J.J. Abrams Reveals The Weirdest Moment Making STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS
Another day, another piece of that Vanity Fair interview with writer/director J.J. Abrams centering on the highly-anticipated Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The outlet has revealed another snippet of their conversation with the filmmaker, and in it, J.J. reveals his weirdest moment working on the movie.
Maybe the weirdest moment, which came months after production, was the first time I sat down with John Williams to show him about a half an hour of the movie. I can’t describe the feeling. All I will say is, just to state the facts of it: I am about to show John Williams 30 minutes of a Star Wars movie that he has not seen that I directed.
I mean, none of what I just said to you was ever going to happen in any form. John Williams—he was the DVD or Blu-ray of my childhood because we didn’t, of course, have VHS tapes of movies to watch when we wanted to. So I would buy John Williams soundtracks, often for movies I had not seen yet, and I would lie on the floor in my room with my headphones on listening to the soundtracks which would essentially tell me the story of the movie that I didn’t know. And I’d look at the photographs on the back of the album and I tried to read what I could about the movie—but really, I would just listen to these soundtracks. So it was an amazing thing to get to know him. But the weirdest thing was the idea that I was showing him scenes from a Star Wars movie he hadn’t seen yet. And the fact that they were scenes that I directed—that’s probably as surreal as it gets in my professional life experience.
That must have been a pretty cool thing for him. As someone who has never been a die-hard Star Wars fan (I was much more into the Indiana Jones movies as a kid), I'm finding myself surprised at how much I'm looking forward to The Force Awakens. The way Abrams is able to capture the sense of adventure on screen has always been one of his greatest strengths, and there's so much promise in the air right now about these new movies that it's impossible not to get swept up in the excitement. We'll find out in a few months if he's created something that lives up to all of the hype — Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens on December 18th.