Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Rian Johnson Interview
Let The Scenes Die
Also on the Blu-ray there are a lot of deleted scenes, 14 in total I believe?
I think so, yeah. It's over 20 minutes, and actually really good scenes. It's not just little snippets of people walking down hallways, but really good scenes and sequences.
I've heard you talk about the reasons you cut them, mostly for pacing, but which one was the hardest to cut?
Oh. I think probably, there's a whole sequence that's Daisy and Mark, the Caretaker village scene, where she thinks the fish nun characters are being threatened and Mark uses this as a teaching moment. And that was just such a massive sequence to shoot. Everything from this massive rig we made for our stunt performer to run across the bay in Ireland, to having 30 Caretaker creatures all doing this dance with instruments, it was a huge thing. And then you're in the edit room, and one click of the delete button and it's gone, so that hurt. But the truth is every single one of the scenes I love on its own merits. I think the movie is stronger for them being out, but they were all tough, like killing babies.
That Rey one was initially reported by some outlets as the third lesson, and then later others saying it wasn't...
I never thought of it as the third lesson. I always thought it was kind of an addendum to the second lesson. I like the notion of the third lesson still floating out there.
Maybe in Episode IX?
We'll see. [Laughs]
One character not in the deleted scenes is Supreme Leader Snoke. Was that always a very early decision that you weren't going to get into his character? Was there a point where you thought about not killing him off?
You have to remember I wrote the movie before The Force Awakens came out, so I didn't write it in the context of 'oh all these people on Reddit are writing their theories on how he's Darth Plagueis' or whatever. It's not like I read all those theories and decided to defy them. To me, first of all, it just wasn't a question that I felt very interested in, mostly because I didn't feel like the character of Rey would be interested in it. It's not Snoke's story, I guess, so in that way he's very similar to the Emperor in the first trilogy, where we know exactly what we need to know about him. He's the powerful, shadowy emperor behind Vader in the first one, and now Kylo in this one. So frankly it never occurred to me to suddenly stop the whole movie to explain his origins, because it wasn't really germane to the story.
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