For almost half a century, the Star Wars saga has captured the hearts and minds of the audience. Now, with The Rise of Skywalker, the ninth episode in the Skywalker saga that’s in theaters, it’s time to close the book on Star Wars as most people know. But how do you say goodbye to something that will never end?
Chris Terrio, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for Argo in 2013 and then worked on Zack Snyder’s vision for the Justice League, was hired by J.J. Abrams to work on the last chapter. The task was wonderful, but daunting: Rise of Skywalker had to deliver a story that surpassed the imagination of each individual, while allowing the galaxy space to continue in some way. A new series of Star Wars films is scheduled to begin in 2022.
Terrio liaises with Polygon and explains where he and Abrams started scripting Episode 9, where their creative journey took them, and finally the personal lesson he had to learn to do justice to this last chapter.
Polygon: When you came into this project, Jurassic World Director Colin Trevorrow already had a script, and he keeps his story by credits. What was already there?
Chris Terrio: Well, you know, J.J. and I’m both a bit superstitious when it comes to starting with material that’s not ours, just because it leads you onto a street you might not have gone.
So we just started with a white board. At Bad Robot there are these large rooms with only white dry-erase boards. They literally surround you everywhere. It is very dramatic. The wall opens and the boards come out. So we just started it. In the truest sense of the word, just write and ask, “What do we want to see? Where do we want to see these characters? What kind of feelings do we want? Which stories do we want to tell? What things did we find unsolved, either from seven or eight, or even episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6? “We started with it and gradually this dry extinguishing board became a document that we just used called ‘The Boards’. It was just a Word document that contained all these ideas and finally included 121 pages of things that we would like to see.
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Gradually, Darwinism takes over and you cut out the things that do not quite make it. We thought only from our own hearts of where we wanted to go, which, as you know, is a great thing for a franchise of this size because it did not feel corporate at all. We were just in Bad Robot, in a room. Only me and J.J., Michelle [Rejwan, vice president of live-action production at Lucasfilm] and of course our other producer and Kathy Kennedy. It was this process of repetition and subsequent collaboration with designers Rick Carter and Kevin Jenkins, both of whom are geniuses. Rick, I’m sure you know his job, but Kevin did not have any recognition as a production designer before this movie. He has been involved in conceptual work and art direction as well as in all possible positions on Star Wars. He just knew all about Star Wars and all his life he had drawn drawings by Ralph McQuarrie. I mean, since he was a kid. So I have Rick, who talks like this mystic and talks about deep immersion attempts into the subconscious. Then Kevin paints and then J.J., Michelle and me and Kathy are all in the room. Add to that Roger [Guyett] from the ILM, who is also a genius. I still have no idea how they did anything in this movie. So it became this small, creative sandbox, in which we could really try everything.
The special thing about a movie of this size is that you can imagine everything. Anything you can literally imagine can be realized in any way. It’s the only time in my life that I’ll ever have such an experience. Not only that, your heart is just so full because it’s Star Wars and those characters you love. They are like your relatives. You love her. I feel that I know and love Luke and Lando better than some of my family members, and I treat them with as much love and warmth as I would with my family. Or more. Having it in the warm emotional core of things, and beyond having the ability to stage everything – every battle, every event, the history of the galaxy – on a screen of this size, is a unique opportunity for life.
They also wrote DC superheroes and talked about unlocking archetypes. Is the clash of good and evil the same as in Star Wars?
I’ve just reread some of George’s [Lucas’s] early writings about Star Wars, even from 1974, and I think it’s a slightly different archetype because I’m attached to certain things in superhero movies that are playing on Earth anyway was realities of the interaction between the mythical world and the human world. While in Star Wars, this Manichaean battle can be between good and evil. You can even use terms like “dark” and “light” without irony, right? One can have a certain mythological seriousness, which George put into the first film and which has since only deepened and developed further. I found it very different. In fact, I found it much closer to the mythical heart of an epic. That and the experience of writing only characters that we all grew up with was awesome.
Is that ever an obstacle, the fact that these people are loved?
Of course. I have certain scripts that I’ve written about people I know or relate to my family, and they’re sitting on the floor because strangely it’s like I do not even want to mess with this psychic reality. Here you have characters that you are almost afraid of because they are sanctified. Rick Carter sometime said something when J.J. and I was tormented by something that happened in the third act. Rick said, “The reason you both can not finish this is because you do not want Star Wars to be over.” I left the room and thought, “Rick is just right.”
