Cover Story: Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Definitive Preview. I. “We’re Going Back?”The first trip to Skellig Michael was wondrous: an hour- long boat ride to a craggy, green island off the coast of Ireland’s County Kerry, and then a hike up hundreds of stone steps to a scenic cliff where, a thousand years earlier, medieval Christian monks had paced and prayed. This is where Mark Hamill reprised his role as Luke Skywalker for the first time since 1. Daisy Ridley, whose character, Rey, was the protagonist of The Force Awakens, J. J. Abrams’s resumption of George Lucas’s Star Wars movie saga. The opening sentence of the film’s scrolling- text “crawl,” a hallmark of the series, was “Luke Skywalker has vanished.” Atop Skellig Michael, at the picture’s very end, after an arduous journey by Rey, came the big payoff: a cloaked, solitary figure unhooding himself to reveal an older, bearded Luke, who wordlessly, inscrutably regarded the tremulous Rey as she presented to him the lightsaber he had lost (along with his right hand) in a long- ago duel with Darth Vader, his father turned adversary. It was movie magic: a scene that, though filmed in 2. The second trip to Skellig Michael? Maybe less of a thrill for an aging Jedi.
Contrary to what one might have reasonably expected, that Abrams would have kept rolling in ’1. Luke and Rey in order to get a jump on the saga’s next installment—especially given that Skellig Michael is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with access limited to the summer months, and only when the weather is cooperative—once Hamill and Ridley had nailed their epic staredown, that was a wrap. It fell to Abrams’s successor, Rian Johnson, the director of The Last Jedi, the eighth movie in the saga, which opens this December, to painstakingly re- stage the clifftop scene, with the two actors retaking their places more than a year later. Star Wars: Episode VIII The Last Jedi, marketed as Star Wars: The Last Jedi, is the upcoming. The official PlayStation®Store - Buy the latest PlayStation® games, movies and TV shows for your PS4™, PS3™ and PS Vita. Star Wars: The Last Jedi (also known as Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi) is an upcoming American epic space opera film written and directed by Rian Johnson. The fact that in Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope Princess Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) had a Ph.D. is making its rounds on the internet. New Hope. Daisy Ridley’s Rey hones her lightsaber skills—and channels her inner Force. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.“When I read the script for Episode VIII, I went, ‘Oh my God, we’re going back?’ Because I said I was never going back,” Hamill told me when I sat down with him recently at his home in Malibu. He wondered, in vain, if they could drop him in by chopper this time, “which is so clueless of me, because there’s no landing pad, and it would mar the beauty of it all,” he said. Hamill is a youthful 6. Rey- Luke meeting spot—carrying heavy equipment—Hamill was allotted an hour and a half, “and I had to stop every 1. None of this was offered up in the form of complaint. Hamill just happens to be a rambling, expansive talker—in his own way, as endearingly offbeat a character as his friend and on- screen twin sister, Carrie Fisher, who passed away suddenly and tragically last December. Like Fisher, Hamill was put on a diet- and- exercise regimen after he was reconscripted into the Star Wars franchise. Harrison Ford was under less obligation, having retained his leading- man shape because he never stopped being a leading man.) Over a spartan snack plate of carrot sticks and hummus, the man behind Luke held forth at length on this subject. Watch the video below for a behind- the- scenes look at Annie Leibovitz’s photo shoot with The Last Jedi cast and crew.“You just cut out all the things you love,” he said. Something as basic as bread and butter, which I used to start every meal with. Sugar. No more candy bars. No more stops at In- N- Out. It’s really just a general awareness, because in the old days I’d go, ‘Well, I’m not that hungry, but oh, here’s a box of Wheat Thins,’ and you don’t put the Wheat Thins in the same category as Lay’s potato chips, and yet I would sort of idly, absentmindedly eat these things while watching Turner Classic Movies, and ‘Oh, I ate the whole box!’ ”Hamill had been dieting and training for 5. Episode VII script he finally received from Abrams, that he would not appear in the movie until its last scene, and in a nonspeaking part at that. On this, too, he has a lot of thoughts. Though he grants that the delayed- gratification reveal of Luke was a narrative masterstroke, he’d have done things differently if he’d had his druthers. Han Solo’s death scene, for example. Why couldn’t Luke have made his first appearance around then? In the finished film, the witnesses to Han’s death, at the hands of his own son, the brooding dark- side convert Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), are his longtime Wookiee co- pilot, Chewbacca, and the upstart Resistance fighters Rey and Finn (John Boyega). Driver’s Seat. Daisy Ridley as Rey, at the helm of the Millennium Falcon, with Joonas Suotamo as co- pilot Chewbacca. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.