“Lost” and “Watchmen” series co-creator Damon Lindelof has gone into detail about why he was fired from a “Star Wars” movie and gone into detail about what the film would’ve covered.
Lindelof was announced as a writer on a new “Star Wars” movie in 2022, teaming with writers Justin Britt-Gibson (“Lanterns”) and Rayna McClendon (“Briarpatch,” “Willow”) to develop the script. The plan was for a film that would come after the events of “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker”.
Within about a year, it was revealed that he had left the project. This week, Lindelof guest-starred on an episode of The Ringer’s House of R podcast and confirmed he was “fired off of a ‘Star Wars’ movie”.
He explained the situation and what the goal of the project would’ve been which deals with a real problem the franchises faces within its fandom – the battle between nostalgia and breaking new ground:
“I was fired off of a ‘Star Wars’ movie. They asked me, ‘What do you think a “Star Wars” movie should be?’ And I said, ‘Here’s what it should be.’ And they said, ‘Great, you’re hired.’ And then two years later, I was fired. And so I was wrong, at least through that prism.
But what we were attempting to do, my partner Justin Britt-Gibson, Rayna McClendon and I, what we were attempting to do was to have this conversation in the movie, which is to say there is a Force of nostalgia and there is a Force of revision, and they are at odds with one another, and let’s do the Protestant Reformation inside ‘Star Wars,’ and it didn’t work.
You have your cake and eat it too. The conversation that the fandom is having, without winking and looking at the audience, that didn’t feel necessarily that risky.”
He goes on to say that figuring out how to make his story connect to the existing universe was incredibly difficult:
“I may have been fired not just because they seemed to like the premise. The writing was really hard. It was slow. Like the tone, getting it right, where it was inside of the canon, what its relationship was to Episode IX. Is it starting a new trilogy? Is it like all of those things? They’re so massive. They’re so big. It’s sort of a tanker equation, which is you turn the wheel and it takes five minutes before it turns a little bit like this.
When Episode VII came out, we all knew what it was Rey and it was Finn and it was Poe and then we were migrating back in and Luke and Leia and Han and Chewy and all those guys. But we got the sense that, when this new trilogy was over, we were going to be launching with these new characters, and that was the center of ‘Star Wars.’ The new question is are Mando and Grogu the center of ‘Star Wars’?”
When Lindelof exited, Steven Knight later came aboard to write a version for director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, with that version being formally announced at Star Wars Celebration Europe 2023 with Daisy Ridley returning as Rey.
Knight later left the project as well, and at present it’s not clear if the film will move forward.
