Star Wars with occasional sarcasm
Director J.J. Abrams and stars Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher will be on a special The Force Awakens episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live tonight.
Most recently, Ford showed up on Kimmel’s Halloween episode.
Live begins at 11:35pm ET on ABC; Tune in or don’t forget to set your DVR!
At the ‘Celebrity Nerd-Off’ with Stephen Colbert, J.J. Abrams revealed that he finished the final sound mix for The Force Awakens early Saturday morning, Yahoo Movies reports. There are “six very small, but important things that (still) need to be done,” per Variety.
→ Deadline claims that we’ve only seen about 5% of The Force Awakens ad campaign, and that it’s really going to ramp up over Thanksgiving. I have a feeling this means ad buys, but consider yourself warned. (And remember, if you’re reading fan sites you’re already paying a lot more attention than most people are.)
→ There’s a better copy of the commercial with the new X-wing pilots up now, but it’s still not ideal.
→ Three more Star Wars themed ads, this time from HP.
→ Rumor: We know he’s in costume, but who is Simon Pegg playing? Making Star Wars may have the answer.
J.J Abrams, Daisy Ridley and John Boyega were on hand for last night’s Saturday Night Live… Among others.
Entertainment Weekly isn’t going to tell you where Luke is in The Force Awakens. J.J. Abrams isn’t going to, either. And certainly not Mark Hamill.
Because Luke Skywalker missing is the whole point. A more interesting question may be, what does the rest of the galaxy know?
“It was the thing that struck me the hardest, which was the idea that doing a story that took place nearly 40 years after Jedi meant that there would be a generation for whom Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Leia would be as good as myth,” Abrams says. “They’d be as old and as mythic as the tale of King Arthur. They would be characters who they may have heard of, but maybe not. They’d be characters who they might believe existed, or just sounded like a fairy tale.”
Abrams does talk at length about how Rey and Finn would perceive Luke or the Jedi, however. For Rey, there’s only the scattershot stories she may have heard. For Finn, “raised from the ashes of the Empire,” Luke is a propaganda villain. (Han Solo? A footnote.)
As for the blue lightsaber, it’s “an important piece of the puzzle that will reveal Luke’s fate and whereabouts.”
And yes, there’s more quotes from Abrams and Hamill, but they’re not going to give you the full story. Not yet.
Andy Serkis didn’t know what Supreme Leader Snoke looked like at first, either, he tells Entertainment Weekly. “It’s the first time I’ve been on set not yet knowing what the character’s gonna look like. I mean talk about secrecy!” And his look was changing throughout filming of The Force Awakens:
“When we first started working on it, he had some rough notions of how Snoke was gonna look, but it really hadn’t been fully-formed and it almost came out of discussion and performance,” Serkis says.
He’s too “tall” and “extreme” for prosthetics, Serkis says. “Without giving too much away at this point, he has a very distinctive, idiosyncratic bone structure and facial structure.”
As for the character:
“Supreme Leader Snoke is quite an enigmatic character, and strangely vulnerable at the same time as being quite powerful,” Serkis says. “Obviously he has a huge agenda. He has suffered a lot of damage. As I said, there is a strange vulnerability to him, which belies his true agenda, I suppose.”
He’s not anyone we’ve already met, either. (It’s been a bad week for Darth Plagueis-based rumors.)
“No, he’s a new character in this universe. It is very much a newly-introduced character,” Serkis says. “He’s aware of what’s gone on, in the respect that he has been around and is aware of prior events. I think it’d be fair to say that he is aware of the past to a great degree.”
Serkis also says that he and Lupita Nyong’o’s Maz Kanata “are the only two performance-capture characters in an otherwise very analog world.”
Lupita Nyong’o’s Maz Kanata is indeed the orange alien we see on the poster, J.J. Abrams confirms to Entertainment Weeky, and the googles are an important part of her character:
Her eyes have special meaning and power. “I had some specific ideas about how she would work and what she would do,” Abrams says. “I had this pitch about these goggles that she wore. Her eyes are an important aspect of her character, and you’ll see how it plays out.”
He also says she was a pirate for a very long time, and “she’s lived over a thousand years. She’s had this watering hole for about a century, and it’s like another bar that you’d find in a corner of the Star Wars universe.”
Carrie Fisher and J.J. Abrams talk Leia in The Force Awakens in the latest from Entertainment Weekly. On what she is now:
“She’s referred to as General,” says director and co-writer J.J. Abrams. “But … there’s a moment in the movie where a character sort of slips and calls her ‘Princess.’”
It’s pretty heavily implied that the slipee is Han, naturally.
Meanwhile, Fisher describes Leia as “solitary. Under a lot of pressure. Committed as ever to her cause, but I would imagine feeling somewhat defeated, tired, and pissed.”
We first learned Leia’s new title in the prologue of the book Moving Target, but this is the first time it’s been explicitly mentioned to the wider audience.
In a new interview with Wired, The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams talks about Star Wars in general, keeping secrets, the Millennium Falcon “changing hands,” and how the previous films succeeded and influenced the new. It’s today’s must-read (so far.)
Some excerpts below the cut, or go straight to Wired.
Master troll George Lucas was among the luminaries asking J.J. Abrams about Star Wars and his other projects for Vanity Fair.
The Associated Press was first to ask The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams about how Luke Skywalker has been missing from all the promotional material. “These are good questions to be asking,” he said. “I can’t wait for you to find out the answer.”
“It’s no accident,” he continued.
One thing we can put to rest: Luke is not Kylo Ren. Adam Driver is playing Kylo Ren, not Mark Hamill, which we’ve known since the Vanity Fair shots were unveiled in May. Bring up the Kahn fib from Star Trek Into Darkness all you like, but no one was going around saying that Benedict Cumberbatch’s role was actually being played by Bruce Greenwood. A ten-year-old video of Mark Hamill saying he’d have liked a more complicated arc in Return of the Jedi is not really the best evidence for that actually happening now.
Abrams also addressed where production stands: “The visual effects process goes on for so long that my guess is we’ll probably be doing visual effects for the next three or four weeks, even though the cut will be done before then. We’re in the editing room working on the cut, going over visual effects and going over reviews. We still have another scoring session with John Williams, who’s a god when it comes to music.”