Apart from the obvious Lawrence Kasdan link – namely that he wrote both Raiders of the Lost Ark and Solo: A Star Wars Story – there’s another very visceral connection between the two films. James Clyne, chatting with StarWars.com, takes a look at that gruesome connection.
“We were having these conversations with Ron about what happens to this space monster when he gets sucked into this gravity well. Does he just turn into a ball of light? Does he dissolve like water? Everybody was throwing out these ideas and it was one of these big conversations and I said, ‘Well, what if in true ‘80s Indiana Jones fashion, his skin just gets ripped off and we see his skull?’ And everybody was like, ‘Oh, that’s disgusting, James!’
A minute later, Ron goes, ‘I want to hear more about the skull.’ And I said, ‘Well, we’re Star Wars. Let’s have those fun moments where you’re a kid and you get giddy because there’s something really kind of gruesome that happens, but it’s not bloody… I wanted to have one of these moments where you kind of felt sad for it. He was just hanging out in space doing his own thing, minding his own business, just a little hungry for some space ship. And then it gets sucked into this thing. We were trying to figure out how to make that a little more fun.”
Raiders was certainly the immediate comparison once seeing this action adventure film, so fascinating to see how present that thought was while constructing the film.
