Star Wars: The Force Awakens arrives in stores on Blu-ray and DVD today, so to commemorate its home
video release, I thought it would be fitting to post the full transcript of
the interview I conducted with the film's director, J.J. Abrams, on December 1,
2015, seventeen days before the film opened in theaters. A shorter version of this Q&A appeared on the TIME For Kids web site. Enjoy!
GLENN
GREENBERG:
I
used to write the Star Trek comic books for Marvel when they had the license.
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| Star Trek: Untold Voyages #1 (May 1998), by Glenn Greenberg, Mike Collins, and Keith Williams |
J.J. ABRAMS:
No way! Oh my God. Now that’s a starter!
So we’ve both been there, then.
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GREENBERG:
Absolutely!
You initially turned down the offer to direct The Force Awakens. One question changed your mind: “Who is Luke
Skywalker?” Without giving anything away about the movie, in your mind, who is
Luke Skywalker?
ABRAMS:
Luke Skywalker represents a righteous
defender of justice and an incredibly powerful figure. And I can imagine for
someone who has never seen anything like that before, who doesn’t have anyone
to fill in the blanks of what has happened before, he’s a kind of mythic
figure. And what got me excited about that question, and Kathy Kennedy, the
producer, raised it, was the very idea that there would be young people in this
world for whom the history of Star Wars would be like a story from another age.
And I just realized that’s kind of the feel of what this movie needs. This is
going to be about discovery, and about these new young characters realizing
that they live in the “Star Wars universe.”
GREENBERG:
Was
the idea always to pick up the story a generation later? Was there ever any
consideration of not skipping a generation and picking up where Return of the Jedi left off, even it
meant having to recast Luke?
ABRAMS:
The idea was, mostly because this amount
of time had gone by, and these actors are still here, it was always the
discussion that we would say it is now nearly 40 years after [the original] Star Wars. And so it was never, for this
film, a discussion to recast. I know that there are other movies that they’re
working on, I’ve heard of a [Han Solo] origin story, and I know that that, of
course, would require [recasting].
GREENBERG:
Of
course! Who is your favorite Star Wars character and why? Do you have a favorite
from the original movies, or the more recent ones?
ABRAMS:
Obviously, the power and coolness of
Darth Vader—he’s my favorite bad guy, maybe ever. But I always felt a
connection to Luke because of his “everymaness.” . . . As much as Han is probably my favorite
character now, as a kid, he was someone to love and adore, but I never felt I
could be Han. You’d always want to hang out with Han, but I felt more connected
to Luke because he was so much more the ordinary kid. But now . . . Han is the character who holds a real
fascination for me.
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GREENBERG:
You
first saw Star Wars when you were 11.
ABRAMS:
Yes.
GREENBERG:
What
is it that first appealed to you about it, what made you connect to it in a way
that, as you’ve said, you didn’t connect to Star Trek?
ABRAMS:
The thing that I connected to most about Star Wars, I think, was the comedy, the
sense of humor that the movie had. It was constantly funny, and in a kind of
sophisticated way too. It was about character, it had a huge heart . . . Its
sweetness, and care with the characters, felt profoundly important in those
[original] movies. And I think the look of the movie—when I was 11 years old,
no movies looked like that before. And this was a movie that wasn’t a family
film like they had existed before. This was far bigger, far funnier, far more
epic in scale and scope, far more inventive in design, far more believable in
its narrative and the world it was creating, it just sort of did everything. It
had better music. It had better visual effects. It did everything brilliantly.
As a result, the feeling that I was left with was amazement, and a sense that
anything was possible. And that to me was the most profound impact.
GREENBERG:
George
Lucas has said that when he was developing Star Wars, he was inspired by myths,
fairy tales, and heroic fiction. Did you draw upon the same influences and
sources when you were developing this film?
ABRAMS:
ABRAMS:
It’s funny, there was a serialized (multi-part) film series called Flash Gordon that was a huge influence
on George Lucas . . . He wanted to do Flash Gordon and couldn’t get the rights.
And of course, in coming up with a story [for Star Wars], he, as a great filmmaker, had all of his influences,
including [movie director Akira] Kurosawa and certainly, in terms of
storytelling, [mythology expert] Joseph Campbell. … I did try to broaden my
horizons as much as possible and watch and read as much as I could—not just to
remember or be inspired by great filmmakers, though it never hurts to watch
[Kurosawa’s film] Seven Samurai . . .
You know, Star Wars is a kind of
crazy collision of a bunch of different styles. It’s fairy tale, it’s myth,
it’s King Arthur, it’s a Western, it’s Flash Gordon, it’s a samurai story—it’s
an amazing mélange of different genres.
What I tried to do in working on this,
and I wrote the script with Larry Kasdan, who wrote The Empire Strikes Back and Return
of the Jedi, is find the master we were serving. Which is to say, what is the story we’re
telling? Who are the characters we care about? Why do we care about them? Why
do we love them? What is their adventure that they go on? And approach it from
what the story needed. As a director, I try to go with the right visual style
for each scene . . . but there isn’t one influence that I can point to and say,
“I was trying to do exactly what he or she did.”
GREENBERG:
Were
there any specific qualities that you tried to recapture from the previous
movies? A visual, a concept, a mood, or a theme?
