Rian Johnson Urges Star Wars to Take More Creative Risks

Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson, who has been out promoting his Knives Out threequel, Wake Up Dead Man, has also been chatting about the current state of Lucasfilm’s sci-fi fantasy franchise and what it might need moving forward.

The director understands that his 2017 flick remains one of the most debated installments in the Star Wars saga. To many fans, The Last Jedi’s bold decisions to paint Luke as a reluctant hero, kill Snoke off without much fanfare, and declare Rey’s parents as ordinary slid too far from expectations and tore down the franchise’s mythos instead of building on it. To others, those were all plus points, and The Last Jedi was right to risk alienating some of the audience to do something, well, different!

Johnson, who grew up a Star Wars fan himself, says he understands that when the franchise gets challenging, there’s “recoil” against it. “I know how there can be infighting in the world of Star Wars,” he told Polygon. “But I also know that the worst sin is to handle it with kid gloves.”

He added, “The worst sin is to be afraid of doing anything that shakes it up. Because every Star Wars movie going back to Empire and onward shook the box and rattled fans, and got them angry, and got them fighting, and got them talking about it. And then for a lot of them, got them loving it and coming around on it eventually.”

Indeed, some are old enough to remember the backlash to George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels, but for many younger fans at the time, those movies were their first exposure to the franchise, and there remains plenty of nostalgia for them. There will be a section of Gen Z and Gen Alpha whose love for Star Wars is really rooted in The Mandalorian. The upcoming Starfighter movie also aims to breathe new life into the franchise – set in a new era with new characters.

As for his own involvement in Star Wars, Johnson has moved on to other projects, but he’s still a fan of the franchise, and being a vocal advocate for risk-taking and creative evolution within the galaxy far, far away can’t be a bad thing in a Hollywood landscape where even big franchises like the MCU are falling back on legacy to keep fans interested.