Rian Johnson Says It Was A “Process” to Identify Star Wars “Patterns” When Creating ‘The Last Jedi’

With the complexity of the Star Wars saga, fans often try to draw connections to things from the past to determine how they’ll affect the future. Writer/director of The Last Jedi Rian Johnson is well-aware of this idea, revealing that one of the biggest challenges he faced at the early stages of creating his film was identifying those patterns.

“It was a real process,” he says. “There’s a lot of possibilities with how to take it… Even just as a Star Wars fan, you realize there are patterns etched into your brain of how you think it should go. It’s tough, because you don’t want to let yourself be guided by those deep-set grooves in your brain, but you also don’t want to make creative decisions just to spite those. It’s an interesting line to ride.”

While any filmmaker aims to avoid repeating things that have been done before, it’s also hard to willfully avoid the natural path that a story will take. Whether it be the relationships between Anakin and Obi-Wan, Luke and Darth Vader or Rey and Kylo Ren, the balance between Light and Dark is one of many repeated themes in the series.

“I felt that I had to be conscious of those patterns and those grooves. Whether I was going to subvert them or play along with them,” Johnson pointed out. “You could say, ‘I’m going to just ignore them and tell my story,’ but then you’re fooling yourself and you’re probably just going along the same path. I had to be conscious of them and even incorporate them. This can’t drive it, but you have to incorporate them, almost in a meta way, into the narrative itself.”

The filmmaker might have embraced some familiar elements of the saga, but he promised his film is more than just a love letter to what his favorite aspects of Star Wars.

“It’s very interesting, the idea of the inescapable draw of nostalgia, because it’s there and it’s impossible to deny the emotional reaction that I have walking onto the interior of the Falcon,” Johnson told SciFiNow Magazine. “I guess I’d be hesitant to use the word ‘homage’ because that makes it sound like it’s just kind of turning the crank and replaying an old tune because we all like it. But telling a story that brings new things and pushes everything forward in an interesting way, that is in this world that we all recognise, there’s something very powerful about that.”

Fans will get to see which patterns have been repeated when The Last Jedi hits theaters on December 15.

[H/T Rolling Stone]