J.J. Abrams Promises Star Wars: The Force Awakens is "Delightful" and Says How He's Passing The Torch

"Delightful" is a good word to describe the feeling after watching the original trilogy, and that's the word director J.J. Abrams and writer Lawrence Kasdan focused on when writing Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

"I tried to focus on things that I find inspiring about cinema," Abrams said in a new interview with Wired. "I asked questions like ‘How do we make this movie delightful?' That was really the only requirement Larry and I imposed on each other: The movie needed to be delightful. It was not about explaining everything away, not about introducing a certain number of toys for a corporation, not about trying to appease anyone. This has only ever been about what gets us excited."

And it's getting fans excited too as the trailers have shown how delightful it's going to be. He admitted that when began Super 8 and Star Trek Into Darkness, "I hadn't really solved some fundamental story problems." He didn't feel that way working with The Force Awakens.

"We wanted to tell a story that had its own self-contained beginning, middle, and end but at the same time, like A New Hope, implied a history that preceded it and also hinted at a future to follow," the director said "When Star Wars first came out, it was a film that both allowed the audience to understand a new story but also to infer all sorts of exciting things that might be."

Abrams admits that while lots of the film is set up, it hopefully won't feel like that:

"Working on this new movie has been as much about trying to set up elements of what is beyond what you're seeing as it has been about telling a story that will be satisfying in and of itself," Abrams said. "But it can't feel like a cop-out—like we're just setting things up and not resolving them."

To help with that, Abrams said that Rian Johnson, the director and writer of Star Wars Episode VIII full access to their film and even "asked for a couple of things here and there that he needs for his story."

"What Larry and I did was set up certain key relationships, certain key questions, conflicts. And we knew where certain things were going," he said. "We had meetings with Rian and Ram Bergman, the producer of VIII. They were watching dailies when we were shooting our movie. We wanted them to be part of the process, to make the transition to their film as seamless as possible. I showed Rian an early cut of the movie, because I knew he was doing his rewrite and prepping. And as executive producer of VIII, I need that movie to be really good."

As a long-time Star Wars fan, Abrams knows what's best to include to make The Force Awakens good, and he's been meticulous on the details that they present in the film.

"Star Wars is so boundless in terms of the world, the characters, the conflicts," Abrams said. "When we began working on this film, Larry and I started by making a list of things that we knew held interest for us, the things we wanted to see, the things we felt were important. There's a very real issue with doing this movie: Every detail, whether it was the design of a costume or the music or a set-dressing choice, must be embraced as coming from Star Wars. You're inheriting Star Wars! That's not something you can do lightly. You have to really understand the design choices, because everything is important. At the same time, it's just Star Wars, meaning: It doesn't make it automatically interesting just because it's in that galaxy."

I'm so excited to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens when it comes out in Dec. 17. I've already got tickets for 3 different screenings. You can read more about the fascinating interview in the link below. Also, check out the first TV spot here.

Source: Wired