ABRAMS:
Yes. For me, the mood was critical. Which
was, a sense of authenticity. Those first movies, whether you’re out in the
deserts of Tatooine or the snowy fields of Hoth, or the forest of Endor, you
felt like you were in these real places. It was transportive, because you
really knew this world, this landscape, is real. That was one thing. There was
a very worn-out feeling in the early Star Wars movies, which I just loved.
These were not stories of people in halls of power, these were stories about
underdogs, about people who were the everyman, or in some cases, people thought
they were nobody important. They were always desperate, and they were desperate
for reasons that were entertaining and viscerally important. I wanted to make
sure that this movie felt more like those kind of, sort of more Western
approach to storytelling than stories of people who were in positions of power.
And that was just a mood that was profoundly important for me when I saw those
early films.
It also provided great contrast. The
shiny black floors and the pill lights of the Empire, I remember, were in stark
contrast to the dusty, dirty, cluttered worlds of our heroes. And I just feel
like that to me was part of the fun of Star Wars, that these two things could
co-exist; the kind of sleek, gleaming, terrifying power of the bad guys and
then the kind of upstart, homespun, crappy underdog world of the people who you
fell in love with. Someone I work with
said that Star Wars is a Western,
that you’re going to have fundamental things in every story, and you need to
embrace those things. [In a Western,] you’re going to have the saloon, you’re
going to have the small town, you’re going to have the bad guy who’s going to
be dressed in black, you’re probably going to have horses. There are just
certain things, and when you’re doing Star Wars, okay, TIE fighters, X-wings,
lightsabers—you know certain things have to be part of this world and the
question is how to use [them].
GREENBERG:
What
new qualities would you say you were trying to bring, that could only come from
you doing a Star Wars movie?
ABRAMS:
I have no idea—I can’t look at myself
from outside. It’s like asking someone what it was like growing up in that
place—this was all I knew growing up, I can’t tell you what it was like
compared to anything else. But I can say that working with Larry Kasdan on the
script, it was a gift to work with him. There was a great continuum of what had
come before, in a way that was priceless. That was really important. I think we
both tried to bring what felt right to us.
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I wanted this movie to be for everyone. I
just got in trouble with my daughter, who’s 16, and my wife, both of whom love
Star Wars, because I had said I want this to not just be for boys and fathers,
I want it to be mothers and daughters. They were like, “Thanks—we’ve loved Star
Wars since we first saw it.” And I apologize to them and anyone else I offended
by saying it. What I meant was, I know there are countless women and girls who
love Star Wars. But I’m saying a lot of the selling of Star Wars has been
primarily to boys. And even as recently as a couple of weeks ago, a major
department store chain had the advertising for action figures from the new
movie and they only had the male figures. And all I’m saying is, this movie is
for everyone. And it was important for me not just to have females in both
good-guy and bad-guy roles, but also to make sure the movie looks more like the
world looks.
When we cast Oscar Isaac, who is a Latino actor, it was not in the
script that he looked a certain way, he was just the right actor. John
Boyega—we didn’t know that [his character] would be any color, white or
otherwise. We were just looking for a guy who was going to be great in the
role. But I knew it was important that the movie be inclusive. And it’s
important to me that people see themselves in this movie, in roles of drama,
comedy, and hopefully great adventure.
GREENBERG:
It’s
been 10 years since the last Star Wars movie was released. For some of my
readers, they weren’t even born at that point. How do you think Star Wars
speaks to kids today? Is it any different from the way it spoke to us, our
generation, when it first came out?
ABRAMS:
I think the very first Star Wars was sort
of gorgeous in its simplicity. It was a very simple story, and I think that’s
profoundly important. Somehow kids today are born knowing about Star Wars. It’s
almost like it’s ingrained in them at such a young age. In some cases it might
be because they’ve seen games or the animated series or whatever. But I think
kids sort of know about aspects of Star Wars somehow through osmosis. At the
same time, we knew this would be the first Star Wars movie for many
people. And not just kids in this
country, but grown-ups in other countries where Star Wars had never been
released before. And it was really important that this movie not rely on
people’s knowledge and understanding of Star Wars for it to work.
But I do
think that it speaks fundamentally still in the most important way, which is,
it reminds you that we’re all connected in some way. It reminds you that you
are capable of extraordinary things. It reminds you that the people who are
going to be the most powerful connections in your life are out there to be
found. And that you will find trust and loyalty and friendship in the most
unlikely of places and situations. And for me as a kid, I would have liked to
think that if things got desperate and intense, that I would run into some of
the characters that I found in Star Wars, that I would become bonded to them,
and that together we would have an extraordinary victory. And I’d like to think
that kids today would want and need that message as much as I did.
GREENBERG:
I
have a question from a 13-year-old girl in Queens, New York. (NOTE: I’m referring here to my daughter Maddie.) She wants to know
how it feels being the boss of the two biggest science-fiction franchises in
movie history.
ABRAMS:
I will tell her that I don’t feel like
I’m the boss of any of these things. I feel like I am, if anything, the
temporary guardian. The answer is, I feel honored to have been involved in Star
Trek in any way, as I’m sure you do. And Star Wars, which was more meaningful
to me as a kid growing up . . . it is still to this moment so surreal that I
got to be involved in it at all. I feel very grateful to all the work that
everyone’s done on this thing—and I hope more than anything that she likes the
movie.