J.J. Abrams has found making ‘Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker’ the most "challenging" thing he’s ever done.
The 53-year-old filmmaker admitted shooting the final instalment in the sci-fi saga has been much more "ambitious" than when he helmed the seventh movie in the franchise, ‘The Force Awakens’ because it is an ending to the entire series and there are a lot of loose ends to tie up.
Asked if he knew how hard making the film would be, J.J. – who took over at the helm after Colin Trevorrow parted ways with the project – said: "I don’t know if I knew exactly, because this one is so much more ambitious than the first one.
"It’s an ending. It’s not a beginning. It’s the end of not just one trilogy but three. It’s a far larger movie in terms of scale.
"Narratively, there’s much more going on everywhere I look — visual effects, more moving pieces. It’s the most challenging thing I’ve ever been involved in. By a lot.
"It’s been breakneck from the time that Kathy (Kennedy, Lucasfilm president) called me, and trying to figure out the what and the why and the how has been challenging.
"But you don’t want to go thinking, ‘I got this’. Because then you’re screwed.
Rian Johnson directed the eighth movie in the franchise, ‘The Last Jedi’, and J.J. admitted he made a number of choices with the film that he wouldn’t have made if he was in charge.
He told Rolling Stone magazine: "When I read his first draft, it made me laugh, because I saw that was his take and his voice. I got to watch cuts of the movie as he was working on it, as an audience member.
"And I appreciated the choices he made as a filmmaker that would probably be very different from the choices that I would have made. Just as he would have made different choices if he had made ‘Episode VII’.
But the director thinks the twists in the film made it "pretty fun".
He added: "I felt the biggest surprise was how dark Luke was. That was the thing that I thought: ‘Oh, that was unexpected’.
"And that’s the thing ‘The Last Jedi’ undeniably succeeds at, which is constant subversion of expectation. The number of things that happened in that movie that aren’t the thing you think is going to happen is pretty fun."
JJ Abrams challenged by final Star Wars
