Okay, so we’re not gonna get that Han Solo funeral (except in book form), but that doesn’t mean there’s a whole lot more to discover in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” “Extensive” deleted scenes have been teased for a while now, and Rian Johnson has pulled the curtain back a little more about what you can expect on the upcoming home video/digital release.
Speaking with Collider, the director revealed there’s a whole lot of stuff from the cutting room floor that you’ll get to see, and he goes into details about some of the sequences fans will get. And in case of some of them, Johnson had to kill his darlings.
“We have a lot of deleted scenes. We have deleted sequences. There are two big sequences that are really the kind of hero pieces of it. One is a whole other big thing between Rey and Luke on the island that involves the Caretaker creatures. You see this village where the Caretakers–the Nun Fish creatures–live, and it’s a sequence that I always really loved. It’s a really beautiful sequence,” he explained. “It’s one of those things where … and this always happens in the edit, it’s like suddenly you can see through the Matrix and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, that big sequence that I love so much and I can’t imagine the movie without, if we lift it out and put these two things together, it plays in a slightly different way but it plays better.’ And you just kind of have that, ‘sigh shit,’ and you hit delete. You don’t think about all the stuff we built on set to get the shots, you don’t think about all the work the actors and the crew did, you just hit one button and it’s gone and the movie’s better … It’s three, four minutes.”
“There’s another sequence where Rose, and Finn, and DJ are sneaking through the Mega Destroyer, which is just another really fun, funny sequence, I think. That’s another four minutes, or something,” Johnson added. “But then there’s a lot of really substantial little scenes. There are scenes with Finn that ended up getting stripped away, kind of his motivation for going out to look for Rey. There’s a lot of stuff that I really love that I was really happy we were able to get back in there … There’s more than 20 [minutes] in there.”
So, will you ever get a version of “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” will all that deleted material inserted back into the picture? Fans might do it, but Johnson won’t. “The final cut of the movie is the best cut of the movie that we could come up with. Everything that was taken out, even the stuff that I love so much, was taken out for a reason at the end of the day,” he stated.
If for some reason you still haven’t seen “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” it’s still in cinemas. No word yet on when you’ll be able to watch it at home, but it’ll likely be sometime this spring.
