Rian Johnson Aimed to Make the ‘Empire Strikes Back’ of the ‘Star Wars’ Sequels

When talking about his time in Star Wars, Rian Johnson often says that he’d like to return to that world one day, at least once he stops making murder-mystery movies and TV shows. But while fans continue to hope he’ll make that once-planned trilogy one day, others can’t quite get past the seeming disappointments contained in his franchise entry, The Last Jedi. In a new interview, Johnson recalls what he was told when he came aboard the Lucasfilm project.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, Johnson addressed the notion that he and J.J. Abrams—who made the first and third films in the sequel trilogy, The Force Awakens and The Rise of Skywalker—didn’t communicate enough about their 2015 and 2017 Star Wars films, leading to a disjointed feeling between the two.

That’s not the case, Johnson said. “We met and I spent days with him and was able to get into his head and all the choices he had made. That having been said, I communicated and I went and made the movie. And he was in the middle of Force Awakens. Ultimately, I feel like the choices in it, none of them were born out of an intent to ‘undo’ anything. They were all [born] out of the opposite intent of, how do I take this story that J.J. wrote, that I really loved, and these characters he created that I really loved, and take them to the next step?”

An authority stepped in for some guidance at this point, Johnson said. “Kathy [Kennedy, the president of Lucasfilm] said, ‘We’re looking at someone to do the Empire [Strikes Back] of this series.’ I took that assignment very seriously. Maybe more seriously than someone would have liked. I guess to me that didn’t mean making something that just had nods to Empire—that meant trying to genuinely do what Empire did.”

Whether or not Johnson’s interpretation of Empire pleased fans (some people don’t mind The Last Jedi!), it’s clear that coming into the franchise to make the middle film in the series was no easy task. That became even tougher when Johnson tried to put his own stamp on the story so far—including, as Rolling Stone uses as an example, doing away with Snoke, the big bad set up with much fanfare in The Force Awakens. Turns out Johnson just thought Kylo Ren was a “more compelling and complicated villain.”

“To me, I didn’t easily dispense with Snoke. I took great pains to use him in the most dramatically impactful way I could, which was to then take Kylo’s character to the next level and set him up as well as I possibly could. I guess it all comes down to your point of view.”

And really, what would Star Wars be without heated fan debates over the choices made, on-screen and off?

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