J.J. Abrams worried ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ would be a ”f***ing disaster”.
The 49-year-old filmmaker has opened up about the pressure of directing the highly anticipated next film in the franchise, ‘Episode VII’, and confessed he was terrified members of the new cast wouldn’t work well with the actors from the original trilogy, who include Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill.
He said: ”When we met Daisy Ridley, when we found John Boyega, and then Oscar Isaac and Adam Driver came aboard, we got really excited. And yes, Daisy and John could work together, but what happens when Harrison’s in the mix? What will that feel like? If it doesn’t spark, it’s a f***ing disaster.”
The ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ director wasn’t just worried about the human characters getting on, however, as he admitted he wasn’t sure new robot BB-8 would gel with the much-loved droids C-3PO and R2-D2 from the previous films.
He told Wired magazine: ”Yes, BB-8 is a great character, amazingly puppeteered, but what will happen when he’s suddenly in a scene with C-3PO or R2-D2? Will it feel bizarre? Will it feel wrong? Somehow it didn’t. When Anthony Daniels [C-3PO] told me, ‘Oh my God, I love BB-8!’ I said, ‘We’re going to be OK’. Because if he’s OK, it’s working.”
And Abrams was thrilled when he realised that everything he’d worked so hard to put together was going to come across on-screen.
He added: ”It was really exciting to say, ‘These scenes are working!’ We worked really hard to cast and to write and to put it all together, but you just don’t know until you start shooting. Then all of a sudden, you’re on-set watching it and you know. It’s a little bit like having a party and having friends from your new school meet friends from your old school, and you think, ‘What’s going to happen?’ And all of a sudden they’re getting along famously and this party’s really fun! It was a lot of work, but it ended up being great.”