Taika Waititi has talked about the tone he wants to strike in his long-gestating Star Wars project, saying he wants it to capture the “fun” of the original trilogy. It’s now well over five years since it was announced that director Taika Waititi had been hired by Lucasfilm to make a Star Wars movie, and ... Star Wars | Taika Waititi’s film will attempt to capture the ‘fun’ of the original trilogy
Taika Waititi has talked about the tone he wants to strike in his long-gestating Star Wars project, saying he wants it to capture the “fun” of the original trilogy.
It’s now well over five years since it was announced that director Taika Waititi had been hired by Lucasfilm to make a Star Wars movie, and it doesn’t sound as though the production has moved along all that much.
Collared by Variety at the Sundance premiere of Fing!, a family adventure in which he plays the villain, Waititi was asked what he’s likely to bring to his Star Wars film.
“I’m just trying to go back and harness a little bit more of the fun from the original films, which is what I remember [from] them,” he said. “The stakes are very high, and there’s serious things going on, but there’s also a lot of fun to be had in those films. That’s what I was trying to bring back.”
He also touched on the fact that his film, with a script by Krysty Wilson-Cairns, will be a standalone film rather than a numbered chapter in the Star Wars saga.
“I was trying to work in a world that was a little bit separate to that because they’ve got so many things going on within that space,” he said. “For me to do something there, it would need to be a little different and a little bit more its own thing.”
It’s also somewhat telling that Waititi’s brief description of his film is almost identical to he gave over two years ago on The Kelly Clarkson Show, where he said he wanted to capture the ‘joy’ of The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi, but also added that he might “piss people off.”
What Variety didn’t get to ask, however, is exactly when this Waititi Wars film is likely to appear. Outgoing Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy described it as “still somewhat alive” in her exit interview earlier in January, adding that she’d read a “hilarious and great” script, but that turning it into a movie people can watch is “just not my decision, especially when I’ve got a foot out the door.”
Whether or not the Jojo Rabbit and Thor: Love And Thunder filmmaker’s Star Wars adventure gets made will come down to Lucasfilm’s new co-presidents, Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan.
