Star Wars director J.J. Abrams reflects on the importance of planning

The Star Wars sequel trilogy is fading in the rearview mirror, but some fans are still debating where exactly it…went wrong (unless you love it, in which case live your truth). J.J. Abrams 2015 movie The Force Awakens looked to get things started a pretty good foot, give or take some critiques about nostalgia porn, but the follow-up movies — Rian Johnson’s 2017 film The Last Jedi and Abrams’ 2019 conclusion The Rise of Skywalker — were both intensely divisive.

From where I was sitting, it had to do with a lack of cohesion among the pictures. You see, Lucasfilm didn’t go into the sequel trilogy with a plan: the idea was that Abrams would make the first movie, Johnson would build on what he did, and then Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow would wrap things up. I can see how that might work in the abstract, but it practice it was kind of a mess, with each movie tugging the story in different directions. For instance, The Force Awakens hinted that Rey’s absent parents were people of some significance, then The Last Jedi famously revealed that they were “no one,” and then The Rise of Skywalker jerked it back and revealed that while Rey’s immediate parents weren’t particularly important, she was the granddaughter of none other than Emperor Palpatine. The trilogy is full of stuff like that, and it just didn’t quite come together.

Recently, Collider asked Abrams asked Abrams how he felt about this creative hand-off with the benefit of hindsight. “I’ve been involved in a number of projects that have been – in most cases, series – that have ideas that begin the thing where you feel like you know where it’s gonna go, and sometimes it’s an actor who comes in, other times it’s a relationship that as-written doesn’t quite work, and things that you think are gonna just be so well-received just crash and burn and other things that you think like, ‘Oh that’s a small moment’ or ‘That’s a one-episode character’ suddenly become a hugely important part of the story,” the director said. “I feel like what I’ve learned as a lesson a few times now, and it’s something that especially in this pandemic year working with writers [has become clear], the lesson is that you have to plan things as best you can, and you always need to be able to respond to the unexpected. And the unexpected can come in all sorts of forms, and I do think that there’s nothing more important than knowing where you’re going.”

J.J. Abrams learned “the hard way” how important it is to plan stories ahead of time

Abrams has involved been involved in a lot of TV shows over the years, including Lost, which also had a controversial ending. “There are projects that I’ve worked on where we had some ideas but we hadn’t worked through them enough, sometimes we had some ideas but then we weren’t allowed to do them the way we wanted to,” he continued. “I’ve had all sorts of situations where you plan things in a certain way and you suddenly find yourself doing something that’s 180 degrees different, and then sometimes it works really well and you feel like, ‘Wow that really came together,’ and other times you think, ‘Oh my God I can’t believe this is where we are,’ and sometimes when it’s not working out it’s because it’s what you planned, and other times when it’s not working out it’s because you didn’t [have a plan].”

But at the end of the day, Abrams thinks having a plan is pretty important:

"You just never really know, but having a plan I have learned – in some cases the hard way – is the most critical thing, because otherwise you don’t know what you’re setting up. You don’t know what to emphasize. Because if you don’t know the inevitable of the story, you’re just as good as your last sequence or effect or joke or whatever, but you want to be leading to something inevitable."

I’m thinking his experience on Star Wars is part of what he means by learning “the hard way” about the importance of planning.

Abrams has moved on from Star Wars, and Disney seems to have moved on from the sequel trilogy. There’s still plenty of Star Wars content to entertain the fans, though, and lots of unexplored depths to plumb:

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