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http://variety.com/2014/film/news/star- ... 201153257/

While Disney chairman Alan Horn remained mostly tight lipped during an interview at the Loyola Marymount School of Film and Television in Los Angeles, he did let it slip that “Star Wars Episode VII” has already begun shooting and has much of its cast.

“We have a lot of them, it’s not completely done yet,” Horn responded when asked about casting, noting it as the most difficult part of putting the highly anticipated film together.

As J.J. Abrams prefers to keep details under wraps for most of his films, Horn declined to reveal any names. Variety, however, learned in February that “Girls” actor Adam Driver is in talks to play the villain. Actors being considered for the lead role include Ed Speleers, John Boyega, Jesse Plemons, Matthew James Thomas and Ray Fisher.

“We’re actually shooting some of it now,” Horn said, despite previous comments that filming would start next month. The chairman could have been referring to getting B-roll and location shots without having the cast on set, but he didn’t divulge any information beyond that.

The script, co-written by Lawrence Kasdan and Abrams after an early draft by “Toy Story 3″ scribe Michael Arndt, was also a challenge, according to Horn. On all other details, though, Horn channeled his inner Yoda to advise those awaiting more news: “Patience, you must have.”

“Star Wars: Episode VII” is produced by Abrams, his Bad Robot partner Bryan Burk and Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy. It’s set to hit theaters Dec. 18, 2015.

I am pessimistic about this. They are going to milk the franchise dry and leave it to hang.

I'm actually somewhat cautiously optimistic. I didn't really like the JJ Abrams Star Trek movies, (I thought the plots/writing was just messy and incoherent) but Abrams is obviously a competent space-action movie director, and Lawrence Kasdan wrote Empire Strikes Back!

I am also cautiously optimistic for the same reasons. I also heard Peter Mayhew is returning as Chewbacca - considering he's nearly 70 and recently had major knee surgery thanks to his condition, I wonder how large a role he will play in the new trilogy.

Chimaera wrote:I am also cautiously optimistic for the same reasons. I also heard Peter Mayhew is returning as Chewbacca - considering he's nearly 70 and recently had major knee surgery thanks to his condition, I wonder how large a role he will play in the new trilogy.

good thing about the Chewbacca suit is that you can have a younger actor play Chewie for action scenes and Peter Mayhew will only have to play the character scenes and you don't have resort to CGI to hide the stun double's face as the mask for the suit does it for you.

Purple wrote:I am pessimistic about this. They are going to milk the franchise dry and leave it to hang.

Whether a franchise is being milked or the fanbase is being pleased depends on the name of the franchise. Marvel are certainly milking their shit. Don't see nerds complaining.

Everything is being "milked" nowadays.

Scrib wrote:

Purple wrote:I am pessimistic about this. They are going to milk the franchise dry and leave it to hang.

Whether a franchise is being milked or the fanbase is being pleased depends on the name of the franchise. Marvel are certainly milking their shit. Don't see nerds complaining.

Everything is being "milked" nowadays.

And hey, we always have the old chestnut to fall back on when it comes to the new films..."It can't be as bad as the prequels."
Right guys?
...Guys?

My greatest fear is actually exactly that; that the new movies will be some reactionary over-compensation in an attempt to be anything but the prequel trilogy and losing the Star Wars in the process.

(the prequel movies were fine Star Wars films, btw)

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote:My greatest fear is actually exactly that; that the new movies will be some reactionary over-compensation in an attempt to be anything but the prequel trilogy and losing the Star Wars in the process.

(the prequel movies were fine Star Wars films, btw)

Hehe, you're funny.
I certainly think Abrams can get the kinetic impact of the space battles right - he's already shown to have flair in that department with Star Trek, and he really does seem to have a love for the franchise as far as I can tell. Hopefully he's smart enough to recognise he doesn't need to deliberately steer clear of the prequels, just ignore them entirely and build something new yet familiar.

