The cast and director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi give us the lowdown on new creatures, new cast members and who might be going to the dark side. — SciFiNow Magazine #139 [ I transcribed this myself so please credit + link back to me if you’re sharing/quoting anything from this piece ]



Most film franchises like to play their cards close to their chests, but Star Wars is in another league. It’s understandable that the franchise known for pulling off one of the greatest shock twists in movie history wants to keep plotlines on the down low, but by goodness it makes it hard to write about them. So here’s what we know about Star Wars: The Last Jedi – Rey goes to Luke Skywalker to seek Jedi training while Finn, Poe Dameron and General Leia’s Resistance continues to fight against the First Order, led by Kylo Ren, General Hux, Captain Phasma and the mysterious Supreme Leader Snoke. So, basically, exactly where The Force Awakens left off. There are hints and suggestions at where the story may go. We know that Finn and new character Rose end up at a giant casino, and we know that Benicio del Toro and Laura Dern have joined the cast. But other than that, everything is tightly under wraps. And, as far as del Toro is concerned, that’s exactly how it should be: “The fans want that wrapping paper around that Christmas gift,” he says. “Don’t give it to them without the paper. They don’t want to see it when they walk in the room. They don’t want to know.” For Kelly Marie Tran, a newcomer to both Star Wars and movies in general, who plays Rose, her casting in The Last Jedi came with mind-boggling levels of secrecy. She wasn’t even allowed to tell her family that she’d got the part, or even that she was filming in London, in case they put two and two together. “I told everyone… I was doing a small indie movie in Canada. I would send pictures of Toronto that I got from Google to my friends saying ‘this is where I am!’. It was a weird time.” Security was similarly tight on set. “Everyone is in these tinted-window cars, transported from one part of the set to another,” Tran explains. “And you’re wearing these like black robes. They’re like secrecy robes, so no one can tell who you are. It’s insane the amount of security there is.”

Tran’s Rose is a mechanic in the Resistance. “She’s kind of this nobody. And she gets pulled into this adventure, is sort of forced into this thing and spends a lot of the movie with Finn. And they get to go on a lot of cool adventures together.” As for Benicio del Toro’s character, apparently named DJ, he’s even more of a mystery. “Maybe you could find him in a Bob Dylan song or a Tom Waits song,” del Toro says, typically enigmatic. “Or maybe in a Dostoyevsky novel. You’ll find DJ in one of those stories. You don’t know what he is. But that’s the idea… You don’t know if he’s good or bad.” For John Boyega and Daisy Ridley, who play Finn and Rey, it was time to jump back into the deep end. “I think I left doing The Force Awakens feeling like a better actor,” Ridley says. “And then I went into [The Last Jedi] and felt like it was all beginning again and I was like, holy crap, I’ve learned nothing!” Boyega, meanwhile, went into The Last Jedi with very clear ideas of what he wanted to do with Finn, who, he says, remained a bit of an enigma throughout The Force Awakens. “You’ve got your foundation for the character,” he says of Finn in The Force Awakens. “Now you’re moving onto the next project and you’re trying to, you know, make more of the character. You can’t make more of someone you don’t really know. And so for me the fear that I did have going into VIII was that I hope that we get more of a sense of where [Finn] belongs… The story for him in this movie is him making that decision himself as to where he will belong. Where he wants to identify himself. And I think that’s very important.” While the lead cast remain the same, the director has changed. JJ Abrams, who directed The Force Awakens, has handed the reins to Looper director, Rian Johnson. Boyega was quickly won over by Johnson’s approach: “Rian is kind of blessed with the challenge of trying to make it different and trying to make it unique and expanding the universe. And so for me that was something that I found very interesting that Rian was doing. There were a lot of LucasFilm officials on set. Sometimes I would see in their eyes that they would be like [Boyega affects the look of a worried studio exec]. And I’d be like, yes, that’s good. Because it means that [Rian’s] taking risks.” LucasFilm producer Kathleen Kennedy approached Johnson about directing The Last Jedi while The Force Awakens was still filming. He tells us that after reading The Force Awakens’ script and watching Abrams’ dailies, he realised that there was a follow-up story that he wanted to tell: “It makes me very happy that [The Last Jedi] felt unexpected to the actors,” Johnson says. “That to me is a compliment, but I don’t think it would ever be good to start a storytelling process by saying ‘let’s be unexpected, what will they never see coming?’ That’s never where you want to begin. I think, to me, unexpectedness is a byproduct of telling a story honestly. So I started with the characters and I said: ‘Where does it make sense for these characters to go in my mind?’ And that’s going to lead you in unexpected places if you let it. But hopefully, when it leads you to unexpected places, it’s the sort of thing like in life where you never could have predicted it but it seems inevitable after it happens.” He says that there was no set-in-stone story for him to follow when he came on board, which may come as a surprise given the recent kerfuffle with Star Wars directors. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were removed from the Han Solo movie (now titled Solo: A Star Wars Story) midway through shooting because LucasFilm and Disney weren’t happy with their work, and Colin Trevorrow dropped out of Episode IX, to be replaced by JJ Abrams. You might think LucasFilm wants to keep tight control of their directors, but that doesn’t seem to have been Johnson’s experience. “No, there isn’t an outline somewhere on a piece of paper that says ‘this, and this, and this’. To me, that means that as we create these movies… there aren’t bases that we have to tag. We can find our way forward chapter by chapter. And it’s going to come to a satisfying conclusion, but it’s going to get there through an organic process of going forward in a way that makes sense at each step; which I think is really exciting for a movie like this.”

