At times this sort of stuff makes me think I should avoid making movies with gigantic fanbases if I get to where I want to be in life, especially stuff like Star Wars and comics. It's just nuts how these people are being treated. I mean I hate what Snyder did with my favorite characters for example but acting like an emotional terrorist/scumbag and trying to make these people suffer, especially in the childish manner we've seen here is just ridiculous.
That's how I feel man. I'm not really an aspiring director per se, but I work closely as a producer and composer on short films with a friend of mine who's a very talented filmmaker with big aspirations. And I tell him all the time, you'd be crazy to ever do any type of franchise property if you ever ended up in that position. I know you need a thick skin to put yourself out there in any creative field. It's a given that some people will hate your work. But I don't think dealing with constant, personal assaults should be part of the territory, and that's sadly the world we live in now.
I really think a lot of these fans out there have a misunderstanding of what the creative process is. You're not going in there and intentionally trying to hurt people's feelings. You're not even necessarily just trying to go in and satisfy your own inner fan fiction. I'm sure Rian Johnson is the type of fan who, had he not been involved with the franchise, would've been cheering along with everyone else if at the end of TFA Rey handed Luke the saber and he just ignited it and said "lez do thizzz", cut to credits.
But if you're good at what you do, you take your craft seriously, which I believe Johnson is, you're a slave to story. You're trying to find where the story and characters are telling you they want to go. And you're hoping that leads to some interesting places that will take the audience on a ride that feels unpredictable, yet somehow inevitable. That's the job. Especially in his case where he was telling only the middle chapter of a 3 part story. His job was to crack that story as he saw it, write something that he believed he could execute on screen, and something that was ultimately going to be able to get the approval of Disney and Lucasfilm and fit into this larger mythology. And in the case of Star Wars, both he and JJ are faced with the monumental task of adding more story to this borderline sacred cultural juggernaut that already had a perfectly satisfying ending in 1983. It's no easy task, and I think both of them handled it with a pretty remarkable amount of poise and grace considering what they were up against and all the backlash they had to know they were going to get from the word go.
You're absolutely free to disagree with the conclusions he arrived at, but this presumption of bad faith on his part is where it all goes awry and I begin to question how much some of these people have considered what the creative process is actually all about. And that's especially apparent to me when fans say Rian was just giving JJ the finger with TLJ and that's where all the creative decisions were stemming from. It's an incredibly misguided way to look at it, IMO.
I mean, sure, it would've been very easy for this whole trilogy to be something extremely safe that preserved the OT in amber. To me though, the OT is the OT because those movies told a great story that was unafraid to challenge the audience's conceptions about it along the way. How can Star Wars ever truly be essential myth again if it's not willing to still do
that thing?
This is why I have to admire TLJ. Even if I don't agree with every choice or it's not how
I would've written it. In fact in some cases, it did the exact opposite of what I wanted. But it showed a level of boldness that gave me hope for where the franchise could go in the future, and that went a long way for me.
