Is there a sense of wonder that comes with being on that set? J.J. has shown us that there are actual spaceships there, not just green screen visual effects.
Driver: Oh yeah. The thing about Star Wars that’s so good—sure there’s this huge [canvas]. It’s space, it’s a long time ago in a galaxy far away. That’s set up immediately. But in the midst of all those things, what has made those movies last so long is that they’re all grounded, which is something that is not so far off from every movie with huge universal themes of siblings and parents and betrayal and trust. That’s so generic and obvious, but it’s hard to balance those things.
That’s what Star Wars comes down to.
Driver: When you break all of those things down, really it’s just because someone wasn’t loved enough or felt betrayed. That’s what makes those movies so universal. I think they can get in your mind in big and sweeping ways.
What did you love about the earlier Star Wars films?
Driver: I always think back to the original movies and to those quieter moments where Luke is out in A New Hope, and there are the two suns setting, and it’s just such a quiet moment. It is the equivalent, basically, of a farm boy dying to get out of his small town and do something bigger. It’s those kinds of universal themes that ground this whole thing in space.
George Lucas put a lot about fatherhood into that original trilogy. It turns out his own dad owned an office supply store, built it from the ground up, and wanted his son to, basically, “join me and together we will rule the office supply galaxy.” We don’t often see that kind of intimacy in large-scale Hollywood sci-fi epics.
Driver: Friendship, I feel, is something that maybe isn’t investigated as much—or maybe I’m not watching those movies. It was such a huge part of the original three. “I’m going to go save my friend.” Everyone was going to go bail their friends out. “I can’t do this because my friends, everything is at stake because of my friends. I gotta go back. … Yoda, I gotta leave, whatever… I gotta leave.” [Laughs]
