RIAN JOHNSON: Hey there. I am Rian Johnson,
and welcome to Episode VIII.
Hold your breath. I feel like (WHISPERS) I shouldn't talk over this.
This is always... I've probably watched the movie
I don't know how many times, but I'll tell you something.
Every time I sit down to watch it, it never gets old.
Just that "Lucasfilm," "A long time ago,"
the pause, and then that opening fanfare, never gets old.
So the opening crawl was the very first thing I started writing.
I just sat down to write the first draft of the script and I just said,
"I'm just going to do a version of it." And it was the very last thing I wrote.
Literally, a day before they tore the movie
out of our hands so they could finish it-finish it,
Um, I was sitting in the edit room with some of the guys,
and we were still tweaking some of the language in it.
And shout-out to a good friend of mine and good writer, Craig Mazin,
who gave me some grammar advice on a couple of things here.
He'll be infuriated I called him out
because there are still some grammatical things
that he thinks are iffy, but he said, "Well, fine, you can leave those in."
The other interesting thing is the opening fanfare.
So we re-recorded it with John Williams. They re-record it every time they do it.
The more interesting thing for me was in the mix.
Realizing it's just like mixing a song.
There's many different ways you can mix that opening fanfare.
And if you listen to all the movies, every single one of them
has a slightly different take on the mix of the fanfare.
Some are brighter. Some are warmer.
The Force Awakens one has a lot of kind of sharper attack to it.
We went for kind of like a warmer-type feel.
So, that was something I never really thought of.
You just think the fanfare is the fanfare.
So we tilt down. This was not the original opening of the movie.
Originally, I had this very clever visual idea
where we would come down and find John in the dome, kind of healing bacta suit.
Here's Billie Lourd, Carrie's lovely daughter.
And we would think we were looking at a planet,
then we tilt down and find John,
and he wakes up, and we started it with that.
And then all this happens.
And it was very clever, but I realized as we started
actually watching the movie with that opening,
it was kind of too clever, and it just took too long.
And, especially in a Star Wars movie,
I realized you just have to get to it as quickly as possible.
So we kind of reconfigured this new opening
where we just leap into the thick of things.
Here's the bad guys.
Here's what's threatened.
Here comes the big ship, the Dreadnought, which is...
Kevin Jenkins, who is one of our great designers at ILM,
kind of ended up designing this thing.
So this actress here who plays the monitor, Kate Dickie,
I mean, she just has two quick little lines in this.
She's in a wonderful movie called The Witch with Ralph Ineson,
who also had a very small part in this movie.
He ended up actually on the cutting room floor.
You can see him in the deleted scenes.
But they were both in The Witch together.
And that was kind of the wonderful thing and also the painful thing
about working in London on this film.
We would have incredible, wonderful, amazing actors,
like amazing Shakespearean actors
(CHUCKLES) who would come on for one day and just say,
"They found us." Just single lines.
And so it was a blessing and a curse.
So we kind of start the movie here with a joke.
And I held on to this.
This was something where I, um, felt like...
First of all, I knew that with all
kind of the heaviness of it being the middle chapter,
and I knew people were going to come in with expectations
of all the grand opera of it, and I really wanted this movie to be fun.
I love the tone that J.J. and Michael and Larry set
with The Force Awakens.
And the tone of the original films has a spirit of fun to it.
I felt like we had to, at the very beginning,
kind of break the ice and say,
"We're going to have fun here.
"We're going to try some fun stuff,
"and it's going to be okay to laugh at this movie."
So we kind of start it with a little Monty Python sketch.
Adrian Edmondson right here is in the movie
because I'm a huge, huge fan of Ade's.
He was in The Young Ones, and he did a series called Bottom,
which I was a huge fan of.
And every day that he was on set,
I was just trying to play it cool
and not start quoting The Young Ones to him.
And Domhnall Gleeson, who we play with in this film,
again, in a slightly more comic way than in (CHUCKLES) The Force Awakens.
I found the character of Hux...
I don't know, I immediately found him very funny.
(CHUCKLES) I saw a lot of humor potential in him,
and I knew that Kylo was going to be front and center
as kind of the heavy in this movie.
We didn't need another heavy between Kylo and Snoke.
And so the notion of Hux kind of being this foil
that could add a slightly different flavor to everything,
I thought could be more useful.
One of the very early things I came up with
was this notion ofBB-8 diving down into the X-wing.
You know, we'd always see Artoo working on it from the outside,
but I thought it could be fun to get down in the guts.
And I like this little bit of business here.
BB-8's trying to plug up the dike.
This actor is Mark Lewis Jones, who plays Canady.
And, God, I love him.
He's just got such a powerful,
(IMITATES LEWIS JONES) "Fire on the base!"
Matt Wood, who is our sound supervisor,
was convinced that that line, "Fire on the base!",
was going to start being used by EDM DJs.
He might be right.
Oh, Carrie.
So this whole kind of, like, thing between Poe and Leia,
this was something that...
Because Poe in The Force Awakens is a fantastic and very charismatic hero,
I really wanted to kind of figure out something about him
that was a, you know, weakness to dig into with this.
And so the notion of turning from a hero into a leader
seemed like a really interesting thing to me.
And the notion that with this opening sequence, he's going to win,
he's going to have the big blowing-up-the-Death-Star moment,
but at a cost that, in terms of the bigger picture, was not worth it.
And here's our little Star Wars: Tokyo Drift moment.
Here we go.
I also love the sparks when those two TIE fighters get hit.
It reminds me of some of the early model work with A New Hope.
The other interesting thing about the bridge of the Dreadnought
is that Steve Yedlin, who's my cinematographer...
And Steve and I have been best friends since we were 17 years old.
We met in film school.
We showed up to that set, and I was like...
We basically were reusing the same set
as the Star Destroyer bridge,
but we had kind of re-purposed it.
I was like, "We need to instantly know that we're here and not there."
And so this idea of making it like a submarine
and going with red lights...
That's Jamie Christopher right there, who just got blown up.
That's our First AD. Hi, Jamie.
Um, that was something we just came up with on the day,
the red light thing.
And here come the bombers.
When we were preparing to make this movie,
we watched a bunch of films.
So we watched...
I sat down with the story group at Lucasfilm,
and I just came up with a list of movies
I thought would be good to kind of draw inspiration from.
And Twelve O'Clock High was one of them,
which is the great film with Gregory Peck,
and it's kind of about World War II bombers.
And that ended up leading to this opening sequence
of kind of a bombing run, and the idea of these bombers that were...
That's another Kevin Jenkins design, these bombers.
I wanted them to be just kind of big cows,
not very maneuverable,
and so the fighters have to protect them.
Just like they did back in the day.
This is Veronica, who plays Paige,
who is, we'll later find out, Rose's sister.
She was so wonderful. She's an actress from Vietnam
who came in and just did all this incredibly difficult
kind of physical work in, like, the first week of our shoot.
It's really tough doing stuff like this
because it's a lot of really intense little moments
that she had to shoot that were logistically tough.
And so, they were very separated out.
So, it's all these little isolated moments
where I'd have to describe the context to her,
and she'd get these intense little beats bit by bit.
That, right there, I think, was maybe the first shot that we did in Pinewood.
Her popping up, yeah, and falling down.
And then that was a stunt performer who did the fall back.
We used a special camera to do this.
We'd actually used a digital camera that has a smaller sensor,
so we could get the depth of field for that shot.
And then this little bit right here was really fun to cut together.
On set, I would say, "We're going to De Palma this moment."
We're going to stretch it out to a ridiculous degree
and do these slow-motion shots where we stretch this moment
of her trying to kick that thing down.
And then, when it actually falls,
it was a question of just how long can we stretch this out for?
And we kept pushing it and pushing it,
and eventually hit a place where it's like, "Okay, this is the moment."
And then this shot is pretty much...
I mean, there's green screen down there,
and obviously the bombs don't fall all the way down,
but it's pretty much practical.
Our amazing practical effects guys built a rig
where those bombs actually were on runners that could slide down the ends.
And so that shot where we boom up and all the bombs fall down around us,
those aren't digital bombs,
those are actually real props that we're sliding down.
We did that little pick-up with Canady
just because we loved him so much in the edit room.
We're like, "Oh, he deserves a good moment before he goes, with Mark."
That insert right there, we actually shot during a makeup test.
We were doing a makeup test before we started shooting anything,
and we were like, "Oh! Let's get this out of the way."
So, this kind of puts a cap on the whole opening bombing run sequence.
It's interesting.
It's fascinating how much it changed over the course of editing,
structurally even.
Like, even a sequence like this where you work out all the effects
and you work out all the things.
You get it in the edit room, and you still end up pulling big chunks out
or moving big chunks around.
It's still a very liquid process all the way through the end.
The poor stunt guy right there actually hit himself
and broke his nose doing that fall. (CHUCKLES)
He was fine. He was all right.
I mean, he wasn't fine. He had a broken nose, but he was fine.
(CHUCKLES) I always flinch when I see that.
So, this was the original opening shot of the movie.
Because we kind of re-purposed it for this
and added the lightspeed to put it here.
But originally, we panned down from the crawl and found this.
And the first thing was Finn waking up.
But in that kind of cut-to-the-chase thing that I found
as we got in the cutting room, Star Wars just wanted to be.
I realized, well, I guess we don't see Finn
until we actually need to see Finn.
'Cause originally, he woke up at the beginning,
the whole bombing sequence happened,
and then this happened where we then see him wandering through the hallways.
And I realized, "Well, let's just connect those things up."
Finn, buddy.
JOHNSON: ILM helped out a little bit with some water,
but this was a pretty amazing rig.
(CHUCKLING)
Had water spurting out of John. The notion of a portable bacta suit.
So, here's Skellig Michael.
We shot here for three days way before the opening,
way before we actually started principal photography.
We got a very small crew out and just got a couple of days
with Mark and Daisy to shoot this
and a couple other little important scenes.
But our time on the island was really limited for a lot of reasons.
And so, we had to really pick our battles in terms of what we shot.
But we knew we had to match this as well as we could
to The Force Awakens' ending.
Of course, the sun was out while we were shooting.
So, we couldn't do much about that.
But we knew we had to be there for that.
So, this moment of Mark tossing the saber...
Fling!
That was always just something that made a lot of sense to me
in terms of, "Okay, he's come out to this island."
And the first thing I had to do when I was writing the script
was figure out why is Luke on this island.
Because we had the enigmatic kind of shot
at the end of The Force Awakens.
We see his face, we wonder what's going on here.
So, he knows his friends are fighting this good fight.
He knows there's peril out there in the galaxy.
And he's exiled himself way out here and taken himself out of it.
And so, I had to figure out why.
I knew, because it's Luke Skywalker, who I grew up with as a hero,
I knew the answer couldn't be cowardice.
I knew the answer had to be something active.
He couldn't just be hiding.
And I knew it had to be something positive.
He thinks he's doing the right thing.
Hey, porgs.
Uh, that led to...
Sorry, it's tough to keep your train of thought on a serious topic
while there are porgs on the screen. I apologize.
That led to the notion that he's come to the conclusion,
from all the given evidence, that the Jedi are not helping,
and they're just perpetuating this kind of cycle,
and that they need to go away
so that the light can rise from a more worthy source.
And so suddenly then that turned his exile
from something where he's hiding and avoiding responsibility
to him taking the weight of the world on his shoulders
and bearing this huge burden of knowing his friends are suffering.
And because he thinks it's a better, bigger thing for the galaxy,
he's choosing to not engage with it.
So, this was maybe my favorite set.
Although, I'll probably end up saying that a couple of times
throughout the commentary.
But this was extraordinary.
This is all practical that you see here.
This is a big practical set
that Rick Heinrichs, our production designer, designed.
And worked on along with a lot of other talented designers.
And that's a big red curtain that we strung up around it.
I mean, everything in this shot with the exception of Snoke is real.
And it was really amazingly striking when you walked onto it in real life.
It just looked like this.
And, of course, Snoke is played by Andy Serkis.
