With Disney’s D23 event hitting and no new footage being shown for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the marketing side of the film is keeping things flowing for fans with new teases but not revealing too much. The latest comes from a piece via Entertainment Weekly where a number of new images have debuted as well as some neat things from Abrams and Kennedy about the project as a whole and some details that focus on Kylo Ren.
While Abrams declined initially to take on the job, Kathleen Kennedy ended up circling back to him after talking with some others and found the way to get him hooked for the job.
“In the context of talking about story and laying out what we were thinking, I said one thing to him,” Kennedy recalls. “‘Who is Luke Skywalker?’” Abrams, who’s 49 now but was only 11 when the original Star Wars debuted in 1977, decided he needed to know the answer, even if he had to devise it himself. “He said, ‘Oh my God, I just got the chills. I’m in,’” Kennedy says. “I mean, it really was almost that quickly.”
And Abrams talks about how things were when they started as to what was coming after his film:
“[They] had just been hypothesizing and throwing out a bunch of what-ifs, but there was no story in place. It was, without doubt, a formidable assignment. There were so many options and so many paths that could be taken. Even when we were in debate — and sometimes it was frustrating and heated — it was always thrilling, because it seemed almost everywhere you looked there was something potentially extraordinary, which felt very much like the DNA of Star Wars itself.”
Abrams also talks about the connections to the past, notably with Kylo Rens’ helmet, saying “The movie explains the origins of the mask and where it’s from, but the design was meant to be a nod to the Vader mask. Ren is well aware of what’s come before, and that’s very much a part of the story of the film.”
The impression is also that Ren is not within the larger framework of any organization but rather someone on the outside, which is a bit more traditional from the old Expanded Universe material. “The lightsaber is something that he built himself, and is as dangerous and as fierce and as ragged as the character.”
Check out the new images below.
Directed by J.J. Abrams, the first film stars Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, Kenny Baker, John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, Lupita Nyong’o, Gwendoline Christie and Max von Sydow. It’s set to debut on December 18th, 2015.
Plot concept: Star Wars: Episode VII is set about 30 years after the events of Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi, and will star a trio of new young leads along with some very familiar faces.
The long tease continues.
This is foreplay I can most definitely handle.
Not surprising that we’re only being drip-fed little bits of information here and there. Just makes the anticipation that much stronger.