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JJ Abrams Says He Almost Turned Down Directing Star Wars: Episode IX

April 10, 2019 | Posted by Jeremy Thomas
Star Wars: The Force Awakens - Millennium Falcon Image Credit: Lucasfilm

JJ Abrams has revealed in a new interview that he nearly turned down the job of directing Star Wars: Episode IX. Abrams spoke with Fast Company and revealed that when Kathleen Kennedy asked him to come on after Colin Trevorrow left the film, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to return to the franchise..

Asked about how it felt to be brought back to direct the film, Abrams said, “I wasn’t supposed to be there. I wasn’t the guy, ya’ know? I was working on some other things, and I had something else that I was assuming would be the next project, if we’d be so lucky. And then Kathy Kennedy called and said, ‘Would you really, seriously, consider coming aboard?’ And once that started, it all happened pretty quickly. The whole thing was a crazy leap of faith. And there was an actual moment when I nearly said, ‘No, I’m not going to do this.’ I was trepidatious to begin with, getting involved, because I love Star Wars so much and felt like it was…It was almost, on a personal level, a dangerous thing to get too close to something that you care that much about.”

He continued, “And yet, with Force Awakens, I feel like we managed to introduce these new characters—for some people, new actors—and continue a story in a way that I thought had heart and humanity and humor and surprise. Though of course I’m aware that there are critics of that movie, it felt to me like we dodged a bullet. Like we got in there, we got to do something. And I left loving Star Wars as much as I did when I got there. Like, somehow, it was on a personal, selfish level something I was really happy to have done. Not just excited about doing but happy to have done. And to ask to have that happen again, I felt a little bit like I was playing with fire. Like, why go back? We managed to make it work. What the hell am I thinking? And there was a moment when I literally said, ‘No,’ and Katie said, ‘You should do this.’ And my first thought was, has she met someone? And then I thought, she’s usually right about stuff. And when she said it, I think that she felt like it was an opportunity to bring to a close this story that we had begun and had continued, of course.”

As far as how much of a response Episode IX will be to The Last Jedi, Abrams said, “I had some gut instincts about where the story would have gone [after The Force Awakens]. But without getting in the weeds on Episode Eight, that was a story that Rian wrote and was telling based on Seven before we met. So he was taking the thing in another direction. So we also had to respond to Episode VIII. So our movie was not just following what we had started, it was following what we had started and then had been advanced by someone else. So there was that, and, finally, it was resolving nine movies.”

Abrams added, “There are some threads of larger ideas and some big picture things that had been conceived decades ago and a lot of ideas that Lawrence Kasdan and I had when we were doing Episode VII, the lack of absolute inevitability, the lack of a complete structure for this thing, given the way it was being run was an enormous challenge.”