Director Deborah Chow Discusses Lucasfilm's OBI-WAN KENOBI Series and The Complexity of The Story

One of the directors of The Mandalorian, Deborah Chow, is now in development on Lucasfilm’s highly anticipated untitled Obi-Wan Kenobi series. She directed the last episode of The Mandalorian, “The Sin”, which is the best episode so far!

Obi-Wan Kenobi was originally being planned as a film, but that all changed with the arrival of Disney+. The opportunity to tell a long-form story with this character is one that Lucasfilm couldn’t pass up! We don’t know much about the series, but we do know that it will be set between the time of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. We also know that it will take place on Tatooine.

During a recent interview with The New York Times, Chow explains that she is grateful to Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni for guiding her into the Star Wars universe:

“One of the biggest benefits is that I just spent the last year in the Star Wars universe and I had great mentors, coming in under [Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni]. Absorbing that, I feel, was the best training I could have had to take on the next one”

When talking about what it was like for her to dive in and direct The Mandalorian, she said:

“So much of it just feeling it and understanding it, on an instinctual level, to know what’s right and what’s wrong with it. And there’s so much knowledge — every prop, every costume is important. Every detail really matters.”

Chow showed us that she has what it takes to bring a Star Wars story to life, and it’ll be cool to see what she ends up bringing to the Obi-Wan Kenobi series. One thing she is happy about is having time to tell his story with a series instead of trying to cram a story into a two-hour film. The filmmaker says that she needs that time to explore the complexity of the character and the state of the galaxy:

“The situation is so complex both for [Obi-Wan] personally and in a way, the state of the galaxy, you sort of need time to explore it and to be honest there are loads of other stories within that period as well, it’s quite a few years. There is so much going on between [Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope] that hasn’t been explored. The idea of being able to go into a character journey plus the politics and plus all the vastness of the empire and what’s going on is exciting just because it feels like a proper period of history and sometimes that is hard to do in two hours. Sometimes with two-hour movies there is always an imperative for the action and the plot to move particularly fast and quickly and to go from action sequence to action sequence and there are many more aspects to storytelling that I find interesting.”

I like that they are going to take some time to explore this time period in the Star Wars universe that hasn’t really been explored that much. There’s no word on when the series will air on Disney+ but it will consist of six episodes and it will start shooting next year.

What are you hoping to see from this upcoming Obi-Wan Kenobi series?