Speaking with Film Stories about his latest film, Elevation which is coming to Prime Video UK on 8th February, George Nolfi – the newly installed writer of the New Jedi Order project starring Daisy Ridley and directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy – discussed his thoughts and intentions for the hotly anticipated return to the Sequel trilogy characters and where he’s drawing inspiration from.
“The way I approach it is, you look at what’s come before you, you look at the broad ideas of what they want to do, meaning: Lucasfilm, Disney, Sharmeen the director, and then you do what a writer does, and try to try and put beats of a story together. Try and imagine characters, and then you present that with an understanding that it needs to honour, obviously, a long, incredible tradition.”
“If you think about George Lucas, the six movies that he did, and the universe that he created, it’s actually very steeped in broad notions of politics. It’s not talking about today, per se, but there’s the Empire’s Nazism slash Roman Empire. The democracy of the Roman Empire collapsing and becoming an empire and the perennial story of human beings organising themselves and against chaos, and then the tools that help human societies tamp down on chaos becomes oppression.
“So that is really very core to what I think George Lucas was trying to talk about. And one of the wonderful things about science fiction and Star Wars – which is more almost science fantasy or space opera – is that you can raise the deepest issues without it feeling like a philosophy class, or a political science class, or something I read in the newspaper today. It can be about real things, deep things.”