Original ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ Directors Were Making a “Gritty” and “Grimy” Film

Solo: A Star Wars Story may be in theaters now, but the film had plenty of drama before its big screen debut with the removal of directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Now, it’s starting to emerge that the original version of the film would have had a different, grittier tone.

Last summer it was announced that Lord and Miller had been fired from Solo over what Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy called “different creative visions on this film.” It was later announced that Ron Howard would step in for the film, ultimately re-shooting over 70-percent of it. While, at the time, it was thought that part of the creative differences that lead to Lord and Miller’s ouster was over the pair making the film too comedic, a report in Variety says that simply wasn’t the case. Instead, Variety says that the Lord and Miller Solo would have been a gritty, grimy film more in keeping with the world Han Solo comes from.

Tone is something that screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan touched on as well.

“Tone is everything to me. That’s what movies are made of,” Kasdan said. “But this was a very complicated situation. When you go to work in the morning on a ‘Star Wars’ movie, there are thousands of people waiting for you, and you have to be very decisive and very quick about it. When you are making those split-second decisions — and there are a million a day — then you are committing to a certain tone. If the [producers] think that isn’t the tone of the movie, you’re going to have trouble. It may not always end this way, but no one was happy about it. It was agony.”

So, if Lord and Miller’s vision had a less comedic tone, how did the producers get a different sense of the film? Emilia Clarke said that may have come in with how Lord and Miller were working as their experimentation and improvisation may have been the real issue.

“Lord and Miller drew Kennedy’s ire for stretching days out with experimentation,” Clarke said. “We were all still very much in a collaborative place of ‘Where does this want to go?’”

Ultimately, Solo ended up going away from Lord and Miller and into the hands of Howard and while the film hasn’t quite performed to expectation at the box office, the final product has gone over well with critics, including ComicBook.com’s JK Schmidt whose spoiler-free review you can read here.

Solo: A Star Wars Story is in theaters now.