And it's a digital creature, and Andy's doing a motion-capture performance.
But the nice thing was...
Sometimes when you do a motion-capture, you're just in, like, a...
It's hard to describe quickly,
but you're in just an abstract space.
Because when you're capturing a performance in motion-capture,
you're just capturing the actor moving, so you don't need him on the set.
But here, we actually built the motion capture rig over the set.
We strung up a big truss
and put the motion-capture cameras in the set,
so Andy could actually be on set,
sitting on the throne, and walking up to him,
and interacting with the other actors,
and doing the performance, which was really nice.
I am a huge Adam Driver fan.
When I got this job, I was just really excited to get to work with Adam.
And especially when I saw his performance
in The Force Awakens and realized,
"Ah, this is a really interesting, complicated villain."
One of the first things I thought was...
I feel like, for this film, especially when we're trying to get,
you know, deeper into his head, I thought,
"Well, we got to figure out a way to get that mask out of the way."
Then I started working into it, and I thought,
"Well, it seems actually really natural that..."
I knew Snoke was going to, in order to manipulate him,
as we'll later find out, he's kind of taking him down a peg here.
And the idea that
Snoke's reaction to the mask is to ridicule it
and to suddenly turn it into this symbol of his immaturity
that he's hiding behind this mask.
That seemed to make sense to me.
SNOKE: ...you're no Vader.
JOHNSON: The ILM guys did such extraordinary work.
And obviously, the whole performance is...
Andy's performance is all completely there.
It's amazing how much it shines through.
But there's a level of collaboration that happens with the animators
who are creating the digital creature in collaboration with Andy's performance.
Those two hand-in-hand just create something really powerful.
But, especially in those close-ups, the level of detail they just got
and just how photo-real that digital character looks.
It was something I was very nervous about coming into it,
and it's amazing to see what they ended up doing with it.
I smashed that helmet myself. I stomped on it.
We actually got a take where it was just split in half,
and that was going to be it.
And then they were starting to take the camera away, and I was like,
"Uh! Wait, let's try one where it's totally smashed."
And I just literally started stomping on it
with both feet until it was shattered, and then that's what we ended up using.
So, this set is extraordinary. This is in Ireland.
This is on the southwest coast of Ireland.
And our amazing Irish crew
built and actually constructed
this Jedi village set on this cliffside.
So, this is cantilevered out over hundreds of feet
of just a sheer cliff drop to the ocean, right there. It's actually right there.
That's not a comp. We just built it there and shot it there.
And, uh, everything to the left, from Daisy on over to the left, is set.
But it's all practical, it's all actually there.
And it was extraordinary being out there.
And then all of this stuff.
We just had such a great time shooting in Ireland. We were there...
At the end of the day, we had just a couple of days on Skellig.
And then during the actual shoot, we were down the west coast of Ireland
for probably about three weeks or so.
But we went out to here. We airlifted this creature in.
We actually helicoptered with a cable, this massive creature
into this very hard-to-get-to
rock face.
Again, our amazing Irish crew had to build kind of a safety staircase
hundreds of feet all the way down to the edge of that rock face,
so the crew could get down there. This is amazing.
And here, this is an amazing stuntman who is actually doing this.
He's suspended by wires, but they actually built a huge suspension thing
where he walked out, and it pulleyed him out
over this very real cliff and drop.
So many of these things,
you kind of plan them out and you think, "Okay, then we'll put a thing here,
"and we'll put a pulley out over the cliff here."
And then you show up on the day
and you see all the amazing, incredible engineering
that has actually happened to make the things happen.
And it takes your breath away.
LUKE: You're wasting your time.
JOHNSON: There's a piece of an X-wing as his door.
A little detail there.
So, this was where Daisy kind of stops,
or Rey kind of stops and the tree calls to her.
Ren Klyce, who is our genius sound designer for this film,
played with a lot of things to figure out what this would be,
this voice calling.
It's just one of the many examples in the movie
of Ren having to communicate
some story points through abstract sound design.
This was a set. This we built in London.
And this whole kind of hillside and the staircase and the tree...
This is basically built in a big, not parking lot,
but a big concrete incline.
Which is pretty extraordinary. That was a special effect.
We just had blue screen behind her,
when we're looking back at the ocean and it pans around.
And then this is a set.
This was a really tight little set that, um...
It was completely enclosed.
It was a 360-degree set, which allowed us to do shots like this
where we would swing around and be able to see the whole thing.
We also had to shoot with very wide lenses.
And we had to use Steadicam. I actually don't usually like Steadicam.
I tend to prefer dollies. I like the feel of dolly moves.
But in here, we didn't really have a choice.
And Dave Hamilton-Green was our B-camera operator
for the whole main unit and also our Steadicam operator.
Another thing was, Dave actually put the Steadicam rig on me
and let me try it.
And I'm so happy he did
because I will never take Steadicam operators for granted again.
That thing is really like a medieval torture device.
I think I lasted a minute and a half in it
and just from standing up with the thing.
It's not even doing anything complicated.
Sweat was pouring down my face.
It's really amazing what a good Steadicam operator can do.
And as you can see by a delicate move like this up to Daisy,
Dave is a very good Steadicam operator.
Daisy gives, I think, such a beautiful performance in this movie,
and this is one of my favorite moments from it.
And so it kills me that I'm now talking over it.
But I guess that's what we're all here for.
But when she did this take,
I remember very distinctly being at the monitor and just getting chills
and thinking, "Ah, she's really something special."
I've seen your daily routine. You're not busy.
I will never train another generation of Jedi.
JOHNSON: I love the light that Steve...
As soon as Steve hit those shafts of light in,
we would figure out ways to get the actors in them.
And this line, actually, "It's time for the Jedi to end,"
it's funny. Originally, my written line here
was something much more kind of convoluted.
I forget what it was, but it was not as concise as that.
(CHUCKLES) It was actually when we cut the trailer,
the trailer guys actually did a condensed version of it
that just said, "It's time for the Jedi to end."
(CHUCKLING) And so, I took that, and I went back and readjusted.
I'm like, "Uh, it's so much better than the line I originally wrote."
I went back and readjusted it
so that it was just that, and it works so much better.
I love that moment with Carrie.
I have this really great memory of just sitting with her and talking through
what was going through her head in that moment.
It felt important to just give a moment of quiet for Leia.
And so much of Leia's thing in this movie, I wanted to...
I felt like here's a character who has
basically experienced just loss after loss after loss
throughout the course of these movies.
And I thought it would be nice to acknowledge that and to actually
give her some moments where you can feel the weight of the world
and see her actually kind of break by the end of this.
I thought the character could be a really powerful thing and something...
To see her actually bearing that weight seemed important,
and Carrie really tapped into it.
This is Amanda Lawrence, who, um...
Amazing, wonderful British actor who I saw in a play.
Initially, we just put her in a tiny...
Initially, she had almost nothing more than what you just saw there.
It was just one little line, and then I just loved her so much,
I just kept giving her more things to do.
(CHUCKLES) And then I gave her that whole speech introducing Holdo.
And I just kept her around.
I just wanted to have her around during the shoot,
'cause she was so cool.
And I just loved her on screen, so she just kept...
I just kept adding to her part basically.
There's a whole scene in the deleted scenes
where you see Poe give Finn the jacket back.
And it explains kind of the stitches in it.
So, if you're curious about how his jacket got back to him,
check out the deleted scenes.
The best advice I got from anyone was from J.J.'s editors
before we started making this movie.
Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey, they both told me,
"In every single scene, just shoot a cutaway ofBB-8,
"and you'll never regret it." (CHUCKLES) And we did.
And my editor, Bob Ducsay, and I,
we said a thank you to Maryann and Mary Jo
almost every day in the editing room.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
Tallie is played by Hermione Corfield.
And there's my buddy Noah Segan in his brief cameo.
I'll also cop to the fact that we just re-recorded that bit
because I said "Hermione Granger" the first time I said it.
(CHUCKLES) So, sorry, Hermione.
But, yeah, she plays Tallie.
So, these space battle scenes were obviously entirely digital.
The stuff outside, and the process of shooting them was interesting.
I basically started just by storyboarding them, the way I always do.
But then I took those storyboards and sat down with the pre-viz guys.
Basically, pre-viz is where you make
a very rough digital animated version of each shot.
It kind of looks like an Xbox game.
And so, I would sit down and translate the boards into pre-viz
and then cut the sequence together, and then work with Bob Ducsay,
our editor, on dramatically making the sequence all fit.
Um, it was a new process for me.
It was my first time working with pre-viz
and working with that whole system.
It was quite interesting.
For example, this shot was something that got...
It wasn't in it originally, and we realized we need to
be able to get a sense of the geography
and what's happening with the shields.
And so, we added that shot in and kind of created it in post.
And then this moment between Adam and Carrie.
I think Carrie just gives such a beautiful performance there.
And we put in a couple of these little...
I think they're three-frame dissolves to kind of mirror the moment in Empire
where Luke connects up with Vader.
And Adam really beautifully rides this moment
of the connection with his mom.
This was a big practical explosion that ILM then took over.
And this kind of intimate performance in a cockpit setting,
um, it's really tough to do.
I mean, you're sitting in this uncomfortable chair.
And, inevitably, I can't be right up by the camera because of the rig.
So, I'm back by the monitor,
talking you through it with a microphone or something.
When you see actors giving really beautiful stuff in a cockpit,
that's a real challenge.
Let's at least remind them that we're still here.
PEAVEY: Very good, sir.
JOHNSON: Anytime Adrian Edmondson is on screen in a shot,
even just in the background...
Next time you watch the movie, just keep your eyes on him.
He's always doing some fun little eye roll or something.
Yeah, this was something that Kathy Kennedy would bring up.
The notion that Leia is a Skywalker as well,
and she's got that same heritage.
And there's the line in Jedi where Luke says,
"Someday... You've got these powers too."
We never see them manifest.
And the notion that in a moment like this,
when it seems like all is lost,
and she just realizes
she's not done yet.
And almost through instinct, almost like you hear about parents
when their kids are caught under cars
being able to get Hulk strength and lift them up.
That's kind of what I wanted this moment to be with her.
Using the Force kind of for the first time in these movies
to pull herself back and to say,
"No, we're not done. This is not ending here."
Move! Out of the way, everybody! Give room!
MEDIC: Life signs are weak, but she's fighting.
JOHNSON: I love this little shot. I remember getting this.
This was fun to get.
And this notion... This was something in the writing that came kind of late.
This idea of this beacon to connect up Rey and Finn.
We were always trying to figure out ways...
I was very conscious of the fact that they were split up for this movie.
And I knew that was necessary,
but I was always looking for ways to connect them
and this notion of this beacon.
Uh... (LAUGHING)
So Joonas Suotamo...
I apologize, Joonas, if I massacred your last name there, but...
He's just the lovely Joonas to me.
He performs Chewbacca in this film.
And this scene in particular, I mean, you're underneath a big carpet.
To communicate these little comedic beats
with the clarity that he does,
um, it's really a skill.
He's a young actor. He was a basketball player,
and he kind of got pulled into this.
And I think he just acquitted himself admirably.
And he can't eat the porgs at the end of the day. He just can't do it.
Uh, that was my hand that pulled the dice down.
(CHUCKLING) Also, that's my cameo in the movie.
Just ruining all the magic here.
It's funny, I wrote that whole bit with the dice,
and I worked the dice into this movie. And when I did, there was still...
Originally, in The Force Awakens,
when Han comes into the Falcon for the first time in the cockpit,
he pulls the dice out of his pocket and hangs them up.
And it was in the script, and they shot it,
and it didn't end up making it into the movie.
But I didn't know that while I was writing this. (CHUCKLES)
They were still shooting it, and so I put this whole dice thing in.
But I figured, well, if Luke comes in,
and even though it's a pretty obscure callback to these dice that you glimpse
in one quick shot in The Force Awakens.
Or, in A New Hope, I think.
I figured, well, he pulls the dice down, you'll know they're Han's dice.
You'll know they mean something.
This is pretty amazing. We found the original footage of the...
