It’s a question fans have been pondering for a while; what direction is Star Wars headed as we approach the 50th anniversary of the saga? With a number of mooted projects MIA (Lando, the Rey film, the Kinberg trilogy, Dawn of the Jedi, no sign of live action Star Wars beyond Ahsoka season 2 next year and the promise of a second season of the blisteringly great Maul – Shadow Lord and Visions spin-off The Ninth Jedi) where will the start of the second half century take us? Damon Lindelof touches on that, speaking about his two-years trying to break the Rey focused New Jedi Order, and it’s clear that while his ideas never quite took hold, he has plenty of them.
“What we were attempting to do, my partner Justin Gibson and Rayna McClendon and I, was have this conversation in the movie,” Lindeolf explained. “There is a force of nostalgia and there is a force of revision, and these are at odds with one another. And they are at odds with one another. Let us do The Protestant Reformation inside Star Wars. You have your cake and eat it too. But the conversation the fandom is having, without winking and looking at the audience, that didn’t necessarily feel that risky. They seemed to really like the premise.”
So what stopped this intriguing, meta idea from making its way to the big screen? “The writing was really hard,” described Lindelof. “It was slow. The tone, getting it right. Where it was inside of the canon. What its relationship was with Episode IX. Is it starting a new trilogy? All of those things. They’re so massive. They’re so big. It’s the old tanker equation. You turn the wheel and it takes five minutes before it turns a little bit.”
Interestingly, Lindelof revealed that he and Lucasfilm were “looking for the center of Star Wars” following the sequel trilogy and believed that the new characters from that trilogy – Rey, Poe, Finn – solved that problem. “When Episode VII came out, we all knew what [the center of Star Wars] was – it was Rey, it was Finn, it was Poe, and then we were migrating back in Luke and Leia and Han and Chewie and all those guys. We got the sense then that, when this [sequel] trilogy was over, we were going to be launching with these new characters and that was the center of Star Wars.“
