Knives Out director Rian Johnson delivered the most subversive Star Wars movie yet with The Last Jedi. Even though he’s hard at work developing a new separate trilogy of films set elsewhere in the galaxy far, far away, Johnson says he knows nothing about this month’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

In a new interview, the filmmaker explains how J.J. Abrams doesn’t need any inspiration from him, how he truly doesn’t know anything about what’s coming up in Abrams’s sequel, and what he hopes the new film accomplishes. These are the Rian Johnson The Rise of Skywalker hopes you’ve been looking for.

In a recent interview, Abrams talked about how Johnson’s choices in The Last Jedi strengthened what he’s doing with The Rise of Skywalker, and how surprising and entertaining he found Johnson’s movie to be overall. Afterwards, CinemaBlend (via The Playlist) asked Johnson about some of Abrams’ additional comments about how Rise is going to be a riskier film because of the decisions made in Last Jedi, and Johnson explained how confident he is that Abrams will be able to deliver a satisfying ending:

“That was so incredibly kind of J.J. to say that. I don’t think J.J. needs any inspiration from me. I think he’s an incredible storyteller who I knew from the instant that I knew that he was doing [Episode] IX that he was going to figure out a way that was going to both surprise all of us and satisfy us deeply at the end of the saga.”

That concept of surprise keeps coming up again and again, and it’s clearly something these storytellers value in a Star Wars project. Indeed, Johnson values it so much that he purposefully didn’t bother trying to pry any details out of Abrams or his collaborators at Lucasfilm because he wants his viewing experience to give him that rare feeling of being a kid again:

“I want to sit down like a Star Wars fan and just get my popcorn and just be 10-years-old again and see this whole thing brought home in a beautiful way that surprises me…it’s Star Wars. It takes you there. It transports you. The instant that John Williams score comes up, the instant you’re back in that world and hear those lightsaber sounds, it’s just [snaps] – you’re back to being ten.”

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker blasts into theaters on December 20, 2019.