Like, the original plate that they shot for Carrie
doing the hologram from A New Hope and were able to use it here.
And again, Ren Klyce, our sound designer,
took the audio from it and transferred it to tape.
And then took it out in the back and stomped on it in the gravel
and got it all messed up in a very organic way.
And Mark's reaction to that, again, I just think it's so beautiful.
LUKE: Three lessons. I will teach you the ways of the Jedi...
JOHNSON: I think Mark and Daisy just played so well off
of each other in this movie.
(CHUCKLES) Thank God because they got quite a lot to do together.
It's funny, one of the tough things in this was we had a lot of shots
where we had to communicate huge ships moving very fast through space.
Ah, here's Amanda again. Mandy. And that was tough.
It's tough to communicate huge ships and communicate speed
without either undercutting their mass,
or without any kind of reference object. In space, it's tough to do.
So, we ended up trying to move the camera quickly past them
and move particulate through space,
even though it doesn't really make sense.
Dennis Muren
works at ILM, and he goes back to the original film. He's a legend.
And we were lucky enough to have him there for a lot of our effects reviews,
and he gave a lot of tips on how to do that.
Here's the legendary Laura Dern who,
(CHUCKLES) God bless her, didn't flinch when I said, "Let's go with purple."
The character of Holdo was interesting. It developed quite a bit in the editing.
We went back and did a couple pick-up shots, actually.
Also, even with this speech, to tweak the performance a little.
Originally, she was a much more kind of hippy-dippy sort of, um...
I don't know, I had this idea that she would be
just the opposite of what you'd expect from
kind of a military leader stepping up there,
and that's still the case with her.
She still has a very feminine energy,
in that she doesn't have the traditional gruff male energy
that you've come to associate
with military leadership.
And so, the fact that she's leading in a different mode, in that...
How people would react to that.
That was something that was very interesting to me.
But our initial take on it that Laura and I did,
it was too much, and she was a little, uh, you know, too spacey.
So, we went back and got a slightly stronger take,
but I think it still has that initial energy we were going for with it.
And she and Oscar just... I mean, they adore each other.
It was just so much fun working with these two.
They got along so well.
There's a lot of dialogue that got cut out here
where there's even more kind of back-and-forth banter between them.
It's the sort of thing where
you always end up having to cut the stuff you love
out of a movie just to keep the thing on track.
So, here comes John, Finn.
So patient, waiting for some good Finn stuff in the movie,
and now we're about to get it.
Uh, I really loved the notion that he's left the First Order,
the character Finn,
but he hasn't really joined the Resistance.
Everything he does in The Force Awakens, even taking them to the Starkiller Base,
it's not to help the Resistance, it's to help Rey.
He always acts out of personal and not ideological motivations.
So, the idea of, that's exactly what he's doing here.
He's trying to save his friend. He's not in it to save the bigger cause.
He's like, "This is how I help Rey.
"I get this beacon away from here, and so she'll be safe
"when she comes to find it, 'cause this place is doomed."
Kelly Marie Tran as Rose.
We went through a really exhaustive,
one of these horrible, exhaustive casting processes.
I say horrible, not for us.
I got to meet a ton of hugely talented actors.
But it's always painful when you meet a ton of hugely talented actors
and end up only casting one. You just want to cast all of them.
Kelly ended up being...
I mean, when I met her and got to know her, she is Rose.
She has a beautiful, bright spirit, and it ended up informing the character
in more ways than one.
Originally, Rose was kind of...
I had thought of her more as a grumpy, sort of Eeyore type.
And once we got Kelly in the part, her spirit just started to infect it.
And even this thing where she's a fan of Finn's,
this was a fairly late rewrite.
This is one of the few scenes I rewrote during production. And I rewrote it...
Originally, she was much more suspicious of Finn.
And I rewrote it to more reflect Kelly's spirit and her personality.
I was like, "Oh, no, she'd be excited and a fan."
And then just genuine disappointment
when she realizes this hero of hers is not who she thought.
Um, a much more open-hearted kind of character
that is very much a reflection of Kelly.
(LAUGHS) This little move she does, I love it.
So, there's the beacon again. Just kind of connecting us back up.
Again, anything we can do to keep Rey and this whole story connected.
So, anytime I could find a place to do the beacon, I would.
This whole sequence, uh,
I was always nervous about when we got in the cutting room,
because it's really exposition. It's explaining what the plan is.
And I know to a certain extent that's fun,
but I also knew that we had a big chunk of it here.
We had to also kind of do this scene where
I could very easily, in my head, picture the bad part of this scene
where it's like, "Wait, back up! What did you just say?"
I think it's a real testament to the actors, both Kelly and John,
and then also in the next scene, Oscar and Anthony,
that they pull this off, and I'm never bored watching these scenes.
And I've seen these scenes a lot.
Back in the background in the cell,
I like the notion that Kelly's already zapped a few guys and put them away.
But, uh, depending on what take you're watching,
that's either my buddy Darrell Fry
from high school, who is a good friend of mine,
or Nathan Johnson, my composer.
(CHUCKLES) It's either one of those two back in the cell,
depending on what take we use.
And this set is just really beautiful.
This was actually...
I know I've said it five times so far,
"I think this was the first shot we did in the movie."
This was the first real proper scene that we shot,
like dialogue scene, with the main actors.
And I have such great memories of this day,
'cause it was this relatively small, little, contained set,
and we just got this dialogue between all of these folks.
And, um, it just kind of popped and crackled, and it just felt like,
"Okay, we're making a Star Wars movie."
Any time I would line it up
and Anthony Daniels as C-3PO would be in the shot,
I would just think, "Oh, my God, really making a Star Wars movie here."
There's our little cutaway ofBB-8.
(CHUCKLES) Thank you again.
And I love this little beautiful moment with Carrie.
Although, to break the magic, in that shot of Poe,
if you go back and watch it, we did, like, a cheat.
And the height didn't make sense there
with John and with Anthony in the background.
They're actually raised up on apple boxes,
on boxes three feet in the air.
So that if you look at them, their heads are up near the ceiling in that shot,
but you never notice.
Although now you do, because I just ruined it.
You're welcome, Blu-ray customers.
Uh, so, I got to work with Lupita tragically shortly on this.
This was just one day of work with her. She's so wonderful.
I love this character of Maz.
In early drafts of the script, there was more Maz in it.
Originally, I had her actually on the cruiser.
And I just slowly found, as I was writing it,
that so much of the stuff I had her doing,
especially as the script got bigger and bigger,
I could be more economical if I gave those beats to our main characters.
So, Maz ended up having
this one very pivotal and I think really fun, fun scene.
But I wish I could have worked with Lupita more
because I think she's quite funny. Especially that line.
And then, yeah. The idea of this orb where she's...
It's almost like a GoPro camera that's strapped to her.
It's an odd little concept that they had fun with.
MAZ: Find the Master Codebreaker.
JOHNSON: And then this jet pack thing was a very last-minute idea.
In one of the effects reviews,
I thought, "Oh, she flies off on a jet pack."
And it got a laugh from the room. So, I thought, "Well, try it."
And once again, we cut to Rey on the beacon.
Just trying to cement that connection to create the illusion of a connection
between these two stories, happening a galaxy away.
So, these Force connections, when I was writing the script,
I knew that I needed Kylo and Rey.
I wanted to delve more into that relationship.
I didn't see a way to do it physically.
I didn't see how I could get them together
without having some contrived thing
where she's being held hostage, and then she can't be...
Or he's on the island, and then there has to be a physical confrontation.
I just wanted to make them talk.
So, I thought of the idea of this,
"Okay, what if a new kind of connection opens between them?"
And then we had to figure out what it would look like.
There were all these visual ideas
for, "Okay, what could this connection look like?"
I just kept thinking, "I want it to just be intimate.
"I don't want any kind of swirling magical thing.
"I don't want it to be about the effect of how they're looking at each other.
"I want it to be painfully intimate,
"just like you're sitting across from someone and talking."
And so, that's why I thought, "Can we get away with just using film grammar?"
Just using the notion that when you cut back and forth between shots like this,
we're trained to think
that these two people are in the same space, talking to each other.
Especially once we got in the mixing stage,
and again, working with Ren Klyce, came up with this pretty extreme notion
of dropping all the sound out except for their voices
to isolate them.
Can we get away with this?
We didn't really know while we were shooting it.
It wasn't until we got in the edit room that we were like,
"I think this is going to work."
And it works, obviously, because of the performances that Mark and Daisy...
I'm sorry, that Adam and Daisy are giving.
Obviously, any time we shot these scenes,
we basically shot each of the scenes twice
because when we were out in Ireland shooting this part of it,
Adam was there in Ireland,
just so he could be off-camera filming this with Daisy.
Daisy was on the set with him,
on Snoke's Star Destroyer set,
shooting the other half of the conversation.
So, we would always basically shoot it twice,
but they were always actually performing,
obviously, off the other actor,
which was really vital.
This is another tiny little bit that we got actually on Skellig,
this little bit of walking up the steps.
And then we're into this also.
This has got a little bit of ILM work to it
to make it look like a big, slightly different than the actual Skellig.
So, we're back into another amazing Rick Heinrichs set.
This was another amazing 360-degree set,
the interior of this, with this beautiful tiled mosaic in this pool,
which is just gorgeous.
We actually repurposed that set for the interior
of the mirror-cave water section.
We just filled it up with water, and it also serves as that set.
This whole sequence out on the ledge.
Because of how intimate this dialogue was going to be,
and for a lot of reasons, for safety reasons,
we actually didn't shoot this part out in Ireland.
We shot plates,
and then this is our amazing folks at ILM
putting Ireland out back there for this whole scene.
This scene, I felt like it was important
if we were going to have a couple of these, um, topsy-turvy lessons
where Luke is trying to
teach her why not to be a Jedi, but why the Jedi need to end.
The notion of approaching a Force lesson, "What is the Force?"
And the notion of, um...
Especially for kids who are watching this, of explaining that...
What Mark says in this, "The Force is not a superpower."
It's not like...
It's not just about making things float,
it's not like an Iron Man-type superpower that you get.
Iron Man doesn't have superpowers. I know.
I know, I know, I know!
Iron Man's suit does everything.
But it's not like a Superman thing.
And the notion of trying to explain, sort of,
in a gentler, more spiritual way,
do a version of an explanation of the Force,
do a little bit of a reset on it,
I thought could be something that would be really good.
I think Mark is just tremendous in this scene,
and I think Daisy is amazing.
It might be the longest single shot in the movie, this one that's coming up,
where we push in slowly on Daisy's face.
What she's doing in it and where she's going is just amazing.
Jaron Presant, who's a good friend of mine,
who has shot second unit for Steve and I going back all the way to Brick.
Uh, he shot second unit on this,
and he got all of those little cutaways of the island.
It was all Jaron.
This shot right here, I love the symmetry of it,
and I think Daisy is just fantastic in it.
And this is the lesson.
That Force does not belong to the Jedi.
JOHNSON: This was another thing similar to the cockpit
because they were actually up on this big ledge shooting it.
It was another thing where I couldn't be up right there next to them,
and so I was directing from far away.
So, the fact that all this incredibly beautiful, intimate acting is happening,
and I'm basically directing them through a megaphone,
is just a testament to these actors.
These cutaways are in Ireland.
This is this amazing location that we found that's, uh, gorgeous,
and we added the hole in.
But that natural kind of basin actually existed.
And then, this shot right here, at the very end of the day,
we did this rig where we had a trash can full of water,
and we suspended it above Daisy's head,
and we dumped all the water on her head, and then we ran it backwards.
She loved it.
(LAUGHS) She was so into it.
After a full day of acting away,
to just get basically dunked by a huge thing of water.
And that was the last shot of the day.
I was nervous asking her to do that, but she was so into it.
That was a treat.
Again, I love their performances here.
And you can see that mosaic back behind Mark there a little bit.
Here's another thing
where we're trying to communicate movement with these massive ships,
and also draw your eye to the little escape thing.
And Billie Lourd as Connix!
