“One of the first things I wanted to do, as soon as everything was all scheduled, was to start drilling daily and making it part of my daily life. I had three months to prepare, so I wanted to immerse myself in the training as much as possible.
The first week was like four hours a day of fight training; just stretching and going over the training with sticks and slowly building up to the lightsaber. Then I went to New York and worked with people they sent there. Whenever we’re not on set, I’m always with the fight guys. It’s almost like a play in a way, the dancing part of fighting. There’s a structure and it’s important to know where everything’s going. You always learn new things about it, and for me this has been a process where a lot of the external things have been formed that gave me more information.
Usually I feel like I try to work internally and try to think about how it feels from the inside out, but for this there are so many tactile things that I can actually hold on to that give me a lot of information. The fight choreography was one of them.”
— Adam Driver describes his process of conveying Kylo Ren’s physicality on-screen.
Top quality interview here, folks. No need to get your news elsewhere. Asking the hard hitting questions, like:
Q: Now being in Star Wars, have you been able to work on the moon?
Adam: Yep.
So there’s a scene where the incredibly toned and buff and beautiful Adam Driver is shirtless. He had been training at this point for doing intense fighting training for like six months. And so he just looked incredible. And he’s wearing these slightly high-waisted pants. It’s a very distinct look. He looks rad.
But I blame the internet. For the older generation, everything wasn’t out there on the internet, so they could fuck off and make mistakes. I love hearing those great old actors talk about their lives – you can see that they’re not as precious. But for us, everything’s online. How does an actor suspend disbelief that you’re this other person when everyone knows so much about you? They’ve already labelled you in their minds. And that’s the other thing – everyone’s a critic now. Which is good in one sense, but also, everything’s just so fucking mediocre, it’s so PC and aimed to please… knuckleheads!
[But why did Kylo fall for his uncle’s Force Illusion when he saw Anakin’s lightsaber split in half right in front of him? Because, Johnson pointed out, he didn’t actually see it.] ‘We as an audience saw that… The truth is, we see the lightsaber split in half – Kylo sees a blinding flash of light and is knocked unconscious, and then Rey takes the lightsaber away before he wakes up. So if you really want to dig into it and get an explanation, you can say that he (Kylo) doesn’t 100 percent know what happened to the lightsaber.’
With the power of the Force awakening inside her, Rey travels to the hidden world of Ahch-To to find Luke Skywalker, the last Jedi Master in the galaxy and the last hope of the Resistance. Hoping to find the hero of legend, Rey discovers instead a man who challenges her expectations.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens introduced audiences to a new central hero—Rey, a young woman from the remote desert island planet Jakku. The Force Awakens allowed audiences to experience the hero’s journey through a fresh set of eyes, bringing a new perspective.
For Johnson, Rey’s motivations were another aspect of getting the story right. “Rey, at the end of The Force Awakens, has been thrown into this big adventure and been sent on a mission to find Luke,” reminds Johnson. “She has a desire for connection to her past and some notion that there are answers there that she can get. I think she probably expects there are some answers about who she is, and that’s really what she is on a quest to find out. Not just meaning who her parents are or where she comes from, but meaning what’s her place in all of this? When she shows up on that island, there’s part of her, and there’s a big part of us, that expects that she’s going to get that information from Luke.”
And how does that meeting with Luke affect Rey? “I think she’s learning not to believe the hype,” offers Ridley. “Even on Jakku, in the backend of nowhere in space, she’s heard stories about Luke. And he makes her realize it’s not all as rosy as it seems to be. Good people make bad choices, and bad people can make good choices. She’s learning her own strengths and weaknesses and continuing to learn about the human psyche, because she hasn’t really had relationships with people before.”
Ridley continues, “Rey doesn’t see herself as this powerful being, and seeing Luke is a reflection of what people see her as. They talk about her potential, and she doesn’t really feel it. But she does start to come around. She tries to move forward and do the right thing, like she has always done.”
Working with both Mark Hamill and Adam Driver on The Last Jedi was “great,” according to Ridley. “They’re both very different,” elaborates the actress. “Mark’s a talker and Adam isn’t. Mark has lived a crazy life. A lot of his life has been influenced by Star Wars, and he’s so well-known for it. He’s older; he’s a father, so his energy is steadier. Adam is incredible. He has this amazing depth of emotion. I don’t know anyone else like him. He’s amazing to work with. He’s very generous.”
Reylo Source 