J.J. Abrams Admits That Having a Plan Would Have Benefited the STAR WARS Sequel Trilogy

The Star Wars sequel trilogy that we got ended up being kind of a mess. In fact, when I watched all three of those films back-to-back they did not flow at all; they were disjointed. There was really no planning involved when Lucasfilm set out to make these films.

Screenwriting and storytelling 101 is to know your ending, from there you build out the script or story. It’s a lot easier to plan out when you know where the story is going. In the case of this Star Wars trilogy, they clearly didn’t know how the story would end.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Lucasfilm and the creative team should have had all three films planned out with the scripts written and approved before they made those films. They would have turned out to be far superior films.

Well, Star Wars director J.J. Abrams admits that those films would have benefitted from planning. During a recent interview with Collider he said:

“I’ve been involved in a number of projects that have been – in most cases, series – that have ideas that begin the thing where you feel like you know where it’s gonna go, and sometimes it’s an actor who comes in, other times it’s a relationship that as-written doesn’t quite work, and things that you think are gonna just be so well-received just crash and burn and other things that you think like, ‘Oh that’s a small moment’ or ‘That’s a one-episode character’ suddenly become a hugely important part of the story. I feel like what I’ve learned as a lesson a few times now, and it’s something that especially in this pandemic year working with writers [has become clear], the lesson is that you have to plan things as best you can, and you always need to be able to respond to the unexpected. And the unexpected can come in all sorts of forms, and I do think that there’s nothing more important than knowing where you’re going.”

Abrams then said that sometimes when you do plan things that plan gets in the way:

“There are projects that I’ve worked on where we had some ideas but we hadn’t worked through them enough, sometimes we had some ideas but then we weren’t allowed to do them the way we wanted to. I’ve had all sorts of situations where you plan things in a certain way and you suddenly find yourself doing something that’s 180 degrees different, and then sometimes it works really well and you feel like, ‘Wow that really came together,’ and other times you think, ‘Oh my God I can’t believe this is where we are,’ and sometimes when it’s not working out it’s because it’s what you planned, and other times when it’s not working out it’s because you didn’t [have a plan].”

Ultimately though, the filmmaker said that having a plan is the most critical thing:

“You just never really know, but having a plan I have learned – in some cases the hard way – is the most critical thing, because otherwise you don’t know what you’re setting up. You don’t know what to emphasize. Because if you don’t know the inevitable of the story, you’re just as good as your last sequence or effect or joke or whatever, but you want to be leading to something inevitable.”

So, in all the years that Abrams has been making movies and TV shows he hasn’t learned the importance of planning until now? That’s odd, but it’s better late than never!