It's Harry "Connix" Jr.
This tiny little set,
we originally had a few more beats that happened in it
that I think will be in the deleted scenes,
but, uh, very little of it is in the movie right now.
I love Chewie's little developing relationship with the porgs
in this little beat.
We almost cut that out a number of times, the little baby porg,
but every time we would show the movie to Kathy, I would hear her giggle.
(CHUCKLES) So, I always thought,
"It's doing something. Let's leave it in."
So, this is, uh, another example of the Force connections.
This is actually shot in London with Daisy,
and this is shot on a sound stage in London with Adam,
but, again, they were both actually still there when we were shooting it.
They were never not off-camera for each other
when we were doing these scenes, obviously.
It was always... Yeah.
It was always the first thing I wanted to see
when I got in the edit room, was these scenes.
While we were shooting, I would actually go...
It's the first time that I've ever made a movie
where I've had to, just for schedule-wise,
be assembling the edit during the actual shoot
and really working on it.
So, after the day of shooting, I would go...
In Pinewood, Bob had an edit room all set up,
and we would go and sit together and watch some scenes.
Whenever one of these came up, it was always a treat
because it was like,
"Is the magic trick gonna work?", basically.
That shot from behind Daisy, we shot in Ireland.
We got a piece of the Falcon out there
and actually shot those scenes looking out to the sea with her,
but everything looking back at her is in London.
You know this town? Canto Bight?
JOHNSON: You can see in the deleted scenes,
there's an extra beat of business
that originally happened in here between the two of them.
Originally, BB-8 stowed away in the bathroom.
That's my cameo as the voice of the jerk alien on the rich yacht.
This is a gorgeous ILM shot.
And Canto Bight.
So, the notion of doing
a very glamorous, Monte Carlo-inspired Star Wars city
where the one-percenters come,
was a very early thing in the writing process that I had.
I thought it would be interesting,
but I'm going to pause real quickly from that and talk about this shot.
This is inspired by a shot in that silent movie, Wings.
It is an amazing shot that goes over the top of all these tables.
We were trying to figure out how to take in
the breadth of all this amazing design
and be overwhelmed visually by the casino.
We had done all these other shots, we're panning around it,
but never quite got it.
Steve Yedlin and I figured out how to do this shot.
We didn't really have the equipment we needed to do it though.
Really what you would do in that shot, if you had what you needed,
would be a large Technocrane, it's called.
It's basically a big crane with a telescoping arm,
and if you have a long enough one, you can telescope the arm straight out.
It's like a turtle poking his head out over the scene.
But we didn't have one of those on that day,
and so Steve built this amazing thing where it was two dollies on either side
with a piece of truss going between them.
The camera was suspended on the truss,
and so basically, this thing is zipping through the whole scene
and all the actors, immediately after the camera passes them,
have to duck so they don't get clomped on the head by the piece of truss.
It was a pretty amazing rig, and it ended up being...
We shot all this additional B-roll and all these other shots of the casino,
and once we saw that one, we were like, "That's kind of all we need."
That's just the setup for it.
Uh, this scene was one of the few pick-ups that we did
to get them out on the balcony and looking at the little kid.
This was a... Just been wanting to set the kids up in advance
and wanting to get them out.
Originally, this scene played out
with them looking through a window in the casino,
and it just didn't have the connection we needed.
So we went back and picked it up again.
I think Kelly's really...
This is a really beautiful moment here,
and you can really see John listening to her and taking this in.
The whole notion of John's journey through this movie would be
that Kelly would be an angel on his shoulder,
that Rose would be an angel on John's shoulder,
and DJ, who we're going to meet soon, would be kind of the devil.
It's, again, in that... Oh, here's Justin Theroux.
(CHUCKLING) Who is so sweet.
Justin Theroux and Lily Cole there on the left,
and they came in for one day
to do this little cameo as James Bond
and Mrs. Bond, I guess.
Also, when you watch the casino things,
if you just look at the faces in the background,
we got Michael Kaplan,
who I'm mentioning way too late in this commentary,
because he did the costumes for this film
and also for The Force Awakens and also for Blade Runner,
little movie called Blade Runner, and Fight Club.
He's a legend.
The casino was a real challenge.
I mean, trying to come up with...
Because I gave him a couple of, um, restrictions.
I told him I wanted it to just be black and white,
the color scheme of all the costumes.
And I told him I wanted it to not be baroque.
I didn't want it to be sci-fiy or elegant...
I wanted it to be just elegant.
I told him, for the guys at least,
I wanted it to be the equivalent of an Armani tux, but in the Star Wars world.
He just did amazing work.
But he also worked closely with the casting for all the extras.
Michael just went through and found amazing background actors
with incredible looks and faces and figures.
Next time you watch the movie,
just keep your eyes on all the faces in the background.
It's pretty incredible.
This was another bit that we got on Skellig.
We spent a few hours of our precious time there
shooting this whole scene.
This is a real landmark on Skellig.
It's called the Wailing Woman, this rock.
Obviously, we could not slice it in half for real.
That's an effect.
So, it's still there if you go out to Skellig.
Originally, there was more intercutting between all the story lines,
between the islands, and Poe with the Resistance, and Finn's mission.
Originally, we hopped back and forth a lot more frequently between them.
It was a really interesting thing for me
as we started getting into the cutting and putting the whole movie together
and feeling it out,
realizing that that was actually detracting from the experience.
It was a good thing, I think, that once you were with these stories,
you wanted to play them out for longer.
It's funny, I would've expected that... And obviously, in the writing,
I thought that hopping back and forth between the stories
would keep the energy up and keep us invested in each of them.
Things are never quite what you expect when you get in the edit room.
I think Mark's performance here is so beautiful.
I keep saying that, but I just keep watching.
(CHUCKLES) I find it hard to keep talking.
I'm just watching him perform.
Especially this moment here, he's talking about Leia.
Daisy as well.
Steve's lighting in this scene,
with this kind of golden light coming through, and Rick's set.
So, I knew I wanted to do a flashback.
There are never flashbacks in Star Wars movies,
so I knew that we were breaking from the norm here.
There's rarely flashbacks, I should say.
But I knew I wanted to go back and see Kylo and Ben.
I'm sorry, Kylo and Mark when they were first training.
So I went back and forth, "Do we show a full training montage?
"Do we show a whole scene where we see kind of his corruption?
"Do we see...
"How much of this do we want to actually watch?"
I landed on, well...
I feel like it would be too much of a tangent to do a full...
Especially given the breadth of the movie that we're trying to accomplish,
it would be too much to go back and see all of this.
So, let's go back to just the moment
that really matters, specifically, to Luke's character,
which is the moment of his failure.
Because, ultimately, this whole construction that Luke has in his head
about the good of the universe and everything is...
It all comes down to this personal feeling of
he's failed this kid because of his hubris.
So, that moment and the notion that came late in the writing process
of doing this Rashômon-style three versions of it,
where you see a slightly different version each time.
It seemed like it had promise.
I think Mark's performance and the voiceover in that whole scene,
combined with his performance on-screen
when he's considering whether or not to...
When he's looking down at Kylo.
It's coming up later.
And it's a really beautiful piece of work.
Here, again, big ships.
This was something we worked on a lot in postproduction also,
was figuring out how to really make the geography of this clear,
and make clear what the threat was.
Some of those scenes on the bridge with Hux and Peavey,
and this little bit here,
this whole little sequence.
Some of this, again, were a few of our relatively sparse re-shoots
where we went back and got these little pieces
to try and really clarify for the audience what the threat was,
that this is basically like a slow-speed chase.
They're in a little bit of a stalemate, but they're running out of time.
It's only a matter of time
before the bad guys are able to blast them out of the sky.
The beautiful ILM shot.
This is Andy Nyman.
This is my buddy Andy Nyman who is a terrific actor
and also a very talented magician,
who's playing the main cop.
Canto Bight cop.
Here comes DJ.
So, Benicio Del Toro is one of my very favorite actors in the world.
I feel like he always defies your expectations when he's onscreen.
The notion of throwing him into this part,
I knew he was going to do something I didn't expect. (CHUCKLES)
On one hand, when you're making your first studio movie,
and a big Star Wars movie is a little scary.
On the other hand, it's very exciting.
The way that he played this character,
and this little kind of stuttery hitch in his speech that he found,
and the weirdness of it,
it ended up, I think, being so perfect.
Yeah, he's got a real...
He reminds me of the fox in Pinocchio a little bit.
And that's sort of his role in this.
Again, DJ on one shoulder of Finn
and Rose on the other, saying, "Fight for the good fight,"
And the other one's saying,
"It's all a big corrupt machine. It doesn't matter."
That's something that's maybe a little different
than what we've seen in Star Wars movies before,
but it felt like something that would be very interesting,
even in kind of a simplified way in this film, to explore.
This set was a fun example of doing a lot with a little.
This is basically just one hallway that we had,
and we, the way that they did in the original films a lot,
just shot it in a bunch of ways to really stretch it out.
This gag with the coins,
they actually came up with a real rig that shot out coins from BB-8.
I think we gave it a little bit of help with ILM at the end of the day.
But also that smoke, that was...
They actually somehow had a little thing in BB-8
where he practically blew the smoke where he looked down.
Again, Jaron Presant, our second unit guy, shot that,
and it's quite cool.
This is an example of a transition where,
originally, we went from there back to another story line,
and then came back here and picked this up here.
This was another thing where we realized,
"No, we've got to stick with this."
And so, we just did a wipe from manhole to manhole.
Practical creature right here.
This is Neal Scanlan who was our creature supervisor
and who made all these amazing creatures.
For this shot, for example, we locked the camera down
and shot the fathier in the closer position,
and then cut and moved it to the second one and shot it,
and cut and moved it to the third one.
It's like a big multi-split screen, but they're all practical creatures.
The creature work that Neal did throughout the whole movie
is extraordinary.
The fathier, in particular, it's a combination of Neal's work and ILM's,
but for those shots where he's first looking over the gate,
it's entirely practical, and it's just gorgeous, I think.
Then, here is our big fathier chase,
which was a huge elaborate sequence
to plan out and to shoot.
The last two weeks of the shoot basically were
Kelly and John on this rig.
The way they did it at ILM, they planned out the animation.
They worked out the anatomy of the fathier,
the bones of it and how it moved.
They planned out the animation for how it would actually be running,
and then we worked out the camera moves for each of these.
And then they made this motion base that Kelly and John were on.
They programmed the move exactly into it
with the camera move exactly on the motion-control camera to come around it.
Then shot by shot, with each one of these,
we just shot their elements for it.
So, the last two weeks of the shoot
were Kelly and John stuck on the back of this big contraption,
just shooting reaction shot after reaction shot.
This is a practical set right here
that we actually had a big, hydraulic thing smash through.
Chris Corbould, our effects supervisor, accomplished that.
Then a shot like this...
So, ILM is doing the fathiers in it.
These are plates that we shot,
shots of running down the street in Dubrovnik,
which is a beautiful city in Croatia that's got this gorgeous polished stone.
If you can ever go to Dubrovnik, I highly recommend it.
We shot plates in Dubrovnik
that ILM accentuated with some additional extensions,
and then put the fathiers in,
and it's a combination of practical explosions we had
in the streets of Dubrovnik and ILM's work.
This, for example, is a combination of some digital work
with also this black sand beach that we shot plates of in Iceland.
Then, once we get up here,
the environment and the fathiers are entirely digital.
And this is just John and Kelly on their motion rig, zipping by.
SPEEDER PILOT: Where'd they go?
JOHNSON: This is the most obscure Young Ones reference
ever put into a Star Wars movie.
Here, for their final moment here,
originally, we had an extra little beat between Kelly and the fathier.
That's another example of a shot of the practical fathier right there,
and just the amazing creature work that those guys were able to get into it.
That's the ILM version walking off.
Here's another little moment of the angel on his shoulder, of Kelly
and him seeing the merits of someone who's actually fighting the good fight.
The sleek ship here is another...
Kevin Jenkins, who I've mentioned a few times, it's his work.
