By George & Josh Bate
The creator of Lost and The Leftovers making a Star Wars movie. It sounds like a match made in heaven. But unfortunately, it ultimately didn’t come to fruition.
Now, however, Damon Lindelof has finally opened up about his work on the New Jedi Order movie, his surprising plans to address the divisiveness among Star Wars fans in the film, and the original plans to position Rey, Finn, and Poe as central characters beyond the sequel trilogy.
In an interview with The Ringer-Verse, Lindelof revealed details about being “fired off of a Star Wars movie.” The movie in question was going to take place approximately 15 years after The Rise of Skywalker and feature Rey as the primary protagonist. The film has since been reworked by a number of screenwriters, including Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, but Lindelof had ideas that would have been fascinating to see unfold in a galaxy far, far away.
“To talk about the bantha in the room, I was fired off of a Star Wars movie.,” Lindelof candidly said. “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 so fired. So I was wrong, at least through that prism.”
Lindelof went on to describe his pitch for a Star Wars movie to Lucasfilm. “What we were attempting to do, my partner Justin Gibson and Rayna McClendon and I, was have this conversation in the movie,” Lindeolf explained. “There is a force of nostalgia and there is a force of revision, and these are at odds with one another. And they are at odds with one another. Let us do The Protestant Reformation inside Star Wars. You have your cake and eat it too. But the conversation the fandom is having, without winking and looking at the audience, that didn’t necessarily feel that risky. They seemed to really like the premise.”
So what stopped this intriguing, meta idea from making its way to the big screen? “The writing was really hard,” described Lindelof. “It was slow. The tone, getting it right. Where it was inside of the canon. What its relationship was with Episode IX. Is it starting a new trilogy? All of those things. They’re so massive. They’re so big. It’s the old tanker equation. You turn the wheel and it takes five minutes before it turns a little bit.”
Interestingly, Lindelof revealed that he and Lucasfilm were “looking for the center of Star Wars” following the sequel trilogy and believed that the new characters from that trilogy – Rey, Poe, Finn – solved that problem. “When Episode VII came out, we all knew what [the center of Star Wars] was – it was Rey, it was Finn, it was Poe, and then we were migrating back in Luke and Leia and Han and Chewie and all those guys. We got the sense then that, when this [sequel] trilogy was over, we were going to be launching with these new characters and that was the center of Star Wars.“
Lindelof went on to express confusion regarding what the “center of Star Wars now,” questioning whether The Mandalorian and Grogu are at the core of the franchise currently or, more generally, if a galaxy far, far away has a center.
For those unfamiliar with Lindelof’s work, he is one of the most accomplished and brilliant screenwriters working today. In addition to creating the critically acclaimed ABC series Lost, Lindelof created and wrote the HBO series The Leftovers and Watchmen, the Peacock show Mrs. Davis, and the films Prometheus, World War Z, and Star Trek Into Darkness. His new project, the DCU series Lanterns, will debut this August on HBO.
We’ll never know how Lindelof’s New Jedi Order would have panned out, but at least we now have a sense of what the screenwriter was going for with his seemingly groundbreaking Star Wars movie.