‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’: 23 Things We Didn’t Know Until We Watched The Director’s Commentary

“Originally we panned down from the crawl and found this,” said Johnson, referencing Finn startling awake in his portable bacta tank/suit. But in the interest of “cutting to the chase,” Johnson decided in the editing room to construct a new opening, one that starts with the Resistance evacuating D’Qar and moves right into a dogfight and bombing run. “I guess we don’t see Finn until we need to see Finn.”

How much trouble did the Last Jedi team go through to get the most WTF moment of the film, where Luke milks a space cow and then gulps it down? A lot of trouble, it turns out. “We airlifted this creature in. We actually helicoptered with a cable this massive creature into this very hard-to-get-to rock face. Then our amazing Irish crew had to build a safety staircase hundreds of feet all the way down to the edge of that rock face so our crew could get down there. It was amazing.”

Yes it was amazing, and yes it was worth it.

When we pick up where The Force Awakens left off, with Rey handing Luke’s old lightsaber back to the exiled Jedi, Skywalker tosses the relic aside and pushes past his visitor. “That was always just something that made a lot of sense to me,” said Johnson. When figuring out why Luke pulled himself out of the fight years ago, a decision that was made at the top of J.J. Abrams’ Episode VII, Johnson knew two things about the Skywalker: he wasn’t a coward, and he had to have exiled himself for the greater good. Those are the facts that guided his decision.

When it comes to Luke’s death scene, he wanted it to be the opposite of Han Solo’s demise at the hands of Kylo Ren in the previous movie. “I wanted Luke to go out on his terms and in a feeling of, like Rey says at the end, peace and purpose.”

The Last Jedi finally showed Leia using the Force, just like her brother and father, in order to survive the vacuum of space. That sequence, it turns out, was suggested by Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy. “This was something that Kathy would bring up, the notion that Leia is a Skywalker as well and she’s got that same heritage. There’s the line in [Return of the] Jedi where Luke says, ‘You’ve got these powers too.’ And we never see them manifest, and the notion that in a moment like this when it seems like all is lost and she just realizes she’s not done yet. And almost through instinct, like how you hear about parents when their kids are trapped under cars getting Hulk strength to lift them up, that’s kind of what I wanted this moment to be with her, using the Force for the first time in these movies to pull herself back and to say, ‘We’re not done. This is not ending here.'”

“I smashed that helmet myself,” said Johnson. “I stomped on it. We actually got a take where it was just split in half and that was gonna be it, and then they were starting to take camera away and I was like, ‘Wait, let’s try one where it’s totally smashed and I just literally started stomping on it with both feet until it was shattered and that’s what we ended up using.”

Johnson has two tiny cameos in the film. The first comes at 33:48 when Luke’s gloved hand pulls Han’s old dice down on the Millennium Falcon. That’s actually Rian’s gloved hand! And later in the film at 54:10, you can hear Rian’s voice as the “jerk alien on the rich yacht” in the first scene on Canto Bight.

When that first trailer hit, everyone was flipping out about Luke’s line, “It’s time for the Jedi… to end.” As Johnson points out, that line was actually assembled in the editing room for the trailer, and was then left in the movie. “[That edit] was so much better than the line I originally wrote, I went back and readjusted it so it was just that and it worked so much better.”

Lupita Nyong’o’s charismatic adventurer Maz Kanata originally had a bigger role. “Originally I had her actually on the cruiser, and I just slowly found as I was writing it that so much of the stuff I had her doing, especially as the script got bigger and bigger, I could be more economical if I gave those beats to our main characters.”

“The best advice I got from anyone was from J.J.’s editors before we started making this movie. Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey, they both told me, in every single scene, just shoot a cutaway of BB-8 and you’ll never regret it. And we did and my editor Bob Ducsay and I, we said a thank you to Maryann and Mary Jo almost every day in the editing room.”

Our introduction to the Canto Bight casino comes via a magnificent dolly shot that zooms through the set–and it is a direct homage to the first-ever Oscar winner for Best Picture, the 1927 silent film Wings. They didn’t plan on doing that either, but all the establishing footage they were shooting on the day just wasn’t working. They wanted to try out this homage but didn’t have the tech needed to pull it off, so they worked up a makeshift rig using two dolly tracks that actors had to immediately duck out of the way of after the camera passed or else get hit by the contraption.

If Kylo Ren and Leia’s Force connection during the First Order’s attack on the fleeing Resistance fleet felt familiar, that’s because Rian used those 3-frame dissolves to be a direct homage to the scene at the end of The Empire Strikes Back when Vader and Luke connect telepathically. That’s just how Skywalkers talk to each other via long distance.

You put a blaster in Laura Dern’s hand, she’s gonna act live out her playground fantasies just like the rest of us. The one time Dern’s Admiral Holdo whips out a blaster and fires it, you can clearly see her say “pew.” “She could never not do, every time she shot it, and I think it’s still in there if you look at her lips.”