Benicio del Toro was, like many of the other actors, surprised by just how flexible Johnson’s approach was, especially considering it was the biggest of big budget films. “I had ideas and comments and suggestions of how I think what the story was trying to tell could be sharper… And so when I sat down with Rian, who had written the script, I was amazed that he didn’t hesitate to explore changes in the story. Or things about my character. Usually, in my experience, when I have worked with writer-directors, they protect their writing. They’re really rigid with the writing… So when I saw Rian was really open to first of all listen and then to engage in conversation and to make decisions quick, I was like: ‘Wow, is this for real? Is this like a trap?’ But he sustained that through the whole shooting.” Star Wars is a big departure for Johnson, who isn’t used to handling films that are so special effects-heavy. The team on The Last Jedi have been keen to keep as much as they can physically real, rather than being overly reliant on digital effects. Why make a CGI creature when you can give the actors an amazing puppet to act opposite on set? Johnson admits that he found the CGI-heavy elements most tricky. “Honestly, the most technically challenging stuff are the space battles because those are the ones where, aside from the cockpits, nothing is real,” Johnson says. “The practical effects, and especially the creature workshop, was much more fun.” He tells us that, rather than letting him see the creatures as a work-in-progress, Neil Scanlan and his team would only allow Johnson to see them in full flow. “They would put on music and they would have all of the creatures interacting with actors in like a little scene… And I would walk through this scene, and that’s how I reviewed the creatures. That’s how I saw them for the first time. It was incredible.” Kelly Marie Tran was similarly blown away by the creatures. “Everything is so real and visceral. I remember acting with an animatronic creature and getting emotional because it was so real! I was like, ‘man I think that creature might have stolen the whole film from me…’” she laughs. But creating the creatures wasn’t straight-forward. Johnson points out that “you’re trying to do the work of evolution in a month with a design team, it’s not easy”. He talks about designing the Fathiers, horse-like creatures that he described in the script as “graceful creatures, very wise-looking and sympathetic; kind of like horses, kind of like greyhounds”, but which, at one point in the process, ended up looking like “a koala bear with horse ears”. While most of the storyline and set-pieces are kept tightly under wraps, John Boyega did hint at an effects-heavy action sequence he took part in. “There’s a really a big whole chase sequence, kind of like in the mirror of what happened with Finn and Rey when they went into the Falcon. But now it’s Finn and Rose. And that whole sequence, it took two weeks to film, in which both of us were on a rig for two weeks. And that was… Yeah, that was excruciating,” he laughs. “Excruciating pain. But the excitement and the adrenaline and the kind of fear that you have to show when the cameras are rolling… It makes it really, really fun.” Finn seems to have a lot of action lined up in The Last Jedi, as Boyega talks about “loads of Stormtroopers flying around on rigs getting blown up” and Finn’s reunion with Captain Phasma, who he left for dead in the last film. “That’s the last time he saw his ex-boss,” Boyega says of Phasma. “And unfortunately he has to go back to work in this film. And they do meet. It’s not the best reunion in the world.” Boyega describes Finn as being on the First Order’s “no-breathe list”. “Finn is now a known kind of space terrorist,” he says. “They see him as a rogue. So that causes a lot of tension. He can’t just go through space the way he used to.” For the returning cast, the action is something they have become used to, and Daisy Ridley was surprised by how much stronger she was this time around. “First time around, it was the first time I ever physically trained for anything,” she says. “And I thought I’d reached my limit of what I could do. And then second time around, you’re like: ‘Oh… okay, I think I can do a bit more than that.’ So physically I felt much stronger and my stamina was higher on everything.” But while action is, and will always be, one of the main cornerstones of Star Wars, the cast frequently talk about how Johnson is doing something a little different this time round. Gwendoline Christie, the woman beneath Captain Phasma’s helmet, explains a little about Johnson’s approach on The Last Jedi: “Rian was creating something in terms of tone that is slightly different from what we’ve had before. It’s driven by story and by character. And relationships. That’s not to say that you won’t get everything else you want in terms of an incredible Star Wars film. But, that is where I feel the focus is. “What we’re demanding as an audience is more interesting and more evolved storytelling, which involves seeing people exploring humanity in a way that transcends good or evil.” This takes us to what seems to be The Last Jedi’s key theme, which pops up again and again while we talk to the actors and director: the thin line between good and evil. Johnson sees all Star Wars movies as coming-of-age tales. However, while it is normally the hero who’s coming of age, The Last Jedi is

slightly different. “In this story,” Johnson says, “I think Rey and Kylo are almost like a dual protagonist. You identify with Rey, but also you identify with Kylo in a way that you never did with Vader. I know I do. Because if these movies are about adolescence, Kylo is that anger of adolescence and that rejection of the parents, and wanting to screw over your dad; and that’s something that all of us, to some degree, can identify with. And the idea of there being a bad guy who you identify with as much as you do the protagonist in some way, that’s really interesting.” The next question, of course, is who’s to say who the bad guy is? It’s a question that Daisy Ridley finds interesting. “It’s funny how Adam [Driver, who plays Kylo Ren] talks about it. He said it’s not the difference between good and bad, it’s the difference between good and right. Like his character thinks what he’s doing is right. He doesn’t think he’s the big baddie. So the lines get blurred anyway. Good people make bad decisions. Bad people make good decisions. What Rian has done is this wonderful thing of morally questioning people in a way that makes you see them in a more three dimensional way, or just in a way that you haven’t seen before.” Boyega agrees, and it’s clearly a topic he finds fascinating. “You know, in war, you’re not always going to be on the side of the good guys,” he says. “If the good guys are getting killed off, I’d probably be like: ‘You know what? I’m going to go get a job at the Empire base and just have a peaceful life.’ So the characters are challenged right now. They have to make these decisions as to where they stand. Even General Leia and Poe Dameron. If they’re going to stand for the Resistance, it has to be for a significant reason. Rian came and made this really challenging. And that’s what I really love.”