Star Wars: Last Jedi director Rian Johnson says catering to fans is a ‘mistake’
Johnson’s Star Wars film was met with polarising reactions in 2017
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Your support makes all the difference.Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson has said that solely catering to fans rather than challenging them is “a mistake”.
Johnson’s work on the second entry in the current Star Wars trilogy was met by a wave of criticism upon its release in 2017, with petitions launched to have it remade or removed from the franchise entirely.
Others criticised some of the film’s unexpected plot twists, notably in regards to the parentage of Rey (Daisy Ridley).
Speaking to the Swing & Mrs Podcast on Radio.com, Johnson has now said that he rejects writing that automatically gives fans what they want.
“I think approaching any creative process with that would be a mistake that would lead to probably the exact opposite result,” Johnson said.
“Even my experience as a fan, you know if I’m coming into something, even if it’s something that I think I want, if I see exactly what I think I want on the screen, it’s like ‘oh, okay,’ it might make me smile and make me feel neutral about the thing and I won’t really think about it afterwards, but that’s not really going to satisfy me.”
He added, “I want to be shocked, I want to be surprised, I want to be thrown off-guard, I want to have things recontextualised, I want to be challenged as a fan when I sit down in the theatre.”
The first reviews for The Rise of Skywalker have tended to criticise what has been interpreted as a course-correction to many of Johnson’s creative choices.
These include a greater emphasis on action, and a greatly reduced role for actor Kelly Marie Tran, whose character Rose was at the centre of an online hate campaign.
“Many of the decisions in this film frustrate me,” critic Clarisse Loughrey wrote in her review for The Independent. “It hangs several of its predecessor’s core philosophies out to dry and, most unforgivable of all, it sidelines Rose Tico in a way that seems pointedly cruel considering how viciously treated the actor was in certain corners of the web.”
“In many respects, it feels like a betrayal of what came before,” she added.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is released in UK cinemas on Thursday 19 December.
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