While the box office success of Star Wars: The Force Awakens is not in question, director JJ Abrams has revealed that he wasn't always so sure he had a good movie on his hands. The filmmaker has spoken about how he felt when he showed his first rough cut to studio executives.

As reported by Entertainment Weekly, during an interview on The Howard Stern Show, Abrams said: "We showed the first cut--which was still incomplete, a complete version of the movie but not the finished version--and we showed it to Alan Horn and Bob Iger and Alan Bergman, the three people at Disney who sat with me in the theater, and we screened the movie. And it was horrifying."

Abrams described their positive reaction as "the biggest relief of my life." However, he then proceeded to doubt that their response was sincere. "What do they know, they spent $4 billion, they have to love it,'" he told Stern. "Their response was so kind, I'm like, 'They're just being nice.'"

At the weekend, Force Awakens star Daisy Ridley revealed that director Steven Spielberg had now seen the film three times. In a new interview with RTL, Spielberg was asked about the Star Wars saga, and whether he would ever like to direct a film in the franchise. "I'm a true fan of Star Wars, but I have always felt it was not in my stars to ever direct one," he said. "But it was in my stars to admire and attend and see each one numerous times. And I think this new Star Wars could be the biggest movie ever."

Star Harrison Ford has also seen the finished movie. He told Good Morning America that "it's a wonderful movie. It's got great production values. It's a real big movie and I was delighted to see it."

Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens on December 18, 2015. It also stars John Boyega, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill.

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