If there’s one word you can use to describe Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it would be magical. It was a triumphant return to top form for the franchise, with director JJ Abrams blending nostalgia and throwbacks seamlessly with the new, fascinating characters. But it seems that magic took a lot of work, and some bad luck on Harrison Ford’s part.
While speaking at the Tribeca Film Festival – and posted in IGN (via Squareeyed) – Abrams has opened up about how the chemistry just wasn’t there between Rey and Finn when production began.
In fact the first scene he shot with Daisy Ridley and John Boyega, aboard the Millennium Falcon, seemed very far from the magic that fans finally saw. Oh dear.
“When I was on the set of the Millennium Falcon and we started to do work with Rey and Finn, the first time we did it, it didn’t work at all,” he recalls.
“It was much more contentious. I didn’t direct it right.”
But luckily, help was on hand, from a silver lining; “When Harrison Ford got injured – which was a very scary day – we ended up having a few weeks off, and it was during that time that I really got to look at what we had done and rewrite quite a bit of that relationship.”
Han Solo to the rescue it seems.
Continuing, Abrams says “when we came back to work again, we actually just reshot from the ground up, those scenes. It was an amazingly helpful thing to get these two characters to where they needed to be.”
And it paid off in the best way, as the connection between the two is one of the strongest elements in the film, and will no doubt be one of the foundations that the next film is based upon.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is out now on DVD and Blu-ray.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story will land in cinemas on the 14th December.
Marc
Marc is a self-confessed nerd. Ever since seeing Star Wars for the first time around 1979 he’s been an unapologetic fan of the Wars and still believes, with Clone Wars and now Underworld, we are yet to see the best Star Wars. He’s a dad of two who now doesn’t have the time (or money) to collect the amount of toys, comics, movies and books he once did, much to the relief of his long-suffering wife. In the real world he’s a graphic designer. He started Following the Nerd because he was tired of searching a million sites every day for all the best news that he loves and decided to create one place where you can go to get the whole lot. Secretly he longs to be sitting in the cockpit of his YT-1300 Corellian Transport ship with his co-pilot Chewie, roaming the universe, waiting for his next big adventure, but feels just at home watching cartoons with his kids….
Nerd Comments