28th May 2027 – aka the third day of the second half century of Star Wars – will see the arrival of Star Wars: Starfighter from director Shawn Levy and star Ryan Gosling, and while on the promotional tour for Stranger Things season five he was asked about the currently filming Star Wars: Starfighter, and he was surprisingly talkative about the upcoming film, even while refusing to describe the film as a prequel or a sequel.
“Well, for one thing, it is different in that it is an all-new non-sequel, non-prequel adventure. It’s new characters, it’s a new timeline. It inherits legacy themes, but it’s really trying to give Star Wars [fans] — and just movie audiences — something fresh, something new. And with a spirit of play and big-hearted adventure with moments of real levity that, frankly, A New Hope had in a revolutionary way.
We’re really trying to sort of take that tone as a North Star every day. My crew, my DP, Claudio Miranda, Gosling is my kind of central collaborator in the lead role. It’s certainly been a dream come true. My 10-year-old self is on set with me every day. In fact, he’s going to catch a flight tonight to go back to the set and keep shooting on Monday. But it’s a huge invigorating opportunity because Lucasfilm has been so encouraging of me doing something new. There’s no pressure to be derivative or limited by an obligation to what came before. There’s just a love of what came before.”
Levy went on to praise his Director of Photography Claudio Miranda.
“I’ll give you two things real quick, beyond his artistry, which is self-evident in everything from Life of Pi to Benjamin Button. Claudio is — I call him the Professor because he loves the nerdy figuring out of prep. He likes to design camera platforms that don’t exist. He likes to think about lenses and format in ways that are innovative. And so the rigor of his innovative thinking is a huge gift to a Star Wars movie that wants to break some new ground visually and be a visceral kinetic ride, which is the other thing he brings. Claudio, in both Top Gun: Maverick and F1 showed this. His sense of how to put people in the action in a visceral way, not just in an observational way, but a subjective and participatory way, in that cockpit, in that driver’s seat. He does it like no one else does it, and I wanted that superpower for Starfighter.”
