'The Last Jedi' creative process, much like the movie itself, meant ditching old ideas
SPOILERS AHEAD. If you haven't seen Star Wars: The Last Jedi yet, turn back now or risk spoiling yourself on some big surprises.
Love it or hate it, Star Wars: The Last Jedi feels distinctly like the work of its auteur filmmaker, Rian Johnson.
In one of the movie's last and most stirring shots, a dying Luke Skywalker gazes out at the twin sunset on Ahch-To. The visual, coupled with a familiar John Williams melody playing behind it, tugs us back to that defining moment from the Original Trilogy when a much younger Luke watched Tatooine's twin suns set.
Then, the future laid before Luke seemed so vast and full of possibility. And now, here in The Last Jedi, that similarly framed scene serves as a recollection. The unknown future has come and gone, and all that's left is the memories.
The twin sunset shot on Ahch-To is an intentional function of the script, but the man who captured it -- longtime Johnson collaborator Steve Yedlin -- didn't approach it as an homage. Really, that moment of Luke drawing in his last breaths speaks to the unique relationship the two men have developed over the years, between director and cinematographer.
"All the shot and lighting design was really us just trying to tell that story in the most visually evocative way we knew how to do, and not tie our hands trying to emulate -- or not emulate -- the older movies," Yedlin said during a recent interview.
Looking back over Johnson's filmography at examples like Brick or Looper -- both of which Yedlin worked on as well -- and holding them up next to The Last Jedi, a familiar pattern takes shape. Johnson, and Yedlin along with him, treasure lingering takes, wide shots, and kinetic interactions that lean on the script and screen in tandem in the telling of a story.
"Rian loves the shots to be so dynamic and evocative, but they're never flashy for flashy's sake."
"Rian loves the shots to be so dynamic and evocative, but they're never flashy for flashy's sake," Yedlin explained. "It's not meant to call attention away from the narrative; it's meant to be where the visuals and the narrative aren't really separate from each other."
If there's any stylistic connection to the Original Trilogy in The Last Jedi, it's that. When George Lucas created the first three Star Wars films, his film nerd background led him to draw on a diverse array of sources for inspiration, from Akira Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress to the sci-fi camp of Flash Gordon. But he didn't copy anything.
Star Wars was and is a space fairy tale built according to a singular creative vision. Lucas was conscious of what inspired him, but never to the point of overt acknowledgment. Johnson and Yedlin approached The Last Jedi with a similar mindset: Let's honor the Star Wars story but make this movie uniquely our own.
"When you get down to the authorship of the individual shots and scenes, I don't know if we're actually that similar to the originals," Yedlin said. "I think it's more of that larger philosophy that really rhymes with the Original Trilogy."
Luke's final scene, then, is "a great example of why Rian's visuals and his narrative are not two separate things," Yedlin added.
"They really are intertwined, and of course that's supposed to be evocative of that scene [on Tatooine]. But it's also really a character moment; it's not just a callback that's fun for the fans to see something that's similar to the original movie. It's a thematic character thing in that moment."
The construction of that scene -- and, really, the movie as a whole -- wasn't the product of a long pre-production conversation about creative philosophy and marrying Johnson's sensibilities with some notion of what a Star Wars is supposed to look or feel like.
It was more organic than that. Johnson and Yedlin are longtime collaborators; once they got past the Star Wars of it all, they set out to make a movie, and make it their way.
"In six months of prep, we'd have one or two conversations about that, and then we'd kind of jump into the details of how we'd do specific scenes," Yedlin said. "We just wanted this to be the most exciting Star Wars movie to us."
Approaching The Last Jedi from that perspective allowed them to honestly consider questions like: "What's a visually exciting way to tell this story?" In constructing the look of the film, the two worked to avoid locking themselves into a decision-making process that would be guided by a need to in some way honor the earlier movies.
"That kind of just ties your hands, and it creates a stodginess where you're guessing what somebody else would have done," Yedlin explained.
"In reality, what [George Lucas] was doing was making a personal, unique film and breaking ground; [he wasn't] paying homage to an older movie. So it was really: How do we design the best version of a Rian Star Wars?"
Adam Rosenberg is a Senior Games Reporter for Mashable, where he plays all the games. Every single one. From AAA blockbusters to indie darlings to mobile favorites and browser-based oddities, he consumes as much as he can, whenever he can.Adam brings more than a decade of experience working in the space to the Mashable Games team. He previously headed up all games coverage at Digital Trends, and prior to that was a long-time, full-time freelancer, writing for a diverse lineup of outlets that includes Rolling Stone, MTV, G4, Joystiq, IGN, Official Xbox Magazine, EGM, 1UP, UGO and others.Born and raised in the beautiful suburbs of New York, Adam has spent his life in and around the city. He's a New York University graduate with a double major in Journalism and Cinema Studios. He's also a certified audio engineer. Currently, Adam resides in Crown Heights with his dog and his partner's two cats. He's a lover of fine food, adorable animals, video games, all things geeky and shiny gadgets.