(BB-8 CHIRPING EXCITEDLY)
DJ: Ah.
N-N-Need a lift?
JOHNSON: So, this is interesting.
You'll see in the deleted scenes,
originally, at the end of the big lesson inside the Temple,
there was a whole other scene
where essentially Luke does a teachable moment with Rey
where he makes her think that the Caretaker village is getting attacked,
and she runs down there to help them.
And it turns out, they're not actually in danger,
and he was just using it as a lesson.
She gets very angry and yells at him.
Originally, it left them in a bad place,
and we ended up lifting that out entirely.
It was one of those interesting things in the edit room
where you lift something huge that you thought was vital out,
and then connect the two pieces back up and realize,
"Yeah, it works in a slightly different way, but it still works."
Adam Driver, ladies and gentlemen.
Looking good.
This is another example of...
(SIGHS) God bless Daisy.
It was freezing, and we were actually out on the coast of Ireland.
This was shot at twilight.
We had a 20-minute window to shoot this scene with her,
when the light was just right.
And it was freezing, and she just did take after take,
and Adam is right off-camera, and she's talking to him.
But we had a very limited amount of time to shoot this,
and she just nailed it.
The emotion that she brings to it, I think, is extraordinary.
The set that Adam is in,
we repurposed a little bit his medical chamber set
and added a few extra elements.
But there was this concept drawing that...
I forget who did the concept painting, one of our great designers.
It had a real Blade Runner vibe to it.
And I thought that would be really fun to see.
So, here's Kylo's version of...
We shot all these flashbacks in one day in this little set,
half a day, I think.
This is Kylo's version of it where he tells her
that he woke up, saw Luke about to kill him, and defended himself.
Which I don't think he's lying actually.
In my mind, that was his experience.
It's actually Luke who was really distorting the truth,
when he left out the stuff in his first telling of it.
I think that it's probably twisted a little bit
by Kylo's own anger and his own prejudices against Luke,
but I feel like he's actually telling her the truth
of his experience in this communication.
So, the mirror cave scene here.
This was a very early image that I had.
One of the first things I did when I got the job initially,
I had met with a couple of people.
I had lunch with Larry Kasdan, which was really important for me.
Obviously, I sat down with J.J., talked to Michael Arndt.
I also went out to Malibu,
and I spent a couple of weeks hanging out with Rick Carter.
Rick Carter is an unseen Yoda behind this kind of sequel trilogy.
He worked on The Force Awakens.
He is a production designer who Kathy Kennedy has a long history with,
and he's a really amazing guy.
Rick and I just spent a couple of weeks.
I would go down there a few times a week,
and we would walk down the beach and just have these long talks.
It was one of the very first things I did when I first got the gig.
And if you know Rick,
you know that when you're talking with him about story,
you aren't talking about action scenes,
you're not talking about set pieces, you're not talking about toys,
you're talking about what matters to you in the story.
And you're talking about the mythic stuff behind it all,
and images that matter to you,
and what it means to you, how it relates to your experience,
really digging into stuff that's very personal.
For that to be the first real conversation
I had with anybody about the movie,
to start it off on that foot of,
"We're going to dig in and figure out what matters to you in this."
To have the permission to start there, I guess, was really, really important.
Rick really gave that to me.
This image, in the mirror cave, of Rey searching for identity
and having this kind of vision where it's all about finding herself,
and there's all these versions of her going down the line,
this infinite number and, "Which one am I?
"Where is it going to end? How am I going to end up?
"Is this going to define me?
"There's all these possibilities of what I can be, and I'm trying to find them."
Which is, for me, that's adolescence.
To some extent, these movies...
Obviously, famously, Lucas drew from The Hero's Journey
and that whole myth that Joseph Campbell wrote about,
making the first Star Wars.
The Hero's Journey is not about becoming a hero,
it's not about becoming Superman.
If you really look at it,
I think it's about the transition from childhood into adulthood.
It's about adolescence.
It's about finding your place in the world, finding who you are.
You have these powers in you,
and who's going to help you find the right way to use them?
That's really Rey's journey in this.
I think that's something all of us can relate to.
Then this, obviously, very critical connection
between the two of them here.
The transition of Kylo
from someone who killed Han Solo
and is kind of a... (CHUCKLES)
Coming into it, I felt like I had to assume,
even though I found the character very intriguing,
you have to come in with...
That's why Rey is so angry with him and just saying, "Screw you,"
for basically the first few Force connections.
Because my assumption is
that's how we're going to feel about him, coming into this movie,
and how to transition him slowly from there to here
in a way that was plausible through Rey's eyes.
The notion that Rey sees this opportunity in him,
and maybe sees something more than that in him,
and to earn this connection, I guess.
That was something that, uh...
That was something we spent a lot of time,
Adam and Daisy and I,
talking through how we were going to get there.
This is a practical shot.
That's not a CG hut blowing apart. (CHUCKLES)
I'm sure in one of the behind-the-scenes docs we show it,
but this was pretty amazing.
We did this in just a shot where they had this thing rigged to pull on strings
all this fake hut, and blow this wall apart behind Mark.
And we pulled the camera back, and Adam scampered out of the way,
and then we pushed back to reveal he's no longer there.
I remember we were shooting all night.
We were shooting all this stuff all night long,
and that was going to be the last shot that we got.
And it was 4:30 in the morning, and the sun was about to come up,
and we ran and we were like, "Ah, the sun's coming up!
"The shot is going to be ruined!" And we got that shot.
I remember everyone was on a big high after it.
So, even though this actually isn't in Ireland,
for all the night stuff,
we had to recreate the set on the backlot at Pinewood
for the night and the rain and the lighting that we needed.
We couldn't shoot it out in Ireland.
We're in England at night with rain pouring down,
and Daisy is just... You see what she's wearing.
She was freezing, and she just gave her all in every single take.
Beyond the amazing performance that she gives,
just the physical exertion of the fight, I'm still amazed by it.
This is the performance I said earlier on... I remember being...
We recorded the ADR. for this, the voiceover for it, at Pinewood.
And I remember sitting with Mark, and he just read the lines over and over,
and I feel him searching for something with this read.
We put it together in the edit room.
Combined with his performance here,
it just really sells this moment
of brief temptation, and then regret,
which is really what this whole thing is about.
So, this appeal that she makes to him here,
this was important.
This felt like...
Because I think, for me,
Kylo, and everyone is gonna have their own read on it when they watch it.
By the way, I'm recording this before we've released the movie,
so I haven't heard what anyone actually thinks about this.
But, for me, there is some kind of primal connection between Rey and Kylo.
It has to do with the fact that even though they're on opposite poles,
and he's a hateful character, and she's this incredibly good character,
the fact that they're both the only ones who have this power in the movie,
and they're on these two opposite islands,
there's some connection between them.
Beyond that though, I needed her to have an actual buyable justification
for why she would go and think that she can turn him.
And to lay out for Luke, "If I do that, this could actually win the day."
So, that scene felt very, very important to me.
Speaking of scenes that feel very important to me,
it just made sense that Yoda was gonna show up in this movie at some point.
This shot, by the way, was Frank Oz's idea.
(LAUGHS) Originally, I forget,
I had some more boring way of introducing Yoda,
but he came up with the notion of dollying back behind Yoda's head
and seeing the shape of it to reveal him,
and knowing that instantly, everyone's heart would jump.
I mean, getting to work with Frank Oz, who is an incredible performer.
Again, Neal Scanlan and his team, they found the original mold for Yoda.
They recreated the puppet from Empire.
There's no digital Yoda here.
This is entirely practical, and it's all Frank puppeteering it and performing it.
We added the little glow around him,
but he's actually there on the set doing it.
They even found the lady who painted Yoda's original eyes.
She was still working in London, (CHUCKLES)
and they tracked her down and got her to repaint the eyes for Yoda.
But getting to work this night with Frank and Mark,
and Frank was down there all night long
in the hole with the puppet, performing it.
I mean, it was such a treat.
And beyond that, Frank is also an incredible director.
I love his films.
Beyond his live-action stuff, obviously,
he's had years of experience working with puppets
and working with them as a filmmaker.
So, when we got in the cutting room,
I actually brought Frank in and showed him the scene,
and he was able to give some incredibly helpful tips,
even just in terms of editing,
how to cut around with a puppet,
and where to cut to a wide shot, and where to let it hold,
and he gave some really important insights
into how to make this play,
and how to make it feel like the real deal.
But, God, yeah, you can't.
This was just another one of those experiences on set
where you look through the monitor,
and what is just a hunk of foam rubber,
suddenly Frank starts operating it, and it comes to life, and it's real.
It's really magical.
And also, the other lesson that Frank taught me was that
Mark's reaction is a massive part of what brings the puppet to life.
The actor who's with him believing, interacting with this living creature,
and Mark's eyes are as important as Yoda's eyes in this scene.
It was a pretty special experience to get to do this
and to get to become friends with Frank during the course of it.
We are what they grow beyond.
That is the true burden of all masters.
JOHNSON: And, meanwhile, back in space.
So, this whole thing of DJ asking for the medallion, and then giving it back,
this was actually something that started with an idea from Benicio,
when we were talking about the character.
I really was very conscious of the history of scoundrels
in the Star Wars universe.
And whether it's Han or whether it's Lando,
we've been conditioned to always see them come around and see the light.
With DJ, I knew I didn't want that to happen.
I wanted him to follow through (CHUCKLES) and just stick to his guns
and just completely sell the heroes out.
So, the notion of, you know, riding that a little bit
and, knowing that we were going to do that,
opening up your sympathy for the character by having the moment of,
"You think he's a jerk here, and then he turns it around
"and gives it back to her at the key moment
"he actually needed it for something," seemed very appealing.
That shot of all the coins,
this is something for the true nerds in the audience.
There were these computer games that were very important to me
when I was growing up.
Infocom games.
They're these text adventures, and Zork was the main one.
If you got the Zork game, you got this little zorkmid, which is a fake coin.
And I've had this thing for years,
and I stuck it in there amongst all the other coins. (CHUCKLES)
So, there is a zorkmid in there. Yeah.
The other thing that I really liked the idea of with the DJ character
was having the opportunity to have him express this, um...
It feels like it's something that is...
It felt a little dangerous bringing it into the Star Wars world,
but it felt right doing it,
this true cynicism of talking about the machine behind war.
Bringing that in as something that Finn has to weigh
as he's considering whether the fight is something he's going to commit to,
this perspective of, "None of it really actually matters,
"it's all just trying to make money."
Obviously, Rose is the antidote to that notion,
that there is actually stuff worth fighting for in the world.
Mandy.
I have great memories of shooting this scene.
I also have great memories of this set
because Oscar and Laura and I used this set as a rehearsal space.
After a day of shooting with other actors,
I would come and sit with the script with Oscar and Laura,
and we would sit on these benches that go around the set,
and we would go through their scenes and work them out in the space.
More than shooting, every time I see this set,
I think about sitting around
and gabbing with Laura and Oscar.
I think Oscar is so good here.
(CHUCKLING) I love that girl who backs away.
That background actor, she gave a terrific little moment there.
Every time we watch it in the edit room, we appreciate that little bit of acting.
That's Caridad, who was Daisy's stand-in throughout the whole movie.
We got her in there for a little close-up,
which I was very happy about.
Terrific actor, Caridad.
POE: (ON RADIO) Finn, Holdo's loading the crew into shuttles.
She's going to abandon ship. Where are you?
JOHNSON: So this was a...
We're so close.
JOHNSON: I love...
By the way, this is from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
(CHUCKLING) "Did you get my note?" "I got a note."
That little moment there.
Getting a lot of Monty Python in this movie.
I always get excited at this part in the movie
because this is where all the stuff starts lining up
and starts coming together.
This moment that's coming up
where she launches out in this weird little escape pod
and meets with Kylo's character.
The design of this thing, first of all,
I just kept pushing them to make it feel like a coffin.
There was something about that image.
There's a C.S. Lewis book that I was really into
when I was in high school called Perelandra.
It's part of the Space Trilogy.
