‘Lost’ and ‘Watchmen’ mastermind Damon Lindelof has detailed why he was fired from writing the Star Wars movie script and hinted at what the story will be like.
Lindelof was a guest on the May 18 episode of The Ringer’s podcast, “House of R,” and said early in a lengthy discussion about “Star Wars” that he “wanted to talk about the banthas in the room.”
“I got fired from a Star Wars movie,” he says. “They asked me, ‘What do you think a Star Wars movie should be like?’ And I said, ‘This is what it should be like.’ And they said, “Great, you’re hired.” And two years later I was laid off. So, at least through that prism, I was wrong. But what my partner Justin Britt-Gibson, Rayna McClendon, and I were trying to do was to have this conversation in the movie. So there’s the power of nostalgia and the power of revision, and they’re at odds with each other, and we said, let’s have a Protestant Reformation in Star Wars, and that didn’t work. You can have your cake and eat it too. The conversations the fandom was having without winking or looking at the audience didn’t necessarily feel that dangerous. ”
Lindelof was announced as a screenwriter for a new Star Wars movie in 2022, but by 2023 it was revealed that he had left the project. The hardest part, he said, was figuring out how to connect his story to the existing world.
“It was really hard to write,” he says. “It’s been slow. The tone, the place in the canon, the relationship to Episode IX. Are we starting a new trilogy? Is it like all of those things? It’s so huge. It’s so big. It’s like the tanker equation, and when you turn the wheel, it takes five minutes to turn a little bit like this. When Episode 7 came out, we all knew it was Rey, and then it was Finn, and then it was us. We got back to Luke and Leia and Han and Chewie and all those people, and we felt like once this new trilogy was over, we were going to start with these new characters, and that’s the heart of Star Wars. The new question is: Are Mando and Grogu the central characters of Star Wars?
The latest Star Wars film, The Mandalorian and Grogu, will be released in theaters on May 22nd.
