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“Lost” and “Watchmen” mastermind Damon Lindelof has detailed why he was fired from writing a Star Wars movie and teases what the tale would’ve been about.
Lindelof was a guest on the May 18 episode of The Ringer’s “House of R” podcast and, early on in a lengthy discussion about “Star Wars,” mentioned that he wanted to “talk about the Bantha in the room.”
“I was fired off of a ‘Star Wars’ movie,” he says. “They asked me, ‘What do you think a “Star Wars” movie should be?’ And I said, ‘Here’s what it should be.’ And they said, ‘Great, you’re hired.’ And then two years later, I was fired. And so I was wrong, at least through that prism. But what we were attempting to do, my partner Justin Britt-Gibson, Rayna McClendon
and I, what we were attempting to do was to have this conversation in the movie, which is to say there is a Force of nostalgia and there is a Force of revision, and they are at odds with one another, and let’s do the Protestant Reformation inside ‘Star Wars,’ and it didn’t work. You have your cake and eat it too. The conversation that the fandom is having, without winking and looking at the audience, that didn’t feel necessarily that risky.”
Lindelof was announced as the writer of a new “Star Wars” movie in 2022, but by 2023 it was revealed that he had left the project. He said that the trickiest part was figuring out how to make his story connect to the existing universe.
“The writing was really hard,” he says. “It was slow. Like the tone, getting it right, where it was inside of the canon, what its relationship was to Episode IX. Is it starting a new trilogy? Is it like all of those things? They’re so massive. They’re so big. It’s sort of a tanker equation, which is you turn the wheel and it takes five minutes before it turns a little bit like this. When Episode VII came out, we all knew what it was Rey and it was Finn and it was Poe and then we were migrating back in and Luke and Leia and Han and Chewy and all those guys. But we got the sense that, when this new trilogy was over, we were going to be launching with these new characters, and that was the center of ‘Star Wars.’ The new question is are Mando and Grogu the center of ‘Star Wars’?”
The newest Star Wars film, “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” opens theatrically on May 22.