J.J. and I was circling around this scene, which was actually easy to write, but we did not really want Star Wars to be over. We can not do that because we did not want it. Because when we finished the outline of this event and the third act, it was over. That’s it. I still do not want it to be over. We were only a few weeks ago in the editorial room and you want to memorize the space somehow and memorize the emotions, because you know that you will never be in this situation again. Even on set I memorized the place because I just did not want to end.
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That being said, Star Wars will continue. How does this affect the creation of finality?
Well, the end of a story depends on where you stop telling them, right? I mean, the end of the war in Europe at the end of the First World War was a certain end and seemed victorious. Then, in a sense, this war continued in World War II, right? And so we stopped telling the story where we believe the Skywalker saga has completed its bow. There are other directions in the galaxy that are very exciting. The Mandalorian really inspired me. I love what Dave [Filoni] and these people do. And women too. I’m sorry, I should not say “boys”. I’m excited about the next trilogies, but I felt we should spend our last two hours and something with those people we’ve met and loved. I think it’s very emotional and I hope it’s a fitting end that feels unavoidable.
You mentioned that you identified loose ends throughout the saga. How daunting is it to get everything in one movie?
I think, after my last count, there were 24 arcs in the movie. Twenty-four characters whose stories had a beginning, a middle and an end. So it’s daunting, but we would also say that this is just the story of the galaxy. It’s not like we have to make some sweetmeats to fit in with certain things. We said, “No, that happened. This is the battle that happened. This was the opportunity they took. That was the plan. ”
We would almost write it as I would write non-fiction. Many of my previous works were like a historical drama and the like. You write it the way you would write any world-historical event or galaxy-historical event, that is, there are all these interwoven threads and all those little moving parts. But they all contribute to the ultimate goal. It was daunting, but we could have written-I mean, it would have killed us-but we could have written three more movies. When we were in the room, we just wanted it to continue. We wanted to continue exploring where things are going. Yet, with this film, we wanted to keep reminding ourselves that one of the things that George said very early [A New Hope] was that the characters had to be constantly endangered and kept moving. The characters have to keep moving. You separate the characters, bring them together, separate them, bring them together and carry on, move on, keep going. So that was our other assignment to ourselves to keep the story moving.
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I think there are also small parts of the galaxy that are opened – at least for the imagination, if not for more movies. We have some new characters in this movie that would make me happy in my brain and imagination. So I hope that we also say that the galaxy is big and diverse. We have shown you this one saga, but the galaxy contains a variety. I hope it feels expansive and does not close, even though it is. It does both.
Somewhere I heard a saying that said, “At the end of the story lies its meaning.” I kept meditating on it, thinking, “How do we end this in a way that seems to summarize the previous one?” We were not easy for us. We really tried to ask, “What does this movie say? What does this trilogy say? What will all nine say? Is it in the best sense of George’s original intention? “
You mentioned that you’ve identified specific story threads throughout the saga. Can you explain this specific process in more detail?
We went back and asked, “What about this strand? Has this little promise made in this episode ever been fulfilled? “Or” Here’s a small aspect of this character that’s somehow interesting and intriguing, “or, as J.J would say,” There was always that line in Empire Strike’s Back, and I’m always thinking about that line. What do you think, what that means? “We could spend hours playing and debating in this world arguing about certain issues and wrestling grizzly.
But at the end of the day, we kept coming back to our love for the characters. You love the story because you can not just do Star Wars with your head. In my past there were movies that were made more with a head than a heart, but you can not do that with Star Wars. It’s bigger than any of us. You can not think, “Oh, I’m a great genius of this saga” because you are not. It’s not just George, it’s all the culture that has accumulated like a glacier around Star Wars. You can not simply tick this box or intellectually satisfy it. It really has to feel operational. I mean, “space opera” is often used as a pejorative, but I actually love that term because I think the thing about opera is that you can not capture emotions with words. It’s transcendent and that’s the thing about Star Wars. It’s bigger than us.
These two twins, trapped in this flood of history, and their mother who died, and how they were separated and their father turned to the darkness, and finally salvation was possible – that’s really human and really moving and something That’s so emotional. I get strangled when I talk about it, like a crazy person, but we have lived so long in the world, and cared so much that you can not just talk about it with your head. You need to talk about it with your heart and try to feel the commitment and human drama of it.
I wanted to ask, there was so much talk about it the “snyder cut” of justice League, I’m curious about your thoughts.
And I have her! I have them, but I will not talk about them right now. In a few months we have a date and we will talk about it. Because that’s a really interesting topic that I have not talked about yet.
