Interview (Written): Michael Arndt, J.J. Abrams, and Lawrence Kasdan

I’ve read and watched several Star Wars: The Force Awakens interviews and Q&A’s with J.J. Abrams and Lawrence, but in fact they received a co-writing credit with Michael Arndt who was the first person to take a crack at the script. So in this WGA interview, I’m just going to feature Arndt’s comments.

I want to go back to the beginning, the earliest stages of this…So the decision is made to create new Star Wars films. And, Michael, you were there to break the story. You, Simon Kinberg, you went up to the Lucasfilm archives, right, and began thinking about this?

Michael Arndt: Yeah, it was I think May 2012, and I was just sort of doing nothing. I was back in New York and trying to figure out what I was going to do next. I just finished working on The Hunger Games, and I was like, “Okay, like no more big Hollywood franchises. I’m going to go back and do my own original stuff.” And then [Kathleen Kennedy] called me up and the initial thing was she wanted me to write VII, VIII, and IX together, and I said, “There’s no way I can do that because it’s just too crazy and daunting.” And then the story that she pitched me was she just said it’s an origin story of a female Jedi. And I was like, “I’m in. I can’t say no to that. I have to do it.” I went to the ranch and I met with George and we spent a lot of time talking about samurai movies basically. I passed that test, you know? I had spent five years at Pixar and became a big believer in writers helping each other out, so Kathy was just brilliant in having Larry come onboard, having Simon Kinberg come onboard, and have all of us get together and sit down and just start kicking around ideas about what we wanted Star Wars to be. So that was the beginning of it.

Do you begin with characters? Or do you start by saying, “What is the world we’re in and then supply the people who live in it?”

Michael Arndt: It was all of a piece. Actually the thing that we talked about — and this happened when J.J. came onboard also — was we went back to feelings. Like, “How did it make us feel?” You know? Like, joy, euphoria, but a sort of awe and myth. You know, we’re creating a modern myth. Even before we talked about character and story, we were talking about the quality of…I mean, we had a whiteboard, and I remember we started writing down adjectives of what it meant, what a Star Wars film meant. And so we’re writing “mythic but fun.” I remember that was one of the first things we said was, “You know, it has to be fun.” So even before characters or anything else, it was really trying to define what the Star Wars feeling was.

For more, click More, but be warned: There’s a big spoiler in Arndt’s remaining comments.

The rest of Arndt’s comments from the interview:

Before I came here tonight, I sent out a little tweet and said, “Hey, I’m going to be talking to these guys. Any questions?” And nobody had any. It was really weird. Number one question I got was if there was any insight you could give about R2’s awakening and at the end of the film.

Michael Arndt: The whole movie is a series of character introductions, and you want all your character introductions to be A+. You want to give each person their moment when they come. Even the Millennium Falcon, that was Bryan Burk’s idea that they’re running to get a ship, it blows up, and so you turn and there’s the backup. It turns out to be the Millennium Falcon. I remember I had initially written R2 and C-3PO showing up together, and Larry very intelligently said, “Well, maybe you want to meet them separately from each other.” And of course I’m like, “No, no, no, Larry, you don’t get it at all.” But then you go, “Oh, of course, of course.” You want to have each to go where are you going to meet them and what feels logical? And, I mean, it’s asking the question about what happened to Luke. I’ll just say very quickly that very early on I tried writing versions of the movie where the girl is at home, her home gets destroyed, she goes on the road, she meets Luke, and then she goes and she kicks the bad guy’s ass. It just never worked. I struggled with this. This was back in 2012. It just felt like every time Luke came in and entered the movie, he just took it over. Suddenly, you didn’t care about your main character anymore because like, “Oh fuck, Luke Skywalker’s here. I want to see what he’s going to do.” This was like a huge thing. I feel so bad for J.J. because it was like, “The good news is you get to make a Star Wars movie, but the bad news is…” We had long conversations about this, and J.J. so much wanted to have Luke Skywalker in his movie. But to finally say, again, any time Luke showed up, it suddenly became his movie. So you had to push it to the very end. And once you made that decision, then you go back to R2 and you go, “What does that mean for R2?” It was just this thing that he hasn’t been the same since Master Luke left. I mean, we had a gazillion scenarios about plugging into the information base on the Death Star, and that’s how he was able to get the full map and where the, all the Jedi temples were and stuff like that.

For the rest of the interview, go here.