Damon Lindelof has explained why he was “fired” from Star Wars.
The Lost co-creator was brought onboard to write one of the movies in the sci-fi franchise in 2022 but he was let go from the project the following year and he’s now revealed his vision for the film just “didn’t work.”
During an appearance on the House of R podcast, Lindelof explained, “I was fired off of a Star Wars movie. They asked me: ‘What do you think a Star Wars movie should be?’”
“And I said: ‘Here’s what it should be.’ And they said: ‘Great, you’re hired.’ And then two years later, I was fired. And so, I was wrong, at least through that prism,” he added.
He went on to add, “What we were attempting to do, my [writing] partner Justin Britt-Gibson, [writer] Rayna McClendon and I, what we were attempting to do was to have this conversation in the movie, which is to say there is a Force of nostalgia and there is a Force of revision, and they are at odds with one another, and let’s do the Protestant Reformation inside Star Wars, and it didn’t work.”
“You have your cake and eat it too. The conversation that the fandom is having, without winking and looking at the audience, that didn’t feel necessarily that risky,” Lindelof further mentioned.
He also went on to explain that writing the movie was “really hard” and he struggled to find the right “tone.”
He said, “The writing was really hard. It was slow. Like the tone, getting it right, where it was inside of the canon, what its relationship was to Episode IX.”
“Is it starting a new trilogy? Is it like all of those things? They’re so massive. They’re so big. It’s sort of a tanker equation, which is you turn the wheel and it takes five minutes before it turns a little bit like this,” Lindelof stated.
“When Episode VII came out, we all knew what it was Rey and it was Finn and it was Poe and then we were migrating back in and Luke and Leia and Han and Chewy and all those guys,” he said and speaking of the latest part of the Star Wars franchise, he added, “But we got the sense that, when this new trilogy was over, we were going to be launching with these new characters, and that was the centre of Star Wars. The new question is are Mando and Grogu the centre of Star Wars?”
