Like why J.J. Abrams made Harrison Ford cry. SPOILERS for one of the most successful movies ever made!
There was initially a lot more with Luke Skywalker — including a shot of him holding Darth Vader’s helmet.
As early as a month after J.J. Abrams landed the job of directing Episode VII in January 2013, producer and Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy began employing a small army of concept illustrators to begin imagining the world of the movie — following in the footsteps of the creative process for George Lucas’s original Star Wars movie, much of which grew from Ralph McQuarrie’s art.
The Secrets of "The Force Awakens": A Cinematic Journey — the behind-the-scenes documentary that premiered at the 2016 SXSW Film Festival in advance of the digital and Blu-ray release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens in April — showcases a great deal of art that never made the finished film, like an evocative field of broken TIE-fighter cockpits. Most prominently, there were several images of Luke Skywalker in action, including a shot of him holding a lightsaber, and another shot of him holding Darth Vader’s helmet.
Lucasfilm
The audition that clinched Daisy Ridley the role of Rey was her interrogation scene with Kylo Ren.
The task of casting an unknown to play Rey — a character who had to be at once fierce and vulnerable, earnest and capable — was a daunting one for Abrams and his team. But the documentary includes footage of one of Ridley’s auditions, in which Kylo Ren tries to use the Force to get inside Rey’s head, and it is clear the part was hers. "She just blew my mind," Abrams says in The Secrets of "The Force Awakens": A Cinematic Journey. "She's reaching this depth of struggle, and tears are streaming down her face. … I thought, Oh my god."
Lucasfilm
John Boyega auditioned with Finn's first conversation with Poe multiple times before he got the role.
Abrams estimates that Boyega auditioned nine times before he was cast as the erstwhile Stormtrooper. The doc stitches together three of those auditions to recreate the scene in which Finn admits that he's rescuing Poe because he needs a pilot. (And even at that stage, the British-born Boyega was using an American accent for the role.)
Lucasfilm
Mark Hamill read all the stage directions at the initial script read-through with the cast.
In The Secrets of "The Force Awakens": A Cinematic Journey, audiences finally get to see footage from that fateful first table read of the entire cast.
And since Mark Hamill had no lines to speak as Luke Skywalker, Abrams asked the actor to read through all the stage directions. "Usually, the director does that," Hamill says in the documentary. "But in this case, he said he wanted to observe."
The final line of the screenplay? "The promise of an adventure just beginning."
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