‘The Last Jedi’ Director Rian Johnson Talks Fan Backlash, Rey’s Origins & More

Rian Johnson‘s ‘Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi‘ is probably the most divisive movie of 2017. Not only did it polarize fans, but it also has slightly underperformed (for a ‘Star Wars‘ movie that is) at the box office, especially internationally. Rather than go down the same path as something like ‘The Force Awakens‘, Johnson decided to take ‘The Last Jedi‘ in a series of unexpected directions. People who were looking for answers to the many questions raised in episode 7 were probably disappointed, but Johnson has stuck to his guns, even going as far as challenging people’s complaints in his own witty way.

Since the film’s release, Johnson has been very responsive to fans as a whole, whether they’ve loved or hated the film. In a recent interview as a guest on the /Filmcast, Johnson addressed the fan backlash that ensued after the ‘The Last Jedi‘s release. The night that the film came out, Johnson had apparently been out promoting ‘The Last Jedi‘ when he saw the initial response on Twitter. Being in a bubble of sorts, Johnson had no way to contextualize the response in terms of the bigger picture:

The crazy thing is, I had no perspective on these tweets. I had no perspective in terms of how big a group of people this was, even what they were upset about specifically. Over the next few weeks, I was able to contextualize it and feel much better about it. But at the time, I thought, ‘Oh my god, does everybody hate this? Did I totally mess up, was I wrong?’ And I had a very dark hour of the soul…because I had no context for this.”

So yeah, it seems that ‘The Last Jedi’ director wasn’t quite sure what to make of the many criticisms that the film has received. Perhaps the most polarizing decision that was made by the director was that of key’s parentage in the film. When asked about how Johnson came to the final decision that he did, the director responded:

“I honestly listed everything I could think of, even awful possibilities where I said, ‘This is not what we’re going to do.’ I mean the less silly one was, ‘Is she a clone?’ Anything that’s a theory on Reddit now I guarantee was listed on that document. The silliest one was, ‘Is she a robot?’ Okay, we’ve seen a biomechanical realistic flesh hand on Luke, could the technology have advanced significantly in the 30 years, and then I just started laughing. Look forward to the ‘Rey was almost a robot headlines.’”

“The question boils down to ‘what is the hardest thing she could hear?’ It’s really similar to the ‘I am your father’ scene, but with the inverse answer. The ‘I am your father’ scene takes what could have been a very simple bad guy and suddenly turns him into something much more complicated. To do that with Rey, to give the audience and Rey that feeling of ‘Oh no,’ it had to be the opposite of that.”

Despite what you may think about the way that he decided to handle it, Johnson kind of has a point. It should be noted that Johnson was writing the script for the film before ‘The Force Awakens‘ was even completed, but he did see dailies of that film apparently. In essence, Johnson was stuck with the task of answering questions that he had had no context for. It’s interesting, because although part of me resents his sentiment here, it also makes total sense, considering he didn’t have much context to work with when crafting the story. In addition to all of this, the director recalled his initial pitch to Lucasfilm head honcho Kathleen Kennedy for ‘The Last Jedi‘, saying that:

“When I got the job, and especially when it broke on the internet and everyone started talking about it and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I guess I’m actually doing this,’ it was really scary. But then, when I sat down to write, it was actually the most fun I’ve ever had writing. I guess maybe because it was a blank page, but I had a starting point [with The Force Awakens]. After Kathy asked me if I’d be interested in it, we had a series of conversations, and basically my pitch was the first movie is like the introduction, the second movie is training. And by ‘training,’ I mean we take each of these characters and we really test their mettle. So I said that would be my approach to it, it’s a very character-based approach where we just start with each one of these characters we care about and figure out what the hardest next step is for each of them.

So having that trailhead to go from, it was also nice because it gives you a direction as opposed to just having a big cloud of childhood fantasies, of ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to see the Falcon do this or that?’ that you could get lost in, it wasn’t like that…once I actually started doing the work, I found that it felt really comfortable. And then all the childhood fantasy stuff is just fuel for the fire.”

It’s interesting, because as much as people have derided ‘The Last Jedi‘ for straying from established lore, Johnson is pretty much a super-fan. I like the idea of Johnson trying to distill this “cloud of childhood fantasies”. Whether you agree if he was successful in the respect is a different argument, but I think that there’s something to be said for the moments where Johnson really tried to push the envelope as far as what we have seen thus far in the ‘Star Wars‘ universe. Toward the end of the interview,Johnson addressed one of the more stunning moments from the film–the “Holdo maneuver“–came to fruition, along with it’s implications for the ‘Star Wars‘ Universe as a whole:

“First of all, has this been done before, period? I’ve got to reserve the right for [Story Group member] Pablo [Hidalgo] to build it back into canon, if he’s like, ‘Yeah, this is a thing and they outlawed it.’ I think there’s various ways you can go with it. But it’s not like it was the plan to do this. It’s a spur of the moment thing. It’s this idea that she gets and she sits down and fucking does, and it obviously takes everybody completely by surprise. It takes Hux by surprise. The fact that Hux doesn’t see it coming means it’s probably not a standard military maneuver. I think it was something that Holdo (laughs) pulled out of her butt in the moment.”

“The early idea I had was – and I storyboarded it all out – I had the silence thing as an idea from very early on. The notion of ‘how do you communicate the bigness of this, and the idea that this was all happening in a nanosecond?’ The notion that this event is out of time in a weird way, and communicate the bigness beyond being just a big explosion.”

“So I had the silence thing and I boarded it out, and had the idea that it was going to be silent when we’re up close seeing all the destruction, and then we’ll cut back to the massive wide shot and only then would the sound catch up with you and you hear the big ‘boom.’ But the whole thing honestly didn’t click until our amazing wizards at ILM came upon the idea of that exposure shift. We had versions of it before that with just regularly lit ships, with streaks of white going through them, and it was nowhere near as impactful. It was when they showed this version of it to me that had this exposure shift, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, that makes it all kind of click.’”

‘Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi‘ is still currently in theaters, and a home video announcement should be made shortly. Until then, what are your thoughts on ‘The Last Jedi‘? Did you love it? Or did you hate it?