→ We learn the most about Lupita Nyong’o’s Maz Kanata since the character’s name was revealed way back in the spring.
→ Starkiller Base and General Hux get the spotlight – and it’s confirmed that Starkiller is indeed what we saw on the poster.
→ The big BB-8 gender question.
→ And, too late for press time I suspect, an interview with Anthony Daniels.
EW may be short on Kylo Ren, but remember he was the focus of EW’s last TFA cover story back in August… And we still have just over a month to go until the movie.
Gugu Mbatha-Raw says Episode VIII role is “a rumor”
“I haven’t been offered anything,” Gugu Mbatha-Raw told E! of the rumor that she’ll be in Rian Johnson’s Episode VIII. Either it’s the plain truth, or she is way (way) better at this then Benicio del Toro.
BB-8’s gender is still up for debate
Both Artoo and Threepio have been ‘he’ from the start, but it seems the jury may still be out on the new addition. Is BB-8 a girl droid or a boy droid?
During the design phase, it was up for debate whether this character would have a male or female personality. “I’m still not sure, dare I say, whether BB-8 is male or female,” [Neal Scanlan, the head of The Force Awakens creature shop] says. “BB-8 was female in our eyes. And then he or she became male. And that’s all part of the evolution, not only visually, but in the way they move, how they hold themselves.”
So far, pretty much everyone involved with the film, from Kathleen Kennedy and J.J. Abrams on down, has been calling BB-8 a he. Yes, it may be silly that this is even an issue, but that’s fandom for you.
As for the droid’s actual personality:
“We always imagined BB-8 as being quite manipulative,” says Scanlan. “I think he knows he’s cute. He knows that he can win people over. And he uses that like children do to get his own way. In this film, he has a very important mission that he has to accomplish and so he uses his personality, his coyness, and all of those things.”
Maybe the ‘BB-8 is evil’ camp has been onto something all along?
Boyega and Ridley on diversity, the Millennium Falcon, and lightsabers in The Force Awakens
I’m not sure if we’re coming up on the last of the Entertainment Weekly stuff or not (my issue did not arrive in a timely fashion, as per usual, and the app is awful) but this afternoon brought interviews with Daisy Ridley and John Boyega. Addressed is some of the backlash:
“We see through the eyes of children that they’re not talking about race the way we grown folks are. They’re not talking about color or how much melanin is in someone’s skin. That should teach us something,” Boyega says.
The bigots trying to sully things? He has no time for them. “We’ve been having a continuous struggle with idiots, and now we should just force them to understand – and I love the way I just used Force there, by the way – just force people to see this is the new world,” he says. “There are loads of people of different shades and backgrounds. Get used to it.”
Ridley talks about Harrison Ford and the Millennium Falcon:
She even got some sage starship-flying advice from Harrison Ford. “I was doing random switch-flipping and Harrison kind of put his hand out and said, no, everything had to have a purpose. Like, you flip a switch and then you see what it does, before you do anything else,” she says. “I was probably flipping switches too quickly!”
There was one other awkward moment. “Um, probably when I sat in his pilot seat,” Ridley says. “There’s a shot where I pilot the Falcon by myself. And then [on another day] Harrison and I went to film together. I went to get into the pilot seat and he was like, ‘That’s mine,’ and I was genuinely mortified. And J.J. was sitting there like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’ And, you know, I moved into the co-pilot seat.”
And Boyega on lightsabers:
“It started in rehearsals. We had [Kylo Ren actor] Adam Driver. That was the first time ever I had a stick in my hand that I could pretend was a lightsaber, which was the first stage of excitement,” he says. “I had to do all the sound effects and stuff by myself.”
In front of the cameras, he was given a much more elaborate prop. “That’s when I got the real saber, which is blue, it’s lighted, and just looks really epic,” Boyega says. “It felt monumental in my hand. I knew not to play like I used to when I was a kid, but to actually use it in serious combat for a scene. It’s absolutely crazy to have in your hand. It’s a bit heavy but it’s worth it. “
I believe that’s confirmation of something Making Star Wars posted last month, about how custom versions of Force FX lightsabers were used on set to help with lighting and other effects.
Video: More The Force Awakens from the Disney Channel
The Disney Channel aired this spot tonight with a handful of new scenes from The Force Awakens, including new footage of General Hux, Poe Dameron and on Jakku.