Lawrence Kasdan’s first produced screenplay was for The Empire Strikes Back—not a bad Hollywood baby step! Maybe even more impressively, he had already written the scripts for Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Bodyguard, which would be shot subsequent to The Empire Strikes Back. Kasdan would go on to co-write Return of the Jedi with George Lucas. His films as a writer-director include Body Heat, The Big Chill, Silverado, The Accidental Tourist, and Mumford.

More recently, he has returned to the galaxy far, far away, co-writing the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens with director J.J. Abrams. I recently spoke with Kasdan about his history with Lucas, the was-Darth-Vader-always-Luke’s-father question, the possibility of a Big Chill sequel, and the fate of Lando Calrissian, the roguish character played by Billy Dee Williams.

Click here to read the June 2015 Vanity Fair cover story on The Force Awakens and to see Annie Leibovitz’s exclusive photos of the cast. Below are some outtakes from my conversation with Kasdan.

Bruce Handy: Tell me about how you first got involved with Star Wars, back in the day.

Lawrence Kasdan: I had just written Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was my first job in Hollywood, and I gave the script to George. And he said, “Will you write The Empire Strikes Back?” George had hired Leigh Brackett to do a draft of Empire, and she was not well. Do you know anything about her? She was an amazing person. She has a credit on The Big Sleep, and she was one of the first female science-fiction pulp people. She was a big writer, important writer. [Her other screenplay credits include Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo and Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye.] I don’t know all the things that happened [with Brackett’s draft of The Empire Strikes Back], but when George got it, it was nothing like what he wanted. It’s very hard to get into his head; I turned out to be able to get into his head a lot.

Anyway, Leigh Brackett died while I was writing Raiders. So when I went and handed George Raiders, he said, “Let’s go out to lunch,” and we went out to lunch. He said, “Will you write Empire Strikes Back?” And I was like, “Don’t you want to read Raiders of the Lost Ark?” And he said, “Well, I’m going to read it tonight. And if I don’t like it, I’m going to call you up tomorrow and take back this offer.” But he liked it, and Steven [Spielberg] liked it. And I immediately started working on Empire. They were already building sets, I think, in England. Irvin Kershner was going to direct it. So that became this very highly energized, totally fun thing. George was so much fun to work with, and hilarious, too. And we just sort of really wrote that fast with Kersh.

When you started working on the new film with J.J. Abrams, to what extent did you bring along your understanding of George’s ideas and intentions about Star Wars?

I think I did have a strong sense of George and George’s journey over those years. We weren’t really involved after Jedi. But before that, we were, very deeply involved. He even helped me get Body Heat made, which was my first movie [as a writer-director, released in 1981]. He was very supportive of that. So we were very close and then we sort of didn’t have much to do with each other for a long time. But my experiences with him had all been very positive and my favorite memories of him were this period of Empire and Jedi, which I came back, after Body Heat, and did for him. He was, again, in a situation where they didn’t have a script and I came in and worked with him and Richard Marquand. So I’m very much infused with the best of George, which was funny and inventive and obviously changed movies forever.