**SPOILERS** If you have not seen “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” do not read this piece with director Rian Johnson discussing some of the major events of the movie. Repeat, if you have not seen “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” turn around right now and come back when you’ve seen the movie, got it? Yes? For real? For sure? Great. Here we go. **SPOILERS**
These days, some storytellers, especially in big blockbuster movies, write from action beat to action beat, or figure out what they want to see in the movie and reverse engineer the narrative from there. “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” writer/director Rian Johnson is not really one of those screen writers.
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There’s lots of characters from the past that Johnson could have written into the movie and some, like Nien Nunb from “Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi,” do make a brief cameo appearance (returning as he did in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens“). However, Johnson didn’t want to just stick anyone he could in his movie.
“You have to write organically,” Johnson told The Playlist in an interview, explaining his process, and how he approached bringing back characters into the series. “So It would lead to some really contrived places if you put your fist down and said, ‘I want to see so and so in this movie,’ and then try and figure out a way to shoehorn them in.”
If you’ve seen the ‘The Last Jedi,’ you know that one major character returns and he does so, according to Johnson, because his purpose was to shake Luke Skywalker’s world up, even scold him a little and perhaps give the dejected hero a sense of hope. This, of course, leads Luke and his crucial decision to intervene against Kylo Ren and the First Order at the end of the movie. Yoda is a catalyst for Luke’s choice to reenter the fray after years of self-imposed exile. “Time it is,” Yoda says. “For you to look past a pile of old books.”
“Yoda was the one,” Johnson said simply of the character’s return and the function he plays of lifting Luke back on to his feet spiritually (the character was once again created by Frank Oz with the help of “Star Wars” Creature Shop supervisor Neal Scanlan).
“I think you have to have your wish list in the back of your head,” he added, about the character he and audiences would have liked to see. “But what you end up getting to pull from has to entirely be dependent on the needs of your main characters.”
And the choice of including say, Obi Wan Kenobi, a character that Luke Skywalker is arguably much more emotionally bonded to, just wasn’t an option.
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“Believe me, man. I would have loved to have had Ewan McGregor in the movie but it was just a matter of storytelling,” Johnson explained. “The original relationship with Obi Wan — obviously if Alec Guiness were still with us that would have made sense. But we never saw Luke ever interact with the Ewan version of Obi Wan, so there’s less of the emotional connection and it might have been a little odd. So, it made sense and we could recreate that character [practically], so it made sense that Yoda be the one that comes back and kicks [Luke’s] butt a little.”
It’s a fascinating thought though, that Obi Wan Kenobi could have been in the movie theoretically, but obviously, Johnson and for that matter, Lucasfilm, who have already recreated a young Princess Leia and General Moff Tarkin through CGI in “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” decided it wasn’t right for ‘The Last Jedi.’
“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” is in theaters now and making insane money.