I recently spoke with J.J. Abrams, the director and co-writer of the forthcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens. While still divulging few details about the film itself, he talked about the sly references to the previous films that he snuck into the new one, his most surreal moment during production, and the truly terrible pun he inflicted upon Max von Sydow.

Click here for a preview of the June Vanity Fair cover story on the film, and to see Annie Leibovitz’s exclusive portraits of the cast.

Bruce Handy: You’ve talked about trying to recapture the spirit and feel of the original Star Wars trilogy. One thing I personally loved about those films, especially the first, was that there was all this backstory that was alluded to but never explained—the audience was plunged into this fully imagined world, and it was a little bit of a sink-or-swim thing. Like in the first film, someone makes a passing reference to the Clone Wars, which was originally a laugh line—the idea that these characters talked about their shared history the way we might talk about World War II and no one was going to give you a paragraph of exposition was funny. For me, it took some of the fun out of Star Wars when all that backstory was filled in in the prequels.

J.J. Abrams: What was incredible about Star Wars, among other things, was that in that first movie Vader could’ve been his father, but he wasn’t, you know. Leia could’ve been his sister, but she wasn’t. You didn’t really know what the Empire was up to exactly. You didn’t really understand what it meant that there was a Senate or the Dark Times or any of the references, and yet you felt the presence of all these things and you understood because it was all being referenced in a way that allowed you to fill in the blanks, and that’s a very powerful thing.

Your movie is taking place 30-something years after Return of the Jedi. Are you going to give it some of that fill-in-blanks quality, in terms of whatever’s happened in the Star Wars galaxy across those decades?

Well, what’s cool is we’ve obviously had a lot of time [during the development process] to talk about what’s happened outside of the borders of the story that you’re seeing. So there are, of course, references to things, and some are very oblique so that hopefully the audience can infer what the characters are referring to. We used to have more references to things that we pulled out because they almost felt like they were trying too hard to allude to something. I think that the key is—and whether we’ve accomplished that or not is, of course, up to the audience—but the key is that references be essential so that you don’t reference a lot of things that feel like, oh, we’re laying pipe for, you know, an animated series or further movies. It should feel like things are being referenced for a reason.

Tell me about what it was like working on the new film both as its writer-director and as a hard-core Star Wars fan going back to your childhood.

Maybe the weirdest moment, which came months after production, was the first time I sat down with John Williams to show him about a half an hour of the movie. I can’t describe the feeling. All I will say is, just to state the facts of it: I am about to show John Williams 30 minutes of a Star Wars movie that he has not seen that I directed.