Vanity Fair have published an indepth profile with Kathleen Kennedy, including an interview with Kathleen, and comment from many of her colleagues over an incredible career.
Perhaps of most significance with regards the future of Star Wars, is the suggestion that she wants Tony Kushner to pen a Star Wars movie. Tony Kushner of course was the screenwriter for Munich and Lincoln.
“I suppose the thing that I think about every now and then, that I miss, is: I love writers.” In particular she mentioned Tony Kushner, who wrote the play and the screen adaptation of Angels in America. Kushner also worked with Kennedy on Munich and Lincoln. She said, “To sit and talk ideas with Tony—to, you know, explore lots of different areas we could go—it’s such a constant education. That is thrilling. And so the only thing I suppose I can do is try to get Tony Kushner to write a Star Wars movie.” Kennedy laughed. “There are times I think about that.”Tony Kushner: “She talked about the way in which the conventional approach to these things is that a script starts from an outline, and that’s what everybody focuses on before there’s a word of dialogue.” In Kushner’s recollection, Kennedy was urging the writers to turn their focus to the characters. She kept saying to them, “Who are these people? I don’t know who these people are.” Kushner felt that “she was expressing an impatience about character being secondary to story line, which violated something very essential for her.”
He went on: “We had an interesting conversation about how a lot of playwrights start with outlines because it gives you something to hold on to, but that you know the characters are likely to derail the outline once they start doing what they do.” He and Kennedy talked about how “there’s no telling what will happen once you have invented a person. They may be willing to do what the outline says to do, but they may have very different plans in mind.” The sense Kushner got was that Kennedy “was pushing people to be unafraid of being lost for a while. It was good to see her holding the banner of complexity in the middle of this huge enterprise of Star Wars.” The machines, in other words, have not won.