The main character travels through space in a coffin.
Maybe that's it.
This moment where she comes in, and it opens, and they see each other,
my editor Bob and I, we kept trying to cut this moment out.
We kept thinking, "Okay, should we see her launch towards it?"
And forever, in the movie, we had cut that scene out,
and were just like, "Okay." Then we cut away the other stuff,
and we come back, and they're in the elevator, and you'll get it.
It just felt like something like, "Ah, do we need to see that?
"Do we really need to see that?"
We slowly realized as we showed it to people,
"Yeah, we really do need to see this moment."
There's something about the first moment they see each other.
So much so that we actually went back
and, again, that was one of our reshoots that we did.
I mentioned a couple of them.
But that was one of our reshoots, was picking up little reaction shots
from both of them seeing each other for the first time.
(BUZZING)
(BUZZING STOPS)
So a stormtrooper and a who now are doing what?
JOHNSON: And during all of this, this whole buildup to
the first initial climax where Rose and Finn get caught,
which is what this whole mutiny bit is leading to.
Another example of a section of the movie
where, originally, the intercutting was much different,
the way it was written and originally shot.
In the edit room,
we constructed these boards
where we had a card with a single photo from each scene on it.
We had them up in order,
and they were on Velcro, so we could shift them around.
There's a little reference to Hardware Wars,
if anyone remembers Hardware Wars.
I was happy we got that in.
Anyway, this was a section in the movie
where we were endlessly shifting the cards around.
Right here, originally,
and we are going to put this in the deleted scenes,
this was originally a much more extended sequence
of Finn and Rose and DJ working their way through the Star Destroyer.
It was one of my favorite little scenes in the movie actually.
It was them sneaking through a big office area
and almost getting caught.
It was wonderful, but it was a thing where, when we put it all together,
we just couldn't spend that long on this sequence.
So, we fabricated this other little segment
and just got through it quicker.
Once we get this, like I was saying,
this whole section here, it was just a lot of working it in post,
a lot of shifting it around.
I think there's sometimes the idea that
you come up with a plan or you have a vision or something,
and you make the movie and try and get it to match that.
The truth is, especially with something bigger
and working with any film, is that...
Even with something like this, that seems like it should be on big tracks
and just lay the foundation and build it,
it's a very organic process throughout the whole thing.
And big things change, big things shift around
all the way through it, up through the cutting process
and even up to the very end.
Now, we're back on my favorite set.
I should mention that the inspiration for this,
the red and the reflective floor,
is a beautiful production of Madame Butterfly
that the late, great Anthony Minghella directed.
There was a visual in it that was similar to this.
When we were fishing around for...
I knew I wanted big, theatrical, red curtains
that we're going to burn away later in the scene,
but we couldn't quite visually figure out how to make it work.
At some point, I remembered the design in that opera,
and I showed it to the guys,
the pure field of red back there and the reflective black floor.
Very much a nod to that.
So, here's the moment where we think DJ may be okay.
Suckers.
Rose and Finn, I meant. Suckers.
This is actually a little practical thing
where they got the remote to pop out, and John had to catch it.
And it's attached to a little bit of acting
where he gives that slow-burn reaction to her, "Of course they are."
But it was always whether he would catch it or not,
and whether it would fly out at the right angle.
We ended up doing 20 takes of it.
And those guys had to nail that little bit over and over again. (CHUCKLES)
Eventually, when we hit it,
it was one of those things that just...
We were like, "Oh, thank God, it worked."
There, you can see Laura say "pew" when she fires the gun,
(CHUCKLES) which she could never not do every time she shot it.
I think it's still in there. If you look at her lips, you can see it.
I had so much fun working with Anthony Daniels.
He's such a gentleman, such a lovely guy.
And, also, I loved Threepio so much
that we were always trying to figure out more and more for him to do,
and little lines for him to do, little moments for him to have.
A lot of the really fun little bits that he has in this movie
were the product of Anthony sidling up next to me in between takes
and saying, "What do you think of this and that?"
And us going back and forth and coming up with
what we think would be funny for Threepio to get into here.
Here's the big buildup to them getting caught.
STORMTROOPER 1 : You there, hands up!
There's Ralph, in the white, who I mentioned earlier.
He was, originally, a much bigger part of the whole sequence
I mentioned that we lifted out
where they were sneaking through the Star Destroyer.
You just glimpse him really briefly in the background there.
He's a great, great actor.
And, of course, I'm very, very sad that that stuff isn't in the movie.
But if you watch the deleted scenes, it's a terrific scene in the film.
Here is the reveal of Carrie.
Originally, this scene went on just a little bit longer.
Originally, after he got blasted back and we had this,
we cut back to Leia, and you saw Holdo come out of the smoke behind her,
but decided that confused things, so we just stepped on the gas.
GURNEY OPERATOR: Okay, help me push him up, guys.
JOHNSON: You can see my little brother coming up here.
He's about to walk down the ramp behind Carrie.
This scene is one of my favorites.
Carrie and Laura and I got together and came up with this scene.
There's my little brother.
This scene was always in the script,
but, um, I felt it was really important to get together with these two actors
and really work out what the heart of it was.
This is where Laura got to talk to Carrie
about what the character meant to her over the years,
and really wanting to pay tribute to, um,
what Princess Leia, over the years, has meant to her
as a real person in the world, growing up.
Carrie's line, "You go. I've said it enough."
That was something Carrie came up with.
That whole moment was just crafted around
getting together with these two amazing actresses over an afternoon,
and talking through what that moment should be.
So, it's one of my favorites in the movie.
I always love watching it.
Come closer, child.
JOHNSON: Andy Serkis is a force of nature.
He's amazing.
He's also just a gentleman.
A gentleman and a scholar.
He's a wonderful, wonderful guy.
And his performance as Snoke is...
For the longest time, when we were showing rough cuts,
we just left in Andy in the mo-cap suit
until very, very late, until we had almost all of the effect shots done.
That was the only point where
we started showing it to people with the CG Snoke,
just because Andy's performance was so powerful.
It was a real education getting to work with him,
both in terms of the technical side of things
with the motion-capture aspect of it, but also just as an actor.
I'm also a super fan of the Mike Leigh movie Topsy-Turvy.
(LAUGHING) So, I've seen that movie a million times.
Andy is in that movie
in a fairly small part, but a really cool little part.
I knew all of his lines from that movie, even the ones that he says off-screen.
So, I just kept quoting Topsy-Turvy to him,
and I think it started as charming,
and I think he ended up getting a little creeped out.
"Wow. You really know that movie."
These close-ups are just extraordinary.
The work that ILM did
in creating this photo-real but entirely digital character,
with his eyes, it's just really amazing.
That's a practical hand,
that's an actual creature foam rubber hand on Daisy,
and that's a digital face on the left of Snoke,
and the fact that they match up and you can't tell is extraordinary.
Daisy, we hefted up on wires for these shots.
There and here also, she's in this horribly uncomfortable rig,
doing this really intense performing.
No, no, no!
JOHNSON: This little scene here always makes me happy.
This is another one where, um,
similar to the stuff earlier I mentioned,
the explaining-the-plan stuff,
I was worried about this scene because
it's in the middle of everything,
and all this stuff's starting to heat up,
and it's kind of a stop-and-explain-things scene.
But again, just because of the actors in the scene,
because it's Oscar as Poe learning his lesson here,
because it's Carrie bringing such guiding warmth to it, I guess,
I never feel like we're getting bored watching it,
which is always the fear.
These guys really pull it off.
And the payoff of the beacon.
The conflict between her and Poe,
and the notion of there being discord amongst the good guys,
in these tight quarters of this ship,
it almost owes more to Ronald Moore's version of Battlestar Galactica
than to the original Star Wars.
It felt like something that'd be interesting to explore.
So, in shooting this, obviously,
the massive hangar is largely an ILM creation.
We had the floor and we had designs that Rick Heinrichs' team had put together.
And then ILM did an amazing job creating this huge space.
Gwendoline Christie, I haven't talked about yet.
She's one of my favorite people in the world.
(CHUCKLING) She's so sweet, and she's so much fun.
She was just like a little kid playing this part.
It felt like, uh... That costume is not easy,
but it seemed like she was putting on a Halloween costume every day.
(CHUCKLES) She was just so happy to put that on.
We had so many conversations about
what the voice should be like in different situations in this,
and Phasma's philosophy and everything.
It was fun.
These shuttles, it was fun because
we built an external-internal set.
We actually built the shuttles with fully finished exteriors
and fully finished interiors,
so we could go from outside to inside them with the camera.
You're going to see that coming up in a bit here.
That was really nice, and that gave us a lot of freedom with these scenes
to really make you feel like these things are fragile things
that are actually containing these people.
SNOKE: ...and obliterate the entire island.
JOHNSON: (LAUGHING) I love Snoke's gold outfit.
I don't know how people are going to react to it.
I know it's kind of a bold choice, but I really love it.
I love the fact that he's not just in dark evil robes,
but that he's got a little bit of flair to him.
I mean, the whole set speaks to him having a sense of the dramatic,
and the notion that he's kind of physically weak,
and so he uses theatricality to cover that.
And the notion of him being a little more glam, I...
Michael Kaplan showed me that design, and I was like, "Yes!
"Make it gold! Make it so!"
And the Praetorian Guards here,
uh, the design of these guys was interesting.
One of my favorite designs in the original film
is the Emperor's Guards.
They're gorgeous, but they're very ceremonial,
and with these guys, I knew they were going to have to actually fight.
So, we built them to move.
And they designed these amazing costumes that were...
The way the plates were on the guys,
the stunt performers could actually do full battle in them.
And they just look stunning.
These close-ups here of Snoke and the power of those, it's fantastic.
There's also something a bit...
We're trying to get a little bit of The Wizard of Oz hallway in here,
with the shape of that hallway going back to the elevator.
I talked a lot with Adam about this moment.
He really wanted to hone in on
what Kylo is thinking when he makes the decision,
where his head is at, coming in here.
We took a lot of time trying to figure out, "Okay, he comes in..."
My take was he comes into this moment,
he knows that Snoke can read his intentions, if not his mind,
and so he can't be thinking actively about an opportunity,
but he's got to be in the moment here.
But, at the same time, he's looking for one.
He's going to look for an opportunity to do something like this.
So, that's his intent from the moment he walks in the scene,
is to betray Snoke, but he doesn't quite know how to do it,
and then he sees this opportunity and takes it.
Talking through it beat by beat with Adam,
it was great because it made me define it for myself.
This was another very early image I had in my head.
This kind of shot that's red on red,
and them slowly coming towards, and our heroes,
this moment here back-to-back.
That moment.
Something I was very excited about from the very early writing phases.
Here's an example of the exterior-interior set
of the spaceship and the shuttle
and the kind of shots it lets us do.
I love this final line from DJ.
This is not the line I wrote. This is a Benicio Del Toro special.
Originally, I had some dumb movie line like,
"Yeah, I'm wrong and rich," or something.
And he's like, "Uh, I think he should just say 'maybe. "'
I was like, "Yes! You should just say 'maybe. ' It's perfect!"
I love it.
Daisy and Adam trained their butts off.
From early pre-production, up through the day that we shot this,
they were training, training, training for these fights.
And they got so good at them,
it gave me the freedom to just set the camera back and shoot them,
so you could actually see them doing the choreography,
which was a real treat.
It meant I didn't have to put a long lens on
and shake the camera around
because I wasn't going to have to cover any sloppy fighting.
These guys were so dialed in,
and the stunt performers who did the Guards were the same.
I had the freedom to actually show them doing the fight.
The movies with the fight scenes in them that I grew up loving,
like Jackie Chan movies or Jet Li,
it's a similar thing where the performers can just carry it.
That does also mean that they're doing big chunks of the fight
for single takes.
And that means that when you do multiple takes of it,
it's just damn exhausting.
The fact that Adam and Daisy and all of our amazing stunt performers
were able to keep up this intensity and sell these moments take after take
with all the technical requirements, just extraordinary.
