With Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery finally revealing its secrets on Netflix today (read our ★★★★★ review here), while doing the press-rounds director Rian Johnson has been speaking about another of his high-profile sequels.
It has been over five-years since Star Wars: The Last Jedi became the spark that lit the flame on the franchise, and the discourse still rumbles on. Johnson took part in a career retrospective with GQ in which he spoke about his approach to the characters, and also addressed the “slightly goofy humour” of his divisive chapter in the Skywalker saga.
Using the much-derided scene in which General Hux (Domnhall Gleeson) and Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) are having a conversation over the intercom as a launch-pad for the discussion, Johnson told GQ that “For me, everything in the movie is Star Wars, and everything in the movie I can trace back to deeply, in a deep way, what ‘Star Wars’ is for me. Everyone has a different take. I know there are Star Wars fans who somehow think that Star Wars was a serious thing, like the Batman movies or something. I was so young that when I watched Empire Strikes Back, it had this deep, profound impact on me, because it was terrifying, because I was just young enough to not experience it as watching a Star Wars movie, but to have it feel like too real.”
Johnson continued “Anyone who thinks that slightly goofy humour does not have a place in the Star Wars universe, I don’t know if they’ve seen Return of The Jedi, but there’s literally a scene where Han Solo is like a cartoon, tied up to a pole and a torch goes by him and he tries to blow it out repeatedly. The slightly self-aware element of gleeful humour is something that is part and parcel to Star Wars.”
You can watch the full chat in the player below, in which Johnson also talks about another point of contention some fans had with The Last Jedi, and that’s the way in which he dealt with the established characters in the Star Wars galaxy. Johnson says that he “definitely didn’t approach the thing as a meta exercise, because I think first and foremost it has to be an honest expression of what the characters are actually going through,” continuing to say “It’s not very interesting to just think in the meta-way about Star Wars“.
Following the release of The Last Jedi in 2017 it was announced that Rian Johnson had been tasked with writing his own Star Wars trilogy, but that appears to be floating in pre-production limbo, with Kathleen Kennedy revealing earlier this year that it was “on the back-burner”.
Let us know whether you’ve reappraised The Last Jedi in the intervening years and what you think of Johnson’s comments by heading to our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
Star Wars: The Last Jedi sees Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), Carrie Fisher (Leia Organa), Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), Daisy Ridley (Rey), John Boyega (Finn), Oscar Isaac (Poe Dameron), Lupita Nyong’o (Maz Kanata), Domhnall Gleeson (General Hux), Anthony Daniels (C-3PO), Gwendoline Christie (Captain Phasma), Billie Lourd (Lieutenant Connix), Andy Serkis (Supreme Leader Snoke), Peter Mayhew and Joonas Suotamo (Chewbacca), Tim Rose (Admiral Ackbar), Mike Quinn (Nien Nunb) and Warwick Davis joined by new additions Jimmy Vee (Pan) as R2-D2, Kelly Marie Tran (Ladies Like Us) as Rose, Benicio Del Toro (Guardians of the Galaxy) as DJ and Laura Dern (Jurassic Park) as Vice-Admiral Holdo.
