Star Wars with occasional sarcasm
If you’re not up to watch the entire The Force Awakens panel from last night, catch the highlights above. And the full backstage interviews are below the cut!
Continue reading “SDCC video: The Force Awakens highlights, backstage interviews with cast and crew”
Sure enough, there was no trailer for The Force Awakens at SDCC, but we did get this sweet behind-the-scenes video, which includes our first look at Carrie Fisher as Leia.
The panel consisted of J.J. Abrams, Kathleen Kennedy, Lawrence Kasdan, John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, Domhnall Gleeson, Gwendoline Christie, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, and even Harrison Ford, who joked about his leg.
We got new pictures of Kylo Ren (Driver) and Captain Phasma (Christie,) but the big reveal was General Hux, Gleeson’s character. “He’s British, so yeah,” Gleeson said when asked how evil his character was. (Driver was far more shady about it.) Gleeson also let slip that the First Order has a ‘Starkiller Base.’ Oh, and the turkey-thing from the first Force for Change video showed up, and his name is Bobbajo. (The spelling is straight from Pablo!)
Ford was the final guest to come out, sounding happy and proud about the film. Harrison Ford! Happy! (Hitfix has the quotes!)
Oh and, hey, let’s see how long this stays up:
All the folks in Hall H were treated to a free concert featuring music from the films and a fireworks finale. I’m not even jealous, because the video is so amazing and the first thing about this movie that has made me cry. I am a Star War, too.
We’ve know that Lucasfilm would have a Friday Hall H panel for The Force Awakens at San Diego Comic-Con for some weeks now, but now we have a time: 5:30pm PDT, aka 8:30pm EDT. The panel description is exactly the same, teasing Kathleen Kennedy, J.J. Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan and “special guests.”
We’re expecting a big splash – one doesn’t take their franchise to Hall H after this many years without bothering to do that much, particularly when one’s parent company has their own con* a month later, and the sibling is sitting it out…
* Yes, we’re expecting TFA stuff at D23 too, but that’s also the first con after the Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation release that’s keeping LFL quiet on the Rogue One front, so that seems like it may get a big splash.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Greg Grunberg talks about how J.J. Abrams is doing (“…All I can do is ask him, ‘How’s it going?’ and he’s like, ‘Oh, I’m really happy.’ So I know if he’s happy it’s just gonna be incredible,”) the trailer and shooting the movie in secrecy:
What I’m gathering from all of the pieces I’ve seen is it’s everything that a Star Wars junkie like me wants out of the movie. We got our script pages, only the scenes that we were in. Not even what was being shot that day! It was all on red paper so we couldn’t copy it or take a picture of it. And then we had to give the script pages back at the end of the day. And we didn’t get them the day before to take them home and learn them—Carrie Fisher and I were talking about it several times, like, “This is crazy! An actor does not get to prepare on this movie.”
He also said his role is “sprinkled throughout the whole movie, in a very small way.”
We don’t have any official word on Grunberg’s role, but it’s fairly obvious if you take one of Friday’s leaked images to heart. Note to spoilerphobes: The EW interview does contain a reference to said rumor.
There will be a Hall H panel for The Force Awakens at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday, July 10, StarWars.com revealed today. Kathleen Kennedy, J.J. Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan and “special guests” will be present.
There are several other panels, including two for Star Wars publishing. (Del Rey will be at ‘Part 2,’ Friday at 11 a.m.)
There’s some great stuff from Lucasfilm head honcho Kathleen Kennedy at Vanity Fair today.
George made it personal. He just made a movie that meant something to him. And I think that’s probably the biggest challenge for anybody stepping into this is that they can’t spend a lot of time thinking about what other people are going to think of the movie. They have to come at it from the point of view of, What does this mean to me and what does it have to do with me? Frankly, I don’t think great movies ever get made unless there’s some aspect of that going on between the creator and the story that’s being told. It can only become emotional [for an audience] if it’s operating on some kind of personal passion.
She also the emotional resonance of Star Wars, the old school experience, and how she and Steven Spielberg ended up hiring J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) to fix up those old Super 8 films.
Vanity Fair isn’t the only magazine borrowing some Star Wars mojo this month. Wired today has ‘the definitive oral history of ILM,’ with George Lucas, Kathleen Kennedy, Steven Spielberg, Dennis Muren and more. (Including J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson.)
How much of The Force Awakens is George Lucas? Well, per the Vanity Fair article (much of which still isn’t online, which means you’re going to be reading dozens of interpretations until it is) the answer is: Not a lot. I’m off to see if I can find a copy…
Today, Vanity Fair has their J.J. Abrams interview, where The Force Awakens director talks about not overexplaining things, his weirdest moment, and capturing the tone of Star Wars. Also, a horrible Max von Sydow pun.
Now, what sparked a lot of discussion today was this bit:
Well, what’s cool is we’ve obviously had a lot of time [during the development process] to talk about what’s happened outside of the borders of the story that you’re seeing. So there are, of course, references to things, and some are very oblique so that hopefully the audience can infer what the characters are referring to. We used to have more references to things that we pulled out because they almost felt like they were trying too hard to allude to something. I think that the key is—and whether we’ve accomplished that or not is, of course, up to the audience—but the key is that references be essential so that you don’t reference a lot of things that feel like, oh, we’re laying pipe for, you know, an animated series or further movies. It should feel like things are being referenced for a reason.
Earlier, they talks about how A New Hope just dropped in references to things like the Clone Wars, and as someone who’s experienced great anvil fatigue over the past decades, I greatly appreciate a return to that, whether it be random whatevers that happened between trilogies or old stuff we already know.
Disney had their earnings call today, in the aftermath of May 4, where Bob Iger talked up their “carefully designed marketing plan” for Star Wars. (…Yeah.) A research film, meanwhile, revealed that the franchise had “197 percent more digital consumption” yesterday than Avengers: Age of Ultron had on the day it was released.
Looking back, Chris Taylor explores how Star Wars has made billions.
→ The Vanity Fair newsletter photo reveal is an alternate take of Lupita Nyong’o, and a bit of an interview with J.J. Abrams. The full interview goes up tomorrow.
→ Spoiler corner: The day before we got the VF photos, Making Star Wars reported about a scene where Kylo Ren is helmetless. After the photos, Jason has a possible name for Maz Kanata’s location. (On that note, Jason was profiled over at The Daily Dot.)
→ Also… Domhnall Gleeson on meeting Harrison Ford | Magic Mike’s Star Wars-style poster