That was a move that Rob Inch, our stunt coordinator, came up with,
the notion of her getting out of that by dropping it.
This was something I had the idea for.
And when we shot that take, (CHUCKLES) it was a very last-minute idea of,
"What if we squirt some smoke into the hole in his mask,
"what would happen?"
And we did it and, as he's falling back,
that wisp of smoke came out, and we were just like, "Oh, yes!"
This sequence, I think...
And I apologize if it gets repetitive with me just saying,
"I think the actors are so good in this scene,"
but I think the actors are so good in this scene,
both Adam and Daisy.
This is such an intimate scene for there to be in the middle of all this chaos,
and I just think they both are so vulnerable and wonderful in it.
The fact that, especially at the very end of the scene,
in one way, Kylo is doing the "Join me" moment,
but, on the other hand, he had to be... Especially at the end of the scene,
it had to be genuinely vulnerable.
It had to be much more like he's making an emotional appeal.
KYLO REN: You know the truth.
JOHNSON: You had to see that.
Adam, I think, got that so well,
and Daisy is just so shattered here and beautiful, her performance.
And the notion of these little fiery things
falling in the background, fiery rain.
This was something I had very early on in my head.
It was always a really key part of the scene and of the beauty of it.
It wasn't something we got in the effects until much later on,
until much later in the process.
So many times when I was watching this scene, I would be like,
"I can't wait until we get the fiery rain in there."
This moment right here, his "please" always kills me.
Please.
JOHNSON: It's very important.
Meanwhile, back in space.
It's another external-internal shot.
Exterior and interior.
Laura's little moment right here.
This whole thing of what she does here,
when Holdo becomes the hero and does the smash-through.
Again, it was an early idea of what...
By the way, Adrian's little reaction here
where he doesn't quite buy Hux's confidence, I love. (LAUGHS)
Anyway, I'll talk about the Holdo thing in just a second,
but I guess I should talk about this amazing little moment between these two.
The notion here that they're equally matched.
The idea here that they're true equals,
and so, when they both are going to reach for this thing,
it is suspended exactly between them,
even to the point where it's going to split perfectly in half.
That was another thing that was an early idea.
I liked the idea of communicating that
just with that visual image.
So, these axes, these executioner weapons,
Jamie Wilkinson, who did our props, designed these.
(LAUGHING) I really love them.
And then Michael Kaplan came up with the idea
of the black bar on those stormtroopers' helmets
to be reminiscent of an executioner's hood.
This moment here of what Holdo's about to do,
going through the... Blasting through it.
This was another very early thing where we had heard about, in these movies,
if you don't do your calculations correctly,
you could smash through a planet
while you're trying to go through hyperspace.
The idea of, "What would that look like?"
Even after we shot it, once we got into post and started doing the sequence,
I didn't really know.
It was actually... Ben Morris is our visual effects supervisor,
and he worked with his team
and, at some point, this idea of turning the lights off
and going to this weird subjective lighting,
that came up.
Once we saw that... I always knew I wanted it to go silent,
and then it's only when we cut back to the big wide
that you suddenly get that piercing sound.
But, visually, once we struck on that idea,
suddenly the sequence just clicked,
and we said, "Okay, the gravity of this, we're finally communicating here."
We gotta go!
JOHNSON: So, similar to when this was all in one piece,
this is nearly all ILM.
All the stuff on the ground is practical,
all the smoke in the air and all the flaming stuff.
But everything up in the air,
including the choreography of everything falling apart, is all ILM.
I knew I wanted to have BB-8 come out and save the day in a walker.
It was another one of our amazing ILM designers, James Clyne,
who drew this sketch of the chicken walker
with its head torn off, with BB-8 on it, and it just looked like BB-8 had legs.
And it made me laugh.
So, we figured out a way to rip the head off and have BB-8...
BB-8 gets legs.
We originally,
the way I storyboarded it, we made a lot more ofBB-8
like a little kid stomping around and kicking stuff around.
It was another one of those things where we had to stick with the action,
stick with what matters here,
which is Finn and Phasma.
And with John, similar to Adam and Daisy,
he just trained his butt off for this fight,
to the point where I could do what you just saw there,
where I could just dolly back with the two of these guys
and see them going at it.
No!
JOHNSON: It's really extraordinary. Really fun day.
Hey.
JOHNSON: Then, this little moment,
(CHUCKLES) which is our homage to the moment in Back to the Future II
where he comes up on the DeLorean.
Steal from the best.
When we were talking about having the mask shattered and seeing through,
there was a lot of discussion about what Phasma's eye should look like.
It was actually Daisy who said...
I was talking with Daisy about it, and she's like,
"I think it should just be normal, just like a beautiful, beautiful eye."
That was the most intriguing idea to me,
the notion that you see behind this mask and it's not something monstrous.
It's something very human.
I thought that was cool.
BB-8just grooving along.
This is an extraordinary huge shot by ILM.
Anything where there's this much chaos going on and this scale on it,
I just don't know how these guys do it.
(JOHNSON LAUGHING)
Always makes me laugh.
And this is something that Domhnall came up with,
this notion that he would reach for his sidearm
until he realizes that he's actually awake, and he forgets it.
And what happened always, always makes me laugh.
So this moment coming up with Kylo,
in my head, my goal with this movie
was always, in regards to Kylo, it was kind of two-fold.
It was, first of all, to kind of get more inside his head,
and, in one way, bring us more into, if not sympathy,
at least some kind of... To reveal his vulnerabilities
in a way through Rey's eyes, so that we had to go along with her on that journey
without just stonewalling him and saying,
"Screw that guy who killed Han Solo."
To have to bring us closer to him to understand him a little better.
At the same time, I knew that by the end of it
I wanted to bring him closer to being the villain
that he wanted to be in The Force Awakens to some point.
I love these shots with Carrie.
I love this little moment here.
Anyway, with Kylo, I knew I wanted to kind of, by the end of this film,
he's not Vader, but he has come into his own as a sort of villain,
but hopefully one that you now have, and that may be as importantly,
Rey now has a level of understanding of.
But that he has that strength and power of, "The Supreme Leader is dead,"
and, in a way, he's earned it a little bit more.
That was always kind of the goal.
So this huge thing right here, this that you're seeing,
that's a big practical rig.
We had the big, huge ship kind of
broken down on a massive track that slid forward.
And Chris Corbould, who was our effects supervisor on set,
and his whole team, were responsible for that,
and also any other big practical effect in the movie that you see,
it's Chris and his guys.
Chris has worked a lot with Chris Nolan on his movies,
and he is just a master at finding these ways to engineer
these big practical things
that can create these very real on-set effects.
It's one example of many in this movie where Chris really made it happen.
This set was interesting.
This set was just kind of like a little box,
and I was very frustrated when we started setting up shots in this set
'cause it didn't seem like... I just for some reason didn't feel like
there was geography to really move around in.
But I ended up working with Steve
and ended up being really happy with the choreography of this
little dance of exposition that we have in here.
These crystal foxes,
this, again, was something that was very early in the script,
this specific visual idea of these foxes with crystal fur.
And the idea that, first of all, they fit into the geography.
That's Joe Cornish, by the way, right behind Oscar,
who directed Attack the Block with John.
Edgar Wright is right back there between Threepio and John,
along with Edgar's wonderful co-worker Leo, and Edgar's brother Oscar.
They're all in there.
Uh, fun cameos.
What was I talking about? Crystal foxes.
So the notion that they're part of this environment,
the idea that this is kind of
like a crystal mineral planet,
and so the creatures on it would evolve
to have this kind of crystal fur.
And also I knew with the story point coming up later on,
the sort of jingle-jangle of their fur as they ran
was going to play a part in how our heroes find their way out.
(CLEARS THROAT) So this is a set.
The trench and part of the base of the thing you saw down there,
the big gun emplacement, and all this plain here.
There's Gareth Edwards there, and this is our second AD, Matt Sharp.
So that was a practical set, what they were walking on,
and then obviously ILM took care of the big massive wall back behind them.
So these speeders were really fun.
I knew I wanted them to be jalopies.
I wanted to have a real kind of sense of David going up against Goliath here.
And so I wanted them to be rickety
and wanted them to just look like they were falling apart.
I also knew that we wanted to take advantage
of the red underneath the white
and that whole graphic element.
So I knew I wanted to have this kind of stabilizing ski
that sprayed up like a jet ski behind them, the red.
At some point this open canopy kind of evolved,
kind of like a biplane, or a World War I plane.
And I love the element that brought in,
of feeling like our heroes are really exposed.
These little, little jalopies.
So the gorilla walkers, this is another Kevin Jenkins special.
And we had talked for a while about what we could do.
I knew I wanted walkers.
It's one of my favorite designs in all of movie history.
I love those walkers.
And we knew we wanted to do kind of an evolution of the design,
but we both loved it so much, we weren't sure what direction to take it in.
And it was tough because
we kept coming up with different ideas,
but they all seemed too clever. And finally we landed on brute strength.
Like Kevin just said, "What if they're like gorillas?
"And we just double down on the scary, kind of aggressive feel of them?"
By the way, that "doogadoogadoog" sound, as all the things hit,
that was something we came up with in the mix.
Bonnie Wild, who is one of our amazing sound editors, she put that together.
So anyway, Kevin came up with that walker design.
The instant I saw it, I thought, "Ah, that's cool."
And here comes the Falcon.
Whoo! Yeah!
JOHNSON: My thoughts exactly.
It's funny, these gunning... (CHUCKLES)
These little gunning stations in the bottom,
it's an interesting thing with Star Wars 'cause geography-wise,
they don't really make sense.
(LAUGHS) There's no real way to...
Especially if you're in an atmosphere with gravity,
you kind of just have to fake it a little bit,
because you're actually looking straight down,
you're actually sitting, looking straight down in them,
and you always kind of have to fake
the geography of them with the Falcon a little bit.
You go back to the original films, and you see they kind of did the same thing.
There's not really room for the way the inside looks from the outside.
This whole sequence is a little bit of a homage to
the original, original, original Star Tours ride,
when they go through the comet.
I always love that.
But the notion of doing this kind of hair-raising Falcon chase
through these crystal caverns.
And originally this was a little more elaborate.
There was originally a whole sequence
where there was a massive crystal monster that almost ate them.
And another one of those things
where you just kind of have to pare it down to basics.
The bit where Chewie knocks the porg out of the way, by the way,
I had to work with Joonas (LAUGHS) because I had to make it very clear
he was knocking him out of the way in order to press a specific button.
(LAUGHS) That was something we had to...
The first few times he did it,
it just looked like he was punching him 'cause he was annoying.
And you can't do that to a porg.
This big cannon, which I knew story-wise we had to have it in here.
I remember working design-wise,
and this was something I worked with James Clyne on, initially at least.
And this was something where it was just like, "Okay, what is it?
"It's a gun, it's a cannon.
"What's the simplest expression of that?"
There were all these much more complex designs,
but I was like, "I need to be able to look at it
"and just see the barrel of a cannon and know exactly what its purpose is."
And so, we boiled it down to its basic form,
and it was just this basically gun barrel.
So here's the moment where Poe kind of learns a lesson from Leia
that he should have learned in the opening sequence
of thinking of the bigger picture of, "Can't blow all of our best pilots
"right on a heroic suicide mission."
And, at the same time, he's crossing with Finn
who's now come around to,
"I'm fighting the good fight.
"I'm in this to the end. I'm not going to let them win."
Who is crossing with Rose, who has been on that track the whole time,
but is now going to come around and say,
"Well, yes, but we've got to protect the things that we love in the world."
So, a lot of crossing around.
MALE COMMANDER: (ON RADIO) Copy that. We see it.
MALE SCOUT: Preparing to fire.
JOHNSON: That was a little thing that my editor, Bob,
while we were shooting, suggested that we get.
I'm really glad we did.
He's like, "You should just get some reaction shots
"inside the mine control center."
And it was a lesson that we learned really quickly with this,
was you'd only be interested so long in spaceships and ships battling.
You have to cut to faces. John's so good.
