I am not sure who is more excited about the prospect of J. J. Abrams directing the upcoming Star Wars: Episode VII – fans of the ionic film franchise or Abrams himself.
At least that’s the feeling I have after reading some comments from the director in the latest issue of Britain’s Empire magazine. Abrams is currently starting to do the press for his upcoming Star Trek Into Darkness due out this summer, and it is a sure bet that journalists will be peppering him with questions about what he will be doing over the next few years in a galaxy far, far away. But it turns out that Abrams himself isn’t quite sure yet and admitted as much when Empire asked him about how he is approaching the project.
I don’t know because we’re just getting started. So it’s a great question that I hope I’ll have a good answer to when I know what the answer is. There are infinitely more questions than answers right now, but to me, they’re not that dissimilar. Though I came at these both from very different places, where they both meet is a place of ‘Ooh, that’s really exciting.’ And even though I was never a Star Trek fan, I felt like there was a version of it that would make me excited, that I would think ‘that’s cool, that feels right, I actually would want to see that.
How we were going to get there, what the choices were going to be, who was going to be in it – all of those things I knew would have to be figured out, but it was all based on a foundation of this indescribable, guttural passion for something that could be. It’s a similar feeling that I have with Star Wars. I feel like I can identify a hunger for what I would want to see again and that is an incredibly exciting place to begin a project. The movies, the worlds could not be more different but that feeling that there’s something amazing here is the thing that they share.
Abrams also addressed how he came to change his mind about taking on Episode VII after first publicly stating that he didn’t want to take on the film.
My knee-jerk reaction was that I’m in the middle of working on the Star Trek movie and I can’t even consider it. But then time went by and I got further along working on the movie and getting to a place where I had done most of the heavy lifting. So when I met with Kathy Kennedy we just started discussing it and I was able to actually engage in the conversation. I went down to tell Katie, my wife and I said ‘I had just a very interesting conversation with Kathy.’ That was the beginning.
I will say that Steven [Spielberg] was very encouraging of Star Wars. It’s funny because I talked to him about it and it turned out he knew all about what was going on.
Currently, Star Wars: Episode VII has been targeted for a 2015 release, though in the past Abrams has expressed some concern about meeting that deadline.
