Kevin Smith Shares His STAR WARS: EPISODE VII Set Visit Experience
Last week, Kevin Smith posted a tearful photo of himself after visiting the set of J.J. Abrams' Star Wars: Episode VII. You can tell the guy had one of the greatest experiences of his life. Well, during a Q&A at the Neuchatel International Film Festival in Switzerland, the filmmaker shared some really cool things about that experience.
There's a video of him talking about it below, and it starts at the 35:00 min. mark. I've included a few excerpts that you can read below if you can't watch the video. In this first part he talks about watching some filming:
"What I saw, I absolutely loved. It was tactile — it was real. It wasn’t a series of fucking green screens and blue screens in which later a bunch of digital characters would be added. IT was there, it was happening. I saw old friends who I haven’t seen since my childhood, who aren’t really friends, but I love them more than some of my fucking relatives. I saw uniforms, I saw artillery I haven’t seen since I was a kid. I saw them shooting an actual sequence in a set that was real. I walked across the set, there were explosions. And it looked like a shot right out of a Star Wars movie."
I don't know about you, but it sounds like we might be seeing some Stormtroopers in action! There were a lot of little hints buried in that comment. You just have to read between the lines. He goes on to discuss what it was like seeing the Millennium Falcon:
"He turns the lights on and there is the Millennium Falcon from my childhood. Now the ship outside looks like a movie set, but the inside, fully replicated, fully built. The guy told me, they took two blueprints: Star Wars and Empire, because the cockpit in Empire was bigger than the cockpit in Star Wars. So they went somewhere between the two. So he takes me over and I’m just looking at it. You look at it from the outside and you can still see inside. I don’t presume we’re going aboard or anything, and then Morgan (JJ’s assistant) says 'You ready to go up' I said (excitedly) 'We can go on it?!'
"As I walked up that ramp I realized that the something that was missing from those other movies (the prequels) and its now in these movies. And its not the obvious like hey the Millennium Falcon or hey the characters that we know are returning. Its something else entirely — he’s building a tactile world, a world you can touch. And he's replicating with all the love of someone who has the world’s greatest collection of Star Wars figures. And when you walk on that set man, I don’t know how else to describe it except thusly: you use another pop culture reference to describe this pop culture phenomenon. Its like the field of dreams, the Kevin Costner movie. And if JJ builds it, we’re all going to come hard, because its amazing. It looks fantastic. So anyone out there wondering if he's going to pull it off, he's pulling it off. He showed me cut scenes, he showed me sequences, images, pictures. I cried and I hugged that guy. And I’m sure as I was crying and hugging on him that he was thinking 'time is money' because they're making a movie. But he got it. He was very flattered. And I was like 'Honestly dude, you’re doing it. You’re making my childhood again. You’re doing our Star Wars. What I saw, blew me away.'"
How freakin' cool is that? Hearing this stuff just gets me even more stoked for this movie, and I didn't think it was possible to get anymore excited that this is actually happening! Check out the video below where he talks about even more Star Wars greatness. Thanks to /Film for the tip!
