Pablo Hidalgo’s official title at Lucasfilm is creative executive. Unofficially, he is the company’s in-house Star Wars geek, a repository of everything known—history, planetology, starship specifications, alien taxonomy, proper spellings—about the galaxy George Lucas created.

Originally hired to interact with fans, Hidalgo has become a key member of the Lucasfilm story group, headed by development executive Kiri Hart, which has been generating ideas for the ambitious slate of new Star Wars films that begins this December with the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I recently talked with Hidalgo about what his job at Lucasfilm entails, where the franchise is headed, and how he managed to turn a childhood obsession into a career.

Click here to read the June Vanity Fair cover story on The Force Awakens and to see Annie Leibovitz’s exclusive photos of the cast and creators.

Bruce Handy: Tell me about how your job developed.

Pablo Hidalgo: I’ve been here for 15 years now, and I started off ages ago working with marketing as part of the online group that was tasked to build up starwars.com as a destination for fans to find out what we were up to during the making of the prequels. And as part of the job requirement, it required all kinds of skills that you’d need as a writer, but also expertise to know about the Star Wars I.P. [intellectual property], to know about George Lucas’s own history, to know about Indiana Jones. As it happened, there just became more and more need for that specific expertise, so it just expanded beyond that. I became the kind of go-to guy for any sort of deep Star Wars mythology questions.

Now we’re at this new point in our history where we’re going to have a very production-focused future with [Lucasfilm president] Kathleen Kennedy leading the way. And if we’re going to build onto this franchise, it’s important to know what’s happened in the past, to know what’s been established, to know what George’s intentions were and stuff like that. So I just got more and more roped into this process to the point where I’m now part of Kiri Hart’s story group. Among things that I do is I offer that kind of level of deep knowledge. I’m able to give my two cents when I see something that isn’t tracking, maybe pointing out that, well, you know, that spaceship doesn’t have that capacity or these two planets are closer than the script is suggesting that they are. That kind of deep universe history.

In terms of history, you’re not just talking about the films and the TV shows, but also novels, comics, games?

Yeah, any sort of storytelling that’s been done in the Star Wars space. We kind of break that out to different degrees of what we call canon, you know—whether or not we’re beholden to it in new storytelling going forward. It’s like if someone will come into a situation and say, “Have we ever done a story like this?” And I could be able to say, “Yeah, we did that, but it was, like, in a 1978 comic book, so, you know, take that as you will.”

In the past, our storytelling had been a little bit more haphazard, and we had to make those maps after the fact and make realizations of like, Oh, if we move this story here, it connects properly, right? But now we’re able to be bit more formal and organized beforehand, and that’s super-exciting. I’m the kind of guy who responds well to whiteboard illustrations that show, Oh, this is where we’re going next and this is where we’ve been, because that kind of builds the world in my mind as we start going towards there.