It’s going to be the longest week ever in the lives of "Star Wars" fans, with "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" now just five, aching days away. With the first reviews set to drop mid-week, many will have to cover their ears, close their eyes, turn off social media, and hope no one is brazen or mean enough to leak out the big secrets director J.J. Abrams has been trying to keep under wraps. It’s certainly been the biggest movie of the director’s career, a fact not lost on the filmmaker who sat down with "60 Minutes" for a segment devoted to the upcoming movie.
"It’s not a movie. It’s a — it’s — it’s bigger than all of us. It’s a — it’s almost a religion for people," Abrams stated about the phenomenon surrounding the sequel, and he’s not underselling it. However, that fandom has led to some extreme and ugly comments from a very small subset of fans about the gender and racial make up of the cast. But the director had a very simple reason for the diversity in the picture.
"When we started casting the movie, it felt incredibly important to me that the movie look like the world in which this movie is being released," he explained.
Naturally, there were no plot details spilled, but Abrams did share where ‘The Force Awakens’ is coming from in its approach. " ‘Return of the Jedi‘ seemed to end pretty happily. But the walk off to the sunset is — is always — a misleading thing, because, ‘Well, then what?’ And so one of the things that I think you see in this movie is that things didn’t just end happily, and that the idea of the force, both the dark and the light side — are at a classic ‘Star Wars’ — place, which is — in a desperate moment," he teased.
Watch the full report below and a couple of TV spots after that. See you on Friday.