Screenwriter Simon Kinberg Says The New Star Wars Films Will Be Character Driven
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A few weeks ago, Disney announced that they would release, at least, one new Star Wars movie (either a spinoff or “episode” film) every summer, beginning with the release of Star Wars: Episode VII in 2015. Some worry that this aggressive strategy would somehow diminish the Star Wars brand, but if Disney and Lucasfilm bring on the best writers and directors in Hollywood to work on these films, then it will be very unlikely for Star Wars to dip in quality. One of the writers that they’ve hired to work on projects after Star Wars: Episode VII is Simon Kinberg.
In an interview with Hero Complex, Simon Kinberg talks about his approach to Star Wars and how writing scripts for X-Men: First Class and Days of Future Past, and Sherlock Holmes would be a different process. Kinberg says:
‘Well, I’ve worked in franchises where they have a long legacy, like the X-Men, or like Sherlock Holmes even, where you have a big fan base, and you have a lot of material to draw from. But I haven’t worked in anything like Star Wars. It’s definitely like the cultural referent for our generation. So it’s daunting and exciting.’ Kinberg continued, ‘We’re really at the early phases of figuring out the details, but the spirit of the original movie is the thing I fell in love with, so it’s the spirit of that that I think will guide us.’
Although it’s unclear which character the film will surround, Simon Kinberg was hired to write one of the Star Wars spinoff movies. Disney and Lucasfilm brought Kinberg onto Star Wars at the same time as The Empire Strikes Back screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan. They will both write spinoff movies and serve as consultants on Star Wars: Episode VII for director J.J. Abrams. When asked whether or not the new generation of Star Wars films would be character driven, Kinberg responds:
Completely. I think what worked so well in all of the Star Wars movies is the characters. I think the reason that they’re different than other science fiction or other genre movies is because George [Lucas] created a universe of people that you wanted to go back and see over and over again, and that’s why it’s spanned and spawned so many different mediums, so many different generations, every different language.
One of the reasons why the Star Wars prequels were not very good movie-going experiences was that the characters were largely dull and poorly written. Anakin Skywalker’s descent into madness was not compelling, but bland. That might have had something to do with the casting of Hayden Christensen, but George Lucas’ scripts and direction were the prequels’ biggest problems. So it’s good to see the new team recognize why Star Wars is universal and timeless.