“Now, remember, one of the plots in the earlier films was the telepathic communication between my sister and me,” Hamill said. So I thought, Carrie will sense that Han is in danger and try to contact me. And she won’t succeed, and, in frustration, she’ll go herself. Then we’re in the situation where all three of us are together, which is one of my favorite things in the original film, when we were on the Death Star. It’s just got a fun dynamic to it. So I thought it would have been more effective, and I still feel this way, though it’s just my opinion, that Leia would make it as far as she can, and, right when she is apprehended, maybe even facing death—Ba- boom! I come in and blow the guy away and the two of us go to where Han is facing off with his son, but we’re too late. The reason that’s important is that we witness his death, which carries enormous personal resonance into the next picture. As it is, Chewie’s there, and how much can you get out of [passable Chewbacca wail] ‘Nyaaarghhh!’ and two people who have known Han for, what, 2. Still, Hamill recognizes that the popular response to The Force Awakens—its stirring ending in particular—was overwhelmingly positive, his misgivings be damned. As I said to J. J.,” he recalled, “I’ve never been more happy to be wrong.”Besides, holding back Luke in VII means that Hamill gets a lot more screen time in VIII. And dialogue. This time, at last, Luke Skywalker talks. Freedom Fighters. Carrie Fisher, Oscar Isaac, John Boyega, and Kelly Marie Tran as the rebels General Leia Organa, Poe Dameron, Finn, and Rose Tico, with droid BB- 8. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz. II. A Long Way from Tosche Station. Rian Johnson, a sandy- haired, baby- faced 4. Californian heretofore best known among cinéastes for his time- bending 2. Looper, is not only the director of Episode VIII but also its sole credited screenwriter. Episode VII was written by Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan, and Michael Arndt.) Earlier this spring, in a screening room in the Frank G. Wells Building at Walt Disney Studios, in Burbank, California, Johnson described to me the approach he took to writing The Last Jedi, the second film of the Rey- centered trilogy. J. J. and Larry and Michael set everybody up in a really evocative way in VII and started them on a trajectory. I guess I saw it as the job of this middle chapter to challenge all of those characters—let’s see what happens if we knock the stool out from under them,” he said. As it is, none of the main characters in The Force Awakens emerged from that picture in what can be described as a triumphal state. John Boyega’s Finn had been gravely wounded in a lightsaber duel with Kylo Ren. In a telephone interview from China, where he was filming Pacific Rim: Uprising, Boyega told me that, as teased in The Last Jedi’s first trailer, his character, Finn, begins the new movie in a “bacta suit,” a sort of regenerative immersion tank that, in the Star Wars galaxy, heals damaged tissue. Adam Driver, alluding both to Finn’s state and the scar seen on his own face in the trailer, told me, “I feel like almost everyone is in that rehabilitation state. You know, I don’t think that patricide is all that it’s cracked up to be. Maybe that’s where Kylo Ren is starting from. His external scar is probably as much an internal one.”Johnson was surprised at how much leeway he was given to cook up the action. But Johnson, in drawing up his screenplay, decided to raise the stakes further. I started by writing the names of each of the characters,” he said, “and thinking, What’s the hardest thing they could be faced with?”At the top of Johnson’s list: Luke Skywalker. When he was last glimpsed in Lucas’s original trilogy, at the end of 1. Return of the Jedi, Luke was basking in victory and familial warmth, reveling with Princess Leia Organa, Han Solo, and their rebel compatriots at a celebratory Ewok dance party. Turning away for a moment from the festivities, he saw smiling apparitions of his two departed Jedi mentors, Yoda and Obi- Wan Kenobi, along with his late father, Anakin Skywalker, restored to his unscarred, un- Vadered form after redeeming himself in death, sacrificing his own life to save his son’s and slay the evil Emperor Palpatine. You’d have expected Luke to have shortly thereafter found a nice girl and settled into a contented existence on a tidy planet with good schools and dual sunsets, no more than a couple of parsecs from the Organa- Solos and their little boy, Ben. But no. Leia and Han’s romance didn’t last, and something heavy went down with twin bro. The result: the cloak, the hood, and monastic isolation of the damaged, Leonard- Cohen- at- Mount- Baldy variety. Night Creatures. Neal Scanlan (seated), creative supervisor of the Star Wars creature shop, and guests at the Canto Bight casino. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz. So what happened to Luke? What we know from The Force Awakens is that he had been running some sort of Jedi academy when “one boy, an apprentice, turned against him, destroyed it all.” These are the words that Han Solo, prior to his death scene, offers to Rey and Finn—the inference being that the boy was Han and Leia’s son, and Luke’s nephew, Ben, the future Kylo Ren. People that knew him best,” Han says of Luke, “think he went looking for the first Jedi temple.”That part of Luke’s legend, Johnson confirmed, is accurate.
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