After helping to usher in a new era of Star Wars in 2015 as the director of The Force Awakens, J.J. Abrams will close out the sequel trilogy -- and the Skywalker Saga -- next week with The Rise of Skywalker. The experience proved difficult at times, but the filmmaker said the right cast and story helped him craft a finale he's proud of.
"The pressure has shifted," Abrams told journalists as a recent press event, comparing the experiences of The Force Awakens and The Rise of Skywalker. "We didn't know at the beginning of The Force Awakens exactly what it would look like to have Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver and Oscar Issac and John Boyega. What would that cast be like? On the first day of The Rise of Skywalker, we sort of knew those things. We knew those things were working. What we didn't know was everything else."
Although he's accustomed to high expectations, Abrams admitted The Rise of Skywalker was a different beast. "This isn't just wrapping up one film or three films, it's wrapping up nine," he said, "so the responsibility was significant, and the movie... this is a pretty big picture. The scale of the movie is enormous. And we knew none of that would work if you didn't care deeply and track with the people. So the most important thing, the people, we knew we were good with. We knew we had this incredible cast, who have gone above and beyond anyone's expectations, are truly spectacularly in the film."
Many of the other Disney movies released in 2019 relied on source material -- whether that meant a comic or a fairy tale or even an earlier version of the same movie -- to pull from when crafting their stories. However, this wasn't the case for The Rise of Skywalker, which presented a challenge because Abrams and his co-writer, Chris Terrio had to come up with the narrative from scratch.
Luckily, Abrams said, "Because we'd worked on The Force Awakens, [Lawrence Kasdan, Michelle Rejwan, Kathleen Kennedy and I had] talked about things back in the day, so this was picking up where we left off. And the fact is that what [director] Rian Johnson did in The Last Jedi set up a lot of things that ended up being wonderful for this story.
"One of the things was that the cast was separated, the cast wasn't together for almost the entire movie. So this got to be the first time the cast [came together again]. When Chris and I got together, we wanted to tell a story of a group adventure. There were some specific things we were drawn to immediately, and there are just some things that... what do we desperately want to see? What feels right?"
Even beyond figuring out the script, there were other roadblocks for Abrams, who explained, "As the director, there are the pressures of all the obvious things: fan expectations and studios and all those practical and logistical issues as well... that weren't brought to set. On the set we can have a sort of buoyancy, a sense of feeling spry. While it was never quite an indie on the set of this movie, we needed to keep the thing as human as possible."
Abrams sees the focus on people coming together as the most important aspect of the entire film. He noted, "To tell a story that is, of course, a giant spectacle with a blockbuster wrapping, the thing that mattered to me more than the amazing effects -- which I'd say are the best work [visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic] has ever done, all the departments going beyond expectations -- the thing that matters the most in the film is the people who are sitting here and what you're watching and the eyes of the characters and the heart of the characters.
"For me, rather than give away themes that Chris and I talked about doing from the beginning and what the specifics were... it's really about hope and it's about coming back to a sense of possibility, about unity. If Star Wars can't do that for us, I don't know what can."
"I'm still so grateful for that call from [Kathleen Kennedy]. The truth is that there's the movie that you know you're presenting to the world and then there's the thing that you're doing, not necessarily secretively, but meaningfully." Abrams went on to say, "We live in a crazy world in a crazy time. Star Wars for me was about hope and it was about community. It was about the underdog and bringing people together. To see all oddballs represented and the most unlikely of people in the most unlikely of places, and the family you make being really your family."
Directed and co-written by J.J. Abrams, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker stars Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Lupita Nyong’o, Domhnall Gleeson, Kelly Marie Tran, Joonas Suotamo, Billie Lourd, Keri Russell, Anthony Daniels, Mark Hamill, Billy Dee Williams and Carrie Fisher, with Naomi Ackie and Richard E. Grant. The film arrives on Dec. 20.