The father-and-son writing team behind Solo: A Star Wars Story — Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan — spoke to SFX Magazine about the film’s tone and more….
“For me, one of the most irresistible moments in A New Hope was that there was one of these characters hurtling through space who thinks that the Force and the Jedi are a bunch of mumbo-jumbo that he’s heard about, but doesn’t believe in,” said the elder Kasdan, who served as screenwriter for 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back. “It turned out that all the movies after that had to deal with the Empire and the Force and the Jedi and everything, but I was looking for the escape hatch. Where do we get to have the fun of this galaxy?”
Lawrence’s son Jonathan elaborated: “We’re not dealing with the spiritual side of Star Wars. It’s about a set of concerns that I think are relatable to all people, but are specific to movies like Westerns and crime movies, where people are out for their own very specific ends. We felt we could do a fun, crime-movie Western, and “Han was a cool character to put in the center of it. That was an attractive protagonist.”
And the Kasdans don’t just mean attractive from a writing standpoint either. While Han was a bit of a puckish rogue in the original trilogy, stealing kisses from Princess Leia and using his smoldering stare to make audiences’ hearts go pitter-patter, Solo: A Star Wars Story may be the most explicitly romantic of the Star Wars movies yet. Jonathan Kasdan claimed that the new trilogy of films were handling the topic of romance “cautiously,” while he and his father wanted to embrace the idea.
“Han is the least chaste character in the Star Wars saga, so we saw making a young Han movie as an opportunity to really deal with a romantic and sexual relationship where he’s truly attracted to a woman and it’s a big part of the dynamic,” Jonathan said.
That woman is Qi’ra, played by Emilia Clarke. Yes, the woman who plays Daenerys Targaryen on Game of Thrones is trading in her fantasy dragons for sci-fi spaceships. Solo will be her second stab at the genre since 2015’s Terminator Genisys, where she played a young, alternate-timeline Sarah Connor. “The relationship between Han and Qi’ra is as essential to the movie as anything – it’s central to that exploration of what is driving Han, what he’s searching for and what keeps him looking for the next big score.”
Read the full article at the link below, and for more on Solo: A Star Wars Story and other Sci-Fi films/shows, pick up a copy of the 300th(!) and latest issue of SFX, out now!
