In an interview with the Happy Sad Confused podcast, director James Mangold was asked about his upcoming Star Wars film, which will explore the dawn of the Jedi, and if it will use terms such as Force and Jedi.
Mangold himself recently cast doubt on the script even using terms like “Force” or “Jedi,” as it will seemingly be in such infancy that the characters wouldn’t have names to describe either the mystical connection between living things or a label for an organization adopting certain teachings.
“I don’t wanna make any guarantees one way or another, but it will be before Jedi, meaning you might be experiencing something that might become Jedi,” Mangold replied to the Happy Sad Confused podcast about whether the film will use those terms. “Despite the fact that other people make movies other ways, I don’t tend to think people brand themselves before they’ve actually found themselves. So you don’t come up with a name for your organization … ‘Let’s put this big thing on our chests.’ I think that the branding tends to happen later.”
Even though Mangold has directed films like Logan and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, both of which have connections to sprawling franchises, he detailed how he aimed to go so far back into Star Wars’ history that he can make a standalone story as opposed to having to be hindered by connecting narrative tissue.
“When I talk to some of the Star Wars clerics who keep track of all these timelines, I was like, ‘So when would this have happened?’ and they were like, ‘25,000 years before Episode I.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I was looking for some distance, but that’s distance,'” the filmmaker joked. “The reality, for me, was that feeling of space, pun not intended but apropos, was something that I felt was really important. Not to get away from — again, fan service or the intricacies of what George [Lucas] has set up and dreamed of, but to just have the space to tell a story and not be instantly encumbered by the bases you have to hit. Which, honestly, there’s no way to explain it to folks other than to say it’s like that game we played as kids, Twister, that at a certain point, you’re in a tangle because you just are trying to find a way to tell a story with so many constraints that you can’t.”
Listen/watch the podcast here.
