Here's How Harrison Ford's Injury Made THE FORCE AWAKENS A Much Better Movie

If you've read about the making of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, you'll know that even though co-writers J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan had the bones of the story written before they started shooting, it didn't become the movie we know and love until production actually began. We already know that the script originally had Poe Dameron dying near the beginning of the movie, and now we're hearing that Harrison Ford's leg injury turned out to be a major blessing because it gave the writers enough time to recalibrate one of the movie's key relationships.

At the Tribeca Film Festival, Abrams spoke about the changes:

"When I was on the set of the Millennium Falcon and we started to do work with Rey and Finn, the first time we did it, it didn’t work at all. It was much more contentious. I didn’t direct it right. It was set up all wrong, and when Harrison Ford got injured - which was a very scary day - we ended up having a few weeks off, and it was during that time that I really got to look at what we had done and rewrite quite a bit of that relationship. So when we came back to work again, we actually just reshot from the ground up, those scenes. It was an amazingly helpful thing to get these two characters to where they needed to be.”

It obviously sucks that Ford got hurt, but since he ended up being OK, I think fans can breathe a sigh of relief and realize that his injury might have been the saving grace of this movie. Finn and Rey work so wonderfully together as we see them on screen, and while reshooting those scenes probably sucked for the crew, I bet Daisy Ridley — a rookie actor who gave a breakthrough performance in the film — probably benefited immensely from being able to do it over again.

Abrams also addressed the criticism that the movie was a carbon copy of Star Wars: A New Hope by basically saying, yes, of course it was — that was the whole point:

“The weird thing about that movie is that it had been so long since the last one. Obviously the prequels had existed in between and we wanted to, sort of, reclaim the story. So we very consciously - and I know it is derided for this - we very consciously tried to borrow familiar beats so the rest of the movie could hang on something that we knew was Star Wars.

This movie was a bridge and a kind of reminder. The audience needed to be reminded what Star Wars is, but it needed to be established with something familiar, with a sense of where we are going to new lands, which is very much what 8 and 9 do.”

That's basically what I've been saying ever since the movie came out. Abrams and Kasdan had a tremendous amount of pressure to put the franchise back on the right track, and making The Force Awakens reflective of the original trilogy was pretty much the only way to do that. As always, I'm super excited to see what Rian Johnson does with Episode VIII.

Source: IGN