JJ Abrams Says THE FORCE AWAKENS' Lightsaber Duels Are Rawer and More Aggressive
One of the coolest things about the Star Wars films is the lightsaber duels, and it all started with the confrontation between Obi-wan Kenobi and Darth Vader in A New Hope. That was the first real duel. From then on, the lightsaber fights got more and more elaborate. In the prequel films, the fight choreography was freakin’ beautiful. The movies may have been crap, but the lightsaber fight sequences were pretty cool to watch. I remember having conversations with my friends back in the day that the fight scenes might have been too perfectly choreographed.
Looks like Director J.J. Abrams wanted to change that and he has scaled back a bit on how the Lightsaber fights play out in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. During an interview with Empire, the director promises the return to the rawer lightsaber battles, which we’ve gotten a brief taste of in the trailers. He says:
“When you look at Star Wars and Empire, they are very different lightsaber battles, but for me they felt more powerful because they were not quite as slick. I was hoping to go for something much more primitive, aggressive and rougher, a throwback to the kind of heart-stopping lightsaber fights I remembered being so enthralled by as a kid.”
Abrams also talked about some of the other things that inspired him on The Force Awakens outside of the Star Wars films. Some of that inspiration came from Terrence Malick, Akira Kurosawa, and John Ford. Empire reports:
[Abrams] looked at “the confidence” of John Ford Westerns. He took in the “unbelievable scene choreography and composition” of Kurosawa’s High and Low. And he studied “the powerful stillness” of Terrence Malick. “It’s not something I would normally have thought of coming to Star Wars,” he says. The spare visual style of Ford, Kurosawa and Malick points to a key mandate for Abrams’ approach to Episode VII: the distinctive less-is-more quality of the originals.
It’s interesting to hear that. I love the “less is more” concept. I’ve always believed that about telling great stories in filmmaking. It’s nice to know that he followed that concept with The Force Awakens. I’m really curious to see how exactly these lightsaber duels are going to play out, though. It looks and sounds like it’s going to be different from anything we’ve seen before in this saga.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens hits theaters December 18th.
Via: ScreenRant