This moment, my goal with this moment was
if we can make the audience, even for a split second, think,
"Oh, my God, Finn is actually going to have a heroic death here."
Like for real.
If you could actually buy that even for a moment,
then I thought that would be a pretty incredible moment.
And the feeling of relief when Rose comes in
and kind of saves the day with it, would just be immense and really powerful.
And also would just show how far John's come with his character
over the course of this movie.
He's gone from getting in the escape pod
to genuinely being ready
to make the ultimate sacrifice for the good guys.
I was almost there.
Why would you stop me?
I saved you,
dummy.
That's how we're gonna win.
Not fighting what we hate,
saving what we love.
JOHNSON: She's protecting what she cares about.
The door in the background and kind of the layout of this plain,
and then the cliffside, and then the door that you see here,
it's another example of just thinking about
the very basic elements of the story
and boiling the design down to the simplest expression of that possible,
which is a lot of what we tried to do constantly in this movie.
This is one of my favorite shots in the film.
You get a little bit of that
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, looking-at-the-monitor-type shot.
And then this light coming through Threepio back there.
And then Carrie, I think, is just so beautiful in this scene.
So, I knew that I wanted
Luke and Leia to have a scene together in this movie.
And I remember so vividly this day on set
because everybody was... It felt like church on set.
It was unlike any other day.
When we shot this scene, there was just kind of this hush over the whole crew,
and everyone was just really quiet and respectful.
And it really felt like we were getting something really special
between these two in this shot specifically.
The moment at the end when... This is Carrie's line. (CHUCKLES)
This is one of Carrie's jokes that she wanted to do, and we got it in there.
The moment at the end where Mark stands up and kisses her forehead.
That's something he came up with during rehearsals.
He just said, "I feel like I want to do this."
And, God, so happy, so happy he did.
To play the whole thing of Luke coming back
as this kind of projection...
I mean, story-wise, I knew I wanted him to come back,
but I also knew that meant he was going to confront Kylo.
And I knew that I couldn't kill Kylo.
I knew I didn't want Kylo to kill Luke.
I knew Luke was going to
die at the end of this film, but I wanted it to be peaceful,
and I wanted it to be the opposite of Han's death.
I wanted it to be peaceful and a win basically
in its own way, on his terms.
So that's where this idea of him coming back as a projection came from.
So, if you watch it through, and if you listen to the sound,
you'll notice we took out all of the footsteps
and interaction of Luke.
He doesn't make any noise when he interacts with anything.
If you look at that shot where he puts the dice in...
Those are Mark's kids, by the way.
If you look at where he puts the dice in her hand,
you can see he doesn't actually interact with her hand,
and actually he just kind of puts his hand over
and takes it away, and the dice are there.
We were very careful,
even to the point of having ILM erase footsteps,
or erase dust he was kicking up.
We tried to play it as fair as possible
in terms of him not actually being there.
This is straight from a beautiful concept,
piece of concept art
that I just thought was gorgeous.
And I think ILM just did an amazing job
creating this final standoff between these two.
Just that kind of Western epic feeling.
We were lucky enough to get John Knoll involved in some of these shots.
So, I'm going to be so curious to talk to people
who see the movie after they watch this.
I mean, in my head, I just...
It makes sense to me that you see this, and you see Luke come out of it,
and you think he protected himself somehow.
I'm curious if for anyone, when they're watching it,
it tips the notion that he wasn't actually there.
That was Ben Munro, by the way, who did that little turn during the pan.
He was our stand-by art director.
(CHUCKLES) And you can see, 'cause all the stuff in the control room
was later on in the shoot, and so, if I look closely,
every time I see a different crew member in the background.
Everyone was like, "Oh, we're almost at the end of the shoot.
"This is our chance to get in."
So, there's a lot of our crew in those shots.
This little moment of...
Well, first of all, I think this is a gorgeous shot ILM did here.
But this moment of Luke
brushing the dirt off his shoulder is a little cheeky,
and, uh, maybe, I don't know.
(CHUCKLES) I like moments like this that kind of
shake the gravity of it up a little bit,
and I like the idea that that's kind of an un-referenced callback
to something in their training that they had together or something like that.
But I just kind of like the cheekiness of it.
And even a little joke like that, I feel like in these heavy moments,
especially in a Star Wars movie,
I really love breaking it up with kind of unexpected situational humor.
So here we're coming into the final home stretch.
This is the final kind of epic showdown between these two.
And Oscar looking gorgeous, learning a lesson.
It's funny.
That binoculars thing he's looking through, that trinoculars, I guess.
That's just a Super 8 camera. (LAUGHS)
There were a lot of props
that were direct callbacks to the original film
that I would pick up and take a look at.
It's like when you first see in the medical droid
that his mouth is literally just a microphone,
and then you can't unsee it.
When I looked at that 'noculars thing,
I was like, "Oh, it's just a Super 8 camera."
ILM, I think, did such an amazing job here.
Also, if you notice little details
like the salts are sparking off of Kylo's blade,
but not Luke's, and the salt flakes never stick to Luke.
Again, I was just trying to play fair a little bit.
One guy that I should mention that I haven't yet
is Peter Swords King, who was our head makeup designer.
He had a lot of work to do in this movie,
between Adam's scar
and all the different states all the actors have to go through.
Peter just did amazing work.
He did all the Lord of the Rings movies with Peter Jackson.
This was another moment that Anthony and I kind of came up with.
That little bit right there.
And it was, I think, on the day the mic,
or the little speaker inside his ear was broken,
and so he didn't, he couldn't quite get the timing of it right.
He was really frustrated with it.
And then we put it together in the edit room
and put his voiceover over it.
And it was just... (LAUGHS) I love that little moment.
It played really well.
And then here's the final payoff
to Carrie and Oscar's arc.
And this little smile from Carrie at the end here,
coming back for that, and coming out of the scene on it,
it was something Bob Ducsay, my editor, did.
And it's an example of how a good editor can really sculpt a moment
and perfectly play it.
I think it's just so magical, that last little smile from Leia.
And that's something that Bob found.
And I never would have thought to go out on that moment.
This was sort of inspired, this landscape here,
by the pressure ridges on the glaciers in Iceland.
But we kind of ended up altering it and making our own version of it,
largely just 'cause those have been,
at this point, shot quite a bit for films.
These boulders here are another example
of just trying to boil something down to its simplest idea.
And when we kept designing kind of this thing,
this idea of, it's blocked by all these boulders, I just kept saying,
"Make the boulders rounder, make them look like Looney Tunes boulders.
"Make them look like Wile E. Coyote boulders."
Just to communicate the simplicity of the hole
that's blocked by rocks she has to get through.
So there you see Kylo's foot moves the salt,
and then, it's going to be in a moment,
a cut of Luke's foot where he goes over the salt,
and it doesn't move the salt.
Again, I was just trying to play fair.
Rob Inch, who I've mentioned a few times,
who was our stunt coordinator, he came up
with these pass-bys for Kylo and Luke.
And we had to come up with a couple different passes
where they would feel dynamic, they would feel like something happened,
but then you watch them back, and you realize
they didn't actually ever make contact with each other.
But they still had to feel dangerous, and Rob did, I think, a great job.
Another specific visual idea I had with this landscape of Crait,
which was another very early kind of thing in the process,
was the idea of the red beneath the white.
But the notion that during the battle, and as the cannon fires,
it would blow it all away and turn it to pure red,
and then during the kind of showdown between these two,
the salt would start falling and turn the whole landscape
back to pure white by the end of it was something I really liked.
And then the notion that our heroes had been split up for the whole thing,
and Finn and Rey have been,
to a certain extent, defined by their distance from each other,
and I just always knew in my head the movie had to end...
If it starts with Finn waking up and saying, "Where's Rey?",
it has to end with them finally coming together, these two friends.
But they've been through their own journeys.
And I love Mark's performance in these little close-ups here.
And Adam's reaction.
And also, what John Williams does musically here,
and through the whole movie, my God.
I mean, I don't know how I've gone this whole commentary
without just talking about John Williams' score the whole time.
And getting to work with him was
one of the joys of the joys of the joys of this movie.
And getting to see, not just in dramatic sequences like this...
I mean, obviously an operatic moment like this, he just nails.
And the way that, in this moment, this realization,
and you don't get much bigger and more grand than this.
But, in addition to that, if you watch some of the quieter scenes in the film,
and watch it just with his score, and see how he rides the emotion of it,
in addition to beats like this, just extraordinary.
So this was always a question of,
would audiences kind of understand
what was happening here with Luke.
I think that, for whatever reason,
I always thought, "Yeah, I think that we're going to get it.
"I feel like we're gonna understand
"that this is kind of an incredibly difficult thing
"that Luke is doing, it's eating up all his energy,
"but we're going to get that he's projecting himself and fooling Kylo."
But this final little scene with Luke here,
Mark just gave an amazing performance.
And we ended up just going back over it,
we probably worked this scene and tweaked it the most in the edit room,
just 'cause it was so delicate in terms of the emotion of it.
And, again, I wanted this to be...
I wanted this to be kind of
the antithesis of Han's death in The Force Awakens.
And, I mean, it was such a powerful scene in The Force Awakens,
and such an incredible moment,
I just... I wanted Luke to go out
on his terms
and in a feeling of, like Rey says at the end, "Peace and purpose."
And a combination of the music,
cutting back to Rey here was something we came up with fairly late in the game.
Again, it's just the reaction of her
and seeing in her eyes,
her kind of standing in for us,
taking this in as she always has throughout the course of this movie.
It's a really necessary thing.
I couldn't talk over that. (CHUCKLES SOFTLY)
So here comes Kylo.
This is very consciously echoing a shot from Episode III of Anakin coming in
that I always loved.
Just a beautiful graphic shot that George did
that we wanted to do a callback to.
And then,
in this final beat between the two of them,
I felt it was really important to put a little cap on this,
going into IX and kind of setting,
"I want to see what happens next between the two of them."
And they're enemies now, but complicated enemies.
And that was always the intent.
And I feel like Daisy's strength right there, it's just so powerful.
And it was actually in the edit room
that the idea of the dice disappearing came up.
We tried it, and there was something really evocative about it.
It made sense if Luke brought them with him
that they would be not really there.
And there was something very sad and beautiful
about them kind of fading away in his hand.
A symbol of his father.
This little beat here, I don't know, it's fun.
I went back and re-watched The Force Awakens a few times
just to make sure we never saw these two meet.
And they were in the base together,
but we never saw them actually come face-to-face.
And I just really liked the idea of
these two kids finally having a moment together.
D'ACY: When we get to the Outer Rim, I have a contact there.
C-3PO: Quite definitely possible.
JOHNSON: And then this little scene with Carrie.
I mean, first of all, it felt like a little party,
getting finally all the actors who had been split up
shooting their own scenes, finally getting them all in the same room.
And it's the Falcon, and we're filming this final little scene of the film,
and the first scene in this movie between Rey and Leia,
and I think Carrie just brings this warmth and beauty to it.
(BB-8 CHIRPS)
And then our coda, which always meant so much to me.
And it was something that... You could very easily lop this off
and end with the Falcon going off,
and that would have been a good ending.
This felt really important to me for a lot of reasons.
Luke, during the course of this film, has basically made the decision
to take on the mantle of being Luke Skywalker
and being kind of like a symbol of hope.
And so to end it with the notion
of Luke hasn't just saved this group of20 Resistance fighters,
he has done what he said, what we wanted him to do from the crawl.
He wanted to reignite the hope in the galaxy.
And that expressed through these kids
who are playing with a Luke Skywalker action figure
and looking up at the stars and thinking,
"I can go up there and join the good fight."
That's what these movies are hopefully all about.
And that's the movie. That's The Last Jedi.
Guys, thank you so much for listening,
and I'm going to shut up over the credits,
so you can listen to John's amazing outro music
and read all of the names of all the incredible people who worked on this.
And I've had the time of my life making this movie,
and very grateful to have gotten to do it.
And grateful to all you guys and to all the Star Wars fans out there.
Love you, guys. Take care.
(THEME MUSIC PLAYING)