Easily the most anticipated film of the year if not the whole millennium, J.J. Abrams’ follow-up to George Lucas’s original Star Wars trilogy is set to break all manner of box office records [it is already – Ed.]. Flicks joined the director and various cast members in London for The Force Awakens’ European premiere.
1. Fans are pretty good at keeping secrets but stay off the Internet if you don’t want to be spoiled.
According to J.J. Abrams, we live in a media-saturated world of information overload. “This comes as no surprise as no surprise,” he says. “But while I know that many people feel that they are entitled to know whatever they want to know whenever they want to know it, I’ve been very gratified by people saying things like ‘thank you for not spoiling the movie’ and even telling us to stop with all the commercial and trailers, as they don’t want to see anymore.”
2. Newcomer Daisy Ridley (Rey) got some invaluable advise from old hands like Harrison Ford.
Admitting that she has “no idea what I did, I just tried very hard” to land the role, the London-based 23-year-old, who has previously only had bit parts in TV series like Casualty, was given some useful tips for how to deal with her unexpected success by Han Solo himself. “It wasn’t so much advice but a conversation about anonymity,” she says. “They’ve just lead by example, and it’s been amazing to see people, who were so established and with huge careers behind them, being so kind and generous to everyone.”
3. Breakthrough star John Boyega (Finn) has seen his likeness in some very odd places.
“It’s all very weird to me,” he laughs. “The whole experience for me in terms of all the merchandise and having my face everywhere has been very strange. We recently went to Tokyo and the first thing I saw at a 7-Eleven was my face, as well as Daisy’s face and BB-8. I thought ‘I’ve never been to Tokyo before in my life, so to have my image here, is quite shocking, but it also made me really, really proud.”
4. J.J. Abrams was determined to elevate the position of women in the Star Wars saga.
“From the very beginning of our discussions about the movie, the notion of a woman being at the centre of the story was always something that was very compelling and exciting to me,” he reasons. “And in addition to Leia, who is an incredibly important part of this puzzle, we wanted to have other women and female characters in the story. So we have Lupita Nyong’o playing Maz Kanata, who is almost like the voice of the Force, and Captain Plasma (Gwendoline Christie), who is like the evil side of the Stormtroopers. We also have other female Stormtroopers and female pilots, as we didn’t want it to feel like it wasn’t inclusive.”
5. Lupita Nyong’o on the mysterious Maz Kanata.
“I got a directive of the words that I was allowed to say, so I just stuck to those words,” she says. “They were ‘I play Maz Kanata, she’s a pirate, she’s lived for a while, she has a colorful past and she owns a bar.”
6. Never taking off her helmet, Gwendoline Christie was pleased that gender wasn’t a factor for Captain Plasma.
“The costume was so well designed by Mike Kaplan, who I’ve admired since I saw Blade Runner when I was about twelve-years-old,” she says of the veteran costume designer. “I was really astounded by how extraordinary it was, and I loved the fact that it hadn’t been feminised or sexualised in any way; it was just practical armour. When I first got the costume, it was apparent that here was a woman who was imposing, uncompromising and high-functioning, and obviously, that then informs the way that you move and talk, as that communicates something about the character, especially when you’re encased in armour.”
7. Adam Driver on how the mask maketh the man for Kylo Ren.
“For me, the costume was my first entry point into who he was, as it said a lot about him,” he says. “I got a lot of information off it: First off, it was unpolished and there was this history to the helmet, as it wasn’t clean and it was dinked up from all the stuff that he’d been through before. His light sabre seemed to be something that he’d made himself, it had kind of exploded and didn’t seem like it was very reliable or consistent to me.”
8. Harrison Ford on returning to the iconic role of Han Solo three decades on, and the prospect of someone else picking up his mantle in the upcoming proposed prequel for the Millennium Falcon pilot-turned-resistance member.
“I have actually relished this whole experience in a way that I had not anticipated, and a lot of credit for that has to go to J.J. Abrams and (screenwriter) Lawrence Kasdan,” he says. “As for any movie featuring a young Han Solo, I don’t know what to think about that, but I’m glad that somebody else is going to have the burden of being young. It’s well beyond my understanding and control, and, of course, I want nothing to do with it, but in the nicest possible way as I know it will be well done.”
9. Daisy Ridley on shooting on remote Irish island, Skellig Michael.
Located just off the coast of County Kerry, the UNESCO World Heritage Site required a high level of fitness from Ridley, who reveals that she is part-Irish herself. “It was one of the most amazing places I’ve been to, but it was really stuff as there were many steps,” she says. “People have been like ‘ooh, did you have to walk up those stairs a lot?’ But Colin Anderson, our incredible Steadicam operator, was walking backwards up the stairs with a 100-pound camera.”
10. It was all about the birds for J.J. Abrams
“We could only bring 45 crew members and no props,” he says of Skellig Michael. “I couldn’t believe that they let us shoot there, as it was a bit like shooting right on Stonehenge. It was really crazy and so gorgeous, and then they told us that a lot of people had fallen off and died there, so you’d think ‘yeah, it’s beautiful but it’s perilous as well.’ We shot there for three days and the weirdest thing but that when we got there on the first day, there were about ten million puffins. But when we went back the next day, they’d all gone, as we’d got there on their last day before they fly away, so there were literally no puffins. It was really strange as the shot where Rey is walking up, and there’s all these birds behind her, those were all in camera, as there wasn’t any CGI at all.”