#1: The original footage from Leia’s hologram message was found and reused for when Artoo plays it for Luke on the Falcon. They even took the original audio and dirtied it up to make it sound like it did in A New Hope.

#2: The new Yoda puppet was made from the original mold used to create the first puppet back in 1979. They even tracked down the same woman that painted Yoda’s eyes for The Empire Strikes Back and had her repeat the process for The Last Jedi!

If Holdo and Leia’s moving scene together felt at all like Laura Dern having a deep fan moment with Carrie Fisher, that’s because that’s kinda what it was. Johnson said he felt it was important to let Dern and Fisher have input on their characters’ farewell exchange. Get ready for tears:

“This is where Laura got to talk to Carrie about what the character meant to her over the years, and really wanting to pay tribute to what Princess Leia over the years has meant to her, just as a real person in the world growing up,” said Johnson. “And Carrie’s line, ‘You go, I’ve said it enough,’ was a thing Carrie came up with. That whole moment was crafted around getting together with these two amazing actresses over an afternoon and talking through what that moment should be. It’s one of my favorites in the movie.”

Throughout the film, Rey and Kylo Ren are united by a mysterious connection through the Force that allows them to “see” and communicate with each other across the galaxy. And while you don’t physically see Adam Driver or Daisy Ridley in the shots where the opposite character is talking, Johnson revealed that they were both just off screen so each actor would have someone to really react to. And yes, that meant they flew (or helicoptered?!) Adam Driver out to all those remote locations for scenes he wasn’t in. Talk about commitment!

“The conflict between [Holdo] and Poe and the notion of there being discord amongst the good guys in these tight quarters of this ship, it almost owes more to Ronald Moore’s version of Battlestar Galactica than to the original Star Wars. It felt like something that would be interesting to explore.”

Rian had a bit to say about Supreme Leader Snoke’s #LEWK, which consists of a gold robe, gold slippers, gold everything. “I know it’s kind of a bold choice, but I really love it. I love the fact that he’s not just in dark, evil robes but that he’s got a little bit of flair to him. I mean, the whole set speaks to him having a sense of the dramatic, and the notion that he’s physically weak so he uses theatricality to cover that, and the notion of him being a little more glam. [Costume designer] Michael Kaplan showed me that design and I was just like, ‘Yes! Make it gold!'”

One of the biggest surprises in the movie comes when Kylo Ren assassinates Snoke while the Supreme Leader is connected to his mind! This moment took a lot of planning to pull off. “I talked a lot with Adam [Driver] about this moment and he really wanted to hone in on what Kylo is thinking, when he makes a decision, where his head is at coming in here.”

Rian said his take was, “[Kylo] comes in here”My take was, he comes into this moment, he knows that Snoke can read his intentions, if not his mind, and so he can’t be thinking actively about an opportunity. He’s gotta be in the moment here, but at the same time he’s looking for one. He’s gonna look for an opportunity to do something like this. And so that was his intent from the moment he walked into the scene, was to betray Snoke but he doesn’t quite know how to do it and he sees this opportunity and takes it.”

When Phasma’s helmet gets shattered by a blow from Finn’s weapon, there was a lot of discussion about what the intimidating stormtrooper would look like underneath the chrome. It was actually Daisy Ridley that suggested that instead of seeing a monster’s eye, you just see a sliver of Gwendoline Christie’s totally human face.

Rian’s references to other Star Wars films extended to things that aren’t quite canonical or well-known. The first comes at 1:30:50, when you see what at first looks like a landing ship revealed to be a First Order iron descending on a uniform. That, Johnson says, is a nod to the 1978 parody short Hardware Wars.

The second comes when the Falcon dives into a crystalline cave on Crait at 2:02:33. Rian says this sequence is “a little bit of an homage” to a section of the original Star Tours ride in Disney World.

Amongst all the Star Wars callbacks, Johnson did not leave the prequels out. When Kylo Ren marches into the abandoned Rebellion headquarters on Crait, Johnson framed that shot to parallel Anakin’s march on the Jedi Temple in Revenge of the Sith. “I always loved [that shot], it’s a beautiful graphic shot that George [Lucas] did and we wanted to do a callback to.”

The climax of The Last Jedi includes the highly anticipated reunion of General Leia and her brother Luke. And while we find out later that it’s a Force projection of Luke, it was (obviously) the real Mark Hamill on set next to Carrie Fisher. That day, Rian points out, was a very special day on set.

“It felt like church on set. It was unlike any other day. When we shot this scene, there was this hush over the whole crew and everyone was really just quiet and respectful and it really felt like we were getting something really special between these two.”

Rian also notes that Hamill and Fisher added their own elements to the scene. Hamill added Luke kissing Leia on the forehead, and Fisher came up with Leia’s joke about changing her hair.

“Adam Driver, ladies and gentlemen. Lookin’ good.”

Where to watch Star Wars: The Last Jedi