Last week, the much talked about man who does much of the talking, Kevin Smith, was lucky enough to drop by the set of J.J. Abrams STAR WARS: EPISODE VII and was apparently moved by what he saw, as his Instagram picture of a man in tears made circulations faster than a group of Ewoks could set up a trap for an AT-ST (seriously though, how the hell did they build that???). Smith was very clear that he signed a non-disclosure agreement, but that didn’t stop him from dropping a few juicy bits of information at the Neuchatel International Film Festival in Switzerland. You can check out the entire video below (the STAR WARS goodness begins at the 35-minute mark), but I’ve included the highlights further down.
Start the dick jokes here:
Regarding his initial reactions on set:
What I saw, I absolutely loved. It was tactile — it was real. It wasn’t a series of f*cking 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 f*cking 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.
Describing his experience boarding the Millennium Falcon:
As I walked up that ramp I realized that the something that was missing from those other movies, and it’s now in these movies. He (Abrams) is 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. It’s like the field of dreams, the Kevin Costner movie, and if J.J. builds it, we’re all going to come hard, because it’s 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.
It’s hard to judge the final product of a film just by a set visit, but you can’t deny that there’s something magical about having the full-sized Millennium Falcon there to actually board and explore. Tears might seem like a bit of an extreme, but I admittedly recall watching STAR WARS for the first time in years when it hit DVD (about a decade ago) and I got misty-eyed by a big, ole nostalgia sucker punch. It’s a thing! It happens! Here’s hoping those “real-time” sets add up to some better Star Wars films.
STAR WARS: EPISODE VII, will show off it’s practical effects on December 18, 2015.
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