Ever since it was officially announced that the title of the next installment in the main “Skywalker saga” would be Star Wars: The Last Jedi, we’ve all been speculating, guessing, and eagerly anticipating more details on the follow-up to J.J. Abrams’ The Force Awakens. Though it’ll probably be another few months (April is rumored) before we get some kind of teaser trailer, the title reveal has made way for a few minor, but intriguing tidbits of information.
Following his little editing bay tease, director Rian Johnson sat down with Empire magazine for an interview, and while he didn’t give anything away plot-wise (obviously), he did share some details on the process of crafting the project – particularly as it relates to getting the characters’ dialogue just right in order to keep audiences invested:
I found myself constantly wanting to push modern idioms into the dialogue, and sometimes that can work, but you have to be very careful. If you go too far you can break that Star Wars spell. The other challenge is the tech talk, which has to be simultaneously complex enough to sound real and conceptually simple enough to follow. The original films were brilliant at that.
Harrison Ford famously told his A New Hope director, “George, you can type this shit, but you can’t say it,” and the dialogue in the ol’ galaxy far, far away has been criticized for being a little on the wooden side in the past. However, most would argue that this is part of what makes Star Wars Star Wars, so it’s encouraging that Johnson is conscious of doing his best to maintain some of the somewhat goofy charm of the originals.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi will be with us on December 15th, 2017.
