More Details on George Lucas's Scrapped Plans for the 'Star Wars' Sequels
Chewbacca and Han Solo (Harrison Ford) in ‘The Force Awakens’ teaser (Lucasfilm)
When George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney, he gave them outlines for three new Star Wars sequels — but his ideas apparently ended up in the trash compactor. Vanity Fair’s new cover story on Star Wars: The Force Awakens notes that Star Wars creator Lucas had his own vision for episodes VII, VIII, and IX, which take place decades after the original Star Wars trilogy.
“We’ve made some departures [from Lucas’s ideas],” producer Kathleen Kennedy told the magazine, but only in “exactly the way you would in any development process.”
According to Vanity Fair, Lucas’s story for the sequels focused on teenagers in the Star Wars universe. The article speculates that the reason Disney was wary was those young characters might have given studio executives bad flashbacks to 1999’s prequel The Phantom Menace, with its 9-year-old protagonist Anakin (Jake Lloyd) and 14-year-old princess Amidala (Natalie Portman). To his credit, however, Lucas included the original trilogy’s protagonists in his storyline — and he’s the one who initially approached Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill about returning for the sequels. (All three will appear in The Force Awakens.)
Watch the teaser:
Lucas hasn’t commented on the changes to his original outline, and he declined to speak to Vanity Fair. However, Kennedy (whom Lucas hand-picked to helm Lucasfilm) says that the original Star Wars director is delighted to sit this one out. “I talk to him and see him frequently,” she told Vanity Fair of Lucas. “And I’m telling you, every time I say, ‘Is there anything you want to know?’ And he’s like, ‘No, no, I want to be surprised.’”
Here are five other reveals from Vanity Fair’s big behind-the-scenes story. The full article is now accessible in a digital edition and hits newsstands on May 12.
There was no screenplay six months before filming.
As pre-production was underway, screenwriter Michael Arndt was still struggling to put the story together. At that point, director J.J. Abrams and writer Lawrence Kasdan (The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi) decided to take over and start from scratch. “We didn’t have anything,” Kasdan said. “There were a thousand people waiting for answers on things.” Abrams and Kasdan wrote the new script in six months, including one memorable session in a crowded café in Paris. “We’re yelling back and forth in this noise saying, ‘This should happen, that should happen, he can’t do that’ — and hoping no one’s there from Cinema Blend,” said Kasdan. The two were still working out story beats while Stormtroopers stood by on set.
Abrams was “terrified” to direct Harrison Ford as Han Solo.
“It wasn’t just about directing one of the great actors in film history,” said Abrams, who also wrote Ford’s 1991 drama Regarding Henry. “It was about directing one of the great actors in film history playing a character that was certainly one of his defining characters.” Abrams said that, contrary to the grouchiness he’d shown towards Star Wars in the past, Ford was “excited to get back in those shoes again.”
Ford’s injury actually made the movie better.
Fans went into a tizzy when they learned that Ford broke his leg on the Millennium Falcon set last year. But Abrams says that the forced hiatus in filming was an unexpected blessing. “In a weird way, it was the greatest gift to the movie … once it was clear Harrison would be OK,” he said. Abrams said that the crisis bonded the cast and crew together, while Ford came back “better and stronger than ever… There was a fire in his eyes that you see in the movie.”
Jar Jar Binks is a constant presence at Lucasfilm.
The much-maligned prequel character, whose bones Abrams considered scattering in the desert as a visual gag in The Force Awakens, is a fixture in the production company’s lobby. A fan-made statue of the Gungan creature stands next to a copy of an internet poll declaring Jar Jar “the most annoying film character of all time.”
Watch our video memorial to the late Jar Jar Binks:
Another Indiana Jones movie is happening.
This is tangential to Star Wars, but Kathleen Kennedy did confirm to Vanity Fair that a film about Indy — another iconic Lucasfilm character — is in the works. “When it will happen, I’m not quite sure. We haven’t started working on a script yet, but we are talking about it,” she said.
