Adam Driver Takes Back His 'Empire Strikes Back' Comment
Adam Driver has learned that talking about Star Wars is a double-edged sword (or a cross-guard lightsaber, if you will). On the one hand, anything he says about the upcoming, secrecy-shrouded Episode VIII generates headlines — which can be good when he’s promoting, say, a small independent film like Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson (in select theaters Dec. 28). On the other hand, he’s not actually allowed to talk about Star Wars, so anything he says is bound to be misconstrued or blown out of proportion. Like, for example, that time last month that he compared Episode VIII to The Empire Strikes Back.
“No, no, and that’s not even what I said,” an exasperated Driver told Vanity Fair this weekend. What I said was the tone of it was different, I didn’t say that it was gonna be in the vein of [it] — I was using it as an example, so poor example.”
Here’s what Driver actually said about that new Star Wars film, in that previous interview with Collider: “It’s similar to how The Empire Strikes Back has a different tone. For that people always go ‘Oooh, it’s dark,’ but I don’t know that it necessarily is. It’s just different in tone in a way that I think is great and necessary but also very clear. [Director Rian Johnson] trusts [that] his audience is ready for nuance and ambiguity. He’s not dumbing anything down for someone and that’s really fun to play.”
And here’s how he attempted to clarify that comment, to Vanity Fair: “Next time I should say — I’m trying to think of another sequel to a movie that’s good. When I read the script, it was not what I expected, in the best of ways.”
Related: Cannes Report: Adam Driver Finds Poetry in ‘Paterson’
Okay then! At this point, according to VF, Driver is so wary of talking about Star Wars that he wouldn’t even answer a question about whether the script “blew him away,” because he was afraid of fans reading too much into the phrase. (You heard it here first, guys: Supreme Leader Snoke is secretly a giant hairdryer.) He also wants to make sure that Paterson, which received mostly excellent reviews on the festival circuit, is seen on its own merits. If he said anything more about Star Wars while promoting Paterson, Driver worried, “It’s gonna be about that, and then everyone’s like, ‘Jim who?’ Paterson who?’”
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