Much of the future of “Star Wars” past December’s ‘Rise of Skywalker’ is a mystery. We know that Disney+ has a couple of series on top, and we know that the film series is taking a few years off to recalibrate before launching into a new trilogy from the filmmaking duo of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. And as Rian Johnson points out in a new interview, he’s still hard at work on his new “Star Wars” film project, and the “unknown” aspect of it is what is most appealing.
Speaking to The Observer, while promoting his upcoming film “Knives Out,” Johnson shed some light on his forthcoming series of films that he’s developing for the “Star Wars” universe. And by “shed some light,” what I really mean is that he says nothing about the plot, but teases that his films will something completely different than what we’ve seen with the Skywalker Saga.
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“I think that the fun and challenging part of [the new ‘Star Wars’ project] is to dive in, figure out what’s exciting and then figure out what it’s going to be,” he said. “We’re doing something that steps beyond the legacy characters. What does that look like? To me, the blue sky element of it is what was most striking about it.”
He continued, “I know the way that I’m coming at it and what’s fun about it for everyone in George Lucas’ films is figuring out, ‘what’s the next step?’ It really makes you think and figure out what the essence of ‘Star Wars’ is for me and what that will look like moving forward.”
It’s been speculated that the Benioff and Weiss films will be focused on the era of “Star Wars” made famous in ‘Knights of the Old Republic,’ but whatever Johnson has up his sleeve is still unknown and obviously not connected to anything in the latest trilogy of films. Obviously, there’s a lot of apprehension on the part of “Star Wars” fans when the name Rian Johnson is brought up, considering how polarizing ‘The Last Jedi’ is, but perhaps, giving the filmmaker free reign to do whatever he can think up is just the type of angle he needs to do his best work.
Clearly, if you can say anything about Johnson’s contribution to “Star Wars,” thus far, it’s that the director has his own vision for the franchise and it’s not something we’ve really seen before.