Why would you ignore them? Because a relative handful of nerds turned their nose up at them?

Episode 1 may have been somewhat bland, but Episodes 2 and 3 were definitely good enough to sit on the same shelf as the original trilogy. Honestly in some ways I liked Episodes 2 and 3 better than RotJ.

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote:Why would you ignore them? Because a relative handful of nerds turned their nose up at them?

Uh, it's more to do with the prequel trilogy being absolute jokes to be honest. And that applies in a literal sense - it's quite deeply ingrained in pop culture how bad they were, especially Phantom Menace. I mean ROTS wasn't too terrible compared to the first two films, but for me the prequels were devoid of much of the fun and charm of the OT.
That's my take anyway, I honestly didn't think there were that many people who even liked the PT.

Chimaera wrote:it's quite deeply ingrained in pop culture how bad they were, especially Phantom Menace.

That's the problem. Everybody says they're bad, repeats to their friends how bad they are, who in turn talk about how bad they are until "pop culture" has said it enough times that it becomes "true."

The real tragedy of it is that I think most people who go around repeating how bad the prequels are probably haven't actually watched them. I don't mean once or twice when they first came out. I mean own the DVDs and actually sit down and watch them alongside Empire Strikes Back.

Enough people have just repeated the idea that these movies are bad so many times that it just bounces around until any dissenting opinion doesn't even exist - as you yourself admit.

I have also seen them many times altogether, I saw TPM a few weeks back and I still maintain it was fucking awful (I watched AOTC and ROTS back to back last year). Of course it's 'cool' to hate the prequels, but I find the hate is mostly for good reasons - namely they suck. I find the acting laughable, the story bores me to tears, and they try way too hard to make everything connected. I just think they were bad, and they're best forgotten about.
I mean, they had their good points, sure - Maul, nice artwork and designs, decent action - but if they never mentioned the events of the PT in the new trilogy my experience would not be diminished in any way.

Now here's the more important question IMHO would feel that new trilogy would be diminished or "tainted" if they did mention the prequel trilogy?

Personally while I don't consider the prequels to be all that great (there's better movies out there), I don't consider them the "worst thing ever!!" either (there's most certainly a lot of movies that are worse), so I get confused by this fanatical hatred for the PT.

Lord Revan wrote:Now here's the more important question IMHO would feel that new trilogy would be diminished or "tainted" if they did mention the prequel trilogy?

Personally while I don't consider the prequels to be all that great (there's better movies out there), I don't consider them the "worst thing ever!!" either (there's most certainly a lot of movies that are worse), so I get confused by this fanatical hatred for the PT.

Nah, it wouldn't exactly make the film 'worse' per se, I just think it's best if it focused more on the aftermath of the OT. I don't have a fanatical hatred for them, I just know a piece of shit when I see one.

Lord Revan wrote:Now here's the more important question IMHO would feel that new trilogy would be diminished or "tainted" if they did mention the prequel trilogy?

Personally while I don't consider the prequels to be all that great (there's better movies out there), I don't consider them the "worst thing ever!!" either (there's most certainly a lot of movies that are worse), so I get confused by this fanatical hatred for the PT.

If it was me, I'd take the broad strokes and the good bits and refer to them if they fit, but throw the bad bits in the trash. Shoehorning references in would be bad, as would drawing attention to mistakes like midichlorians and what a little shit Anakin was.

Chimaera wrote:but for me the prequels were devoid of much of the fun and charm of the OT.

This. On their own the movies were in my opinion quite decent. The effects were nice and the story whilst failing at some points wasn't worse than the usual movie plot these days. I even liked Jar Jar as a character. He was just the right kind of goofy to be fun. But they just lacked that something that the OT had. They are decent. But that's it. Decent. Not good, not bad, just decent. And you can't have something that's decent directly related to something that is awesome without it constantly getting compared and looking bad in said comparison.

