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Kevin Smith Visits the Set for Star Wars: Episode VII; 2 Cast Members Added

Like many people my age, I grew up on the original Star Wars trilogy. Unlike most of my friends, I don’t remember the first time I watched it, it was always just… there.

The prequel trilogy was a huge let down, the magic of the original trilogy was that it felt both completely fantastical and yet grounded in reality. I know I’m not the only one who carries this opinion, so one of the biggest worries of bringing Star Wars back to the big screen would be an over-reliance on CGI again.

Fortunately, Kevin Smith (who always manages to slip in a Star Wars reference in his films) had a chance to visit the set and has quelled some of those fears. JJ Abrams has done without the greenscreens of the prequels, and replaced them with genuine sets and props. Here’s a transcript of what he saw:

What I saw, I absolutely loved. It was tactile it was real. It wasn't a series of fucking 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 fucking 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.

Since he signed an NDA, he can’t speak about what he saw. In fact, in the Lucasfilm office where he signed the document, there’s a poster of an Imperial Officer with his finger pressed against his lips titled, “Loose lips sink starships.” Fortunately, he did speak about climbing on board Han Solo’s ship, the Millennium Falcon (authors note: my favorite starship design of all time), because images of it have already leaked onto the internet:

He turns the lights on and there is the Millennium Falcon from my childhood. Now the ship outside looks like a movie set, but the inside, fully replicated, fully built. The guy told me, they took two blueprints: Star Wars and Empire, because the cockpit in Empire was bigger than the cockpit in Star Wars. So they went somewhere between the two. So he takes me over and I'm just looking at it. You look at it from the outside and you can still see inside. I don't presume we're going aboard or anything, and then Morgan (JJ's assistant) says "You ready to go up?" I said (excitedly) "We can go on it?!"

As I walked up that ramp I realized that the something that was missing from those other movies (the prequels) and its now in these movies. And it’s not the obvious like hey the Millennium Falcon or hey the characters that we know are returning. It’s something else entirely he's 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. And when you walk on that set man, I don't know how else to describe it except thusly: you use another pop culture reference to describe this pop culture phenomenon. It’s like the field of dreams, the Kevin Costner movie. And if JJ 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.

Reading about that almost brings a tear to my eye as well. Smith is a bit of a polarizing figure in the film industry, but one thing no one can say is that he isn’t a huge geek and his enthusiasm for what Abrams is doing is infectious. Here’s the video where you can see him speak about it, which starts around the 35 minute mark.

In other news, two new cast members have been added. They are newcomer Crystal Clarke and parkour star Pip Anderson, but there is no indication who they are playing. Here’s a photo provided by StarWars.com:

Star Wars: Episode VII premieres December 18, 2015

Hat tip: /Film

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