JJ Abrams Reveals His Favorite Star Wars Prequel Trilogy Scene, How He Laughed When He Read Supreme Leader Snoke’s Fate in The Last Jedi

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Star Wars filmmaker JJ Abrams shared his thoughts on what his favorite scene was from the controversial, often maligned, Prequel Trilogy for the franchise. According to Abrams, his favorite scene was the one featuring Sheev Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) speaking to Anaking Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) while watching the opera.

In the scene, Palpatine offers Anakin a tale about Darth Plagueis, luring the young Jedi Knight further to the Dark Side of the Force. Abrams commented, “There’s just something about that scene. There’s just two people sitting there. It’s visually interesting. But I just think Ian’s performance in it is spectacular.”

After interviewer Dalton Ross cited the scene in The Phantom Menace where Darth Maul was split in half, Abrams noted that while he thought the scene was “amazing,” he was disappointed with how heavily Maul was hyped as a character but was then killed off before he could really be developed. Abrams stated, “It was over too quickly.”

Darth Maul did turn out to survive, appearing later in The Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels, and the live-action SOLO, which Abrams acknowledged. That said, Maul’s character in the spinoff shows seems far removed from the more stoic and terse character in Episode I.

Later during the interview, Abrams was asked about his reaction to Rian Johnson’s script for The Last Jedi, which surprisingly kills off the villain Supreme Leader Snoke, who appeared to be set up as the big bad of the new trilogy by Abrams in The Force Awakens. JJ Abrams diplomatically stated, “When I read his first draft, it made me laugh, because I saw that was his take and his voice. I got to watch cuts of the movie as he was working on it, as an audience member. And I appreciated the choices he made as a filmmaker that would probably be very different from the choices that I would have made. Just as he would have made different choices if he had made Episode VII.”

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, directed by J.J. Abrams, opens in theaters on December 20.