The news broke yesterday that the Oscar-winning directors of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” had directed an episode of the upcoming Lucasfilm series “Star Wars: Skeleton Crew”.
What wasn’t clear at the time was how many episodes they would do and whether it was part of the already shot first season or was it for an upcoming (and as yet unannounced) second season.
Since then, the pair have confirmed on Instagram post story it was a single episode of the first season. Daniel Kwan, one-half of the directing duo alongside Daniel Scheinert, also discussed the criticism the pair has been receiving after the initial report.
To put it simply, various cinephiles got upset on social media that these directors were “selling out” to the Disney corporate machine, seemingly mistaking the reports suggesting the pair were going to direct a whole season (as opposed to a single episode) rather than focus on original filmmaking. Kwan says in his post:
“Lol, all of the people @ing us about getting sucked up by the ‘corporate machine’ can chill. These headlines are always misleading. Don’t worry. We aren’t working on a whole series, we guest-directed one episode.
Jon Watts approached us to do an episode a while ago (before ‘EEAAO’ even came out). We love Jon, love ‘Star Wars,’ love learning new tech, we love meeting new cast and crew, and we needed the days to keep our healthcare (!!!) so it was an easy yes.
We shot it last year and had an incredible time working with the most talented cast and crew and i’m excited for you all to see it. Our next film will be an original Daniels project so you can stop worrying (and stop bothering me about it).”
The Daniels directing the episode follows a common trend of late of celebrated directors tackling prestige TV for a single episode – the most recent “The Mandalorian” episode was helmed by “Minari” director Lee Isaac Chung whilst the sixth episode of HBO’s “The Last of Us” hailed from celebrated “Quo Vadis, Aida” director Jasmila Žbanić.
“Star Wars: Skeleton Crew” is expected to arrive on Disney+ sometime later this year.
