There's been plenty of
Star Wars news over the last few days after the anticipated release of
The Last Jedi! In this article, we've compiled a few fun facts about the fim's story that have been discussed by director Rian Johnson. Check them out below!
To view the list in its entirety, simply click on the VIEW LIST (ONE PAGE) button below!
Poe Originally Went To Canto Bight With Finn
Finn's subplot in the film involved the ex-Stormtrooper travelling to Canto Bight to find a codebreaker that would help disable the First Order's hyperspace tracking. The final film saw Finn accompanied by Resistance engineer Rose, but originally it was Poe Dameron who was supposed to travel with him.
“Poe originally went on the journey with Finn to Canto Bight. And it was boring,"Johnson explains in
The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (via Screen Rant) .
"It was just these two dudes on an adventure. I knew something was wrong when I looked at their dialogue and realized I could interchange any of the lines. There wasn’t conflict between them. So I realized I had to come up with something else. Finn needing somebody else to go with who would actually challenge him and push him and contrast with him was where Rose came from.”
Mark Hamill Didn't Just Play Luke Skywalker
Playing the self-exiled Luke Skywalker was a challenge for Mark Hamill, though he also got to have a small role as a second character. The actor is credited as the character "Dobbu Scay" in the film's credits, and revealed (
via EW) that he asked Rian Johnson to have a small appearance in Canto Bight.
“I said I’d love to do a CGI thing, and he said sure,” Hamill said.
“And I got to go to the set of the casino and see in detail 150 extras in jaw-dropping costumes.” As for which character Dobbu Scay actually is? You'll have to play a guessing game.
“I’m not telling. I like playing the mystery of it all.”
The Significance Of Ach-To's Black Cave
Rey doesn't receive much guidance from Luke Skywalker at first, and descends to the depths of Ach-To to explore the black cave she first sees when connecting with the Force. Rian Johnson explained that this was a deliberate parallel to Luke's training on Dagobah in
The Empire Strikes Back.
“Well, the idea that this natural place reflected […] The idea that if there’s a Jedi Temple up top, the light, it has to be balanced by a place of great darkness. We’re drawing a very obvious connection to Luke’s training and to Dagobah here, obviously,” Johnson told
SlashFilm.
“And so the idea was if the up top is the light, down underneath is the darkness. And she descends down into there and has to see, just like Luke did in the cave, her greatest fear. And her greatest fear is [that], in the search for identity, she has nobody but herself to rely on."
The Flashbacks Were A Late Addition
While they were few and far between, we got to see some glimpses into Luke's past, revealing how Kylo Ren destroyed his Jedi Temple. According to Rian Johnson, these flashbacks were a late addition to the film, inspired by Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film
Rashomon.
“The three flashbacks were a late addition — one of the last things that went into the script before we started shooting,” Johnson said in
The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (via
Screen Rant).
“It’s similar to Rashomon, but the actual story motivation was that I wanted some harder kick to Rey’s turn: ‘You didn’t tell me this.’ I wanted some harder line that was crossed — a more defined thing that we could actually see — between Luke and Kylo.”
There Was A Fake Leia
Early on in the film,
General Leia is taken out of commission by The First Order when the blow apart the bridge of their capital ship. While Leia is able to use the Force to guide herself back from the cold vacuum of space, she is left in a coma and placed in a medical pod. Johnson revealed to EW that a fake version of Carrie Fisher was created so the actress didn't have to lay inside the pod for every single scene.
“Obviously when we were shooting her up close it was Carrie,” Johnson said.
“But in case you ever glimpsed her in the background, Neal Scanlan and his creature shop did a mask and a dummy version of her to be underneath the dome. But they did such a good job, it was absolutely eerie.”
Did you spot anything else in the film? Let us know in the comments!