Grumman wrote:

Lord Revan wrote:Now here's the more important question IMHO would feel that new trilogy would be diminished or "tainted" if they did mention the prequel trilogy?

Personally while I don't consider the prequels to be all that great (there's better movies out there), I don't consider them the "worst thing ever!!" either (there's most certainly a lot of movies that are worse), so I get confused by this fanatical hatred for the PT.

If it was me, I'd take the broad strokes and the good bits and refer to them if they fit, but throw the bad bits in the trash. Shoehorning references in would be bad, as would drawing attention to mistakes like midichlorians and what a little shit Anakin was.

shoehorning anything anywhere is gonna be bad, no questions there as it will seem artificial no matter what, how ever the reverse is just as bad, going out of your way to avoid any links to the PT is gonna seem just as artificial and apart from pleasing some fanatics won't do the movies any good.

basically my opinion is that if the story seems to demand a link or comment about event of the PT (in-universe that is) then do so and ignore the whining of few fanatics who'd just find something else to whine about if didn't include those references, but on the other hand these movies are set in the post OT era so if there isn't reason to make overt references to the PT then don't.

Lord Revan wrote:...how ever the reverse is just as bad, going out of your way to avoid any links to the PT is gonna seem just as artificial and apart from pleasing some fanatics won't do the movies any good.

We're talking about events that happened two empires and fifty years ago. At that point, there's a lot of room for those links to have broken on their own, especially when the primary institution in the series was basically razed to the ground and reduced to the level of myth for twenty years.

I really dislike the prequels, even RoTS, because even though it was decent, it had too much baggage from the previous two films. Regardless, I don't care too much if the new films mention things from the Prequels. The things that suck about the Prequels have less to do with the actual storyline and events, and more to do with the implementation.

To me, the prequels suffer from the same problem as The Godfather Part III, in that they might not be bad, per se, but they don't measure up compared to the masterpieces that came before them.

PKRudeBoy wrote:To me, the prequels suffer from the same problem as The Godfather Part III, in that they might not be bad, per se, but they don't measure up compared to the masterpieces that came before them.

This. Pretty much anything would have been considered "bad" in comparison. Then again, I do sometimes wonder if we (the fans) put the OT on a higher pedestal than they might otherwise deserve. They are certainly excellent films, but there does seem to be an element of "they're so awesome because they're the original Star Wars."

I'm not sure it's really a pedestal-putting thing, specifically. I think when they really blew up a lot of the Sci-Fi genre conventions and offered a hugely influential and effective story, with a number of great performances and great worldbuilding. There's weak points, but the effort and passion is there all over the board, and it was really potent before a million billion games, movies, and television shows watered down the impact of that. There's nothing wrong with all that, but before it was part of our cultural landscape it was a really visible island of great work, like the Indiana Jones movies. These are not, like, masterwork stories but they're very good moviemaking. It's great popcorn stuff, and I think that they hold up really well.

The prequel trilogy is riding the coat-tails of Star Wars in so many ways that it is hard to ever see it being successful as a franchise without the Star Wars name and the previous series' ideas rolled into it. If we strike out all the legacy material (Lightsabers, Jedi, Star Destoyer wedge shapes, etc) and just go with the ideas they had for this movie, you end up with a giant sloppy mess. Look at things like Naboo, Jar Jar, the Trade Federation, the costume and acting choices made, the tremendous abuse of green screen technology, the whole pod race debacle, etc... that stuff isn't fetid, but it's not fresh. You could have made a pretty forgettable series of movies out of that stuff, but it would have been cult movie quality at best, like the Last Starfighter or Explorers.

Now, I know it seems super unfair to strike out the previous material, but I think it's pretty clear that you can take pretty much any shitty thing, throw Star Destroyers and Lightsabers into it, put that soundtrack to work, and there will be a major upkick in coolness. The Phantom Trilogy really does not stand on its own merits, and if you remove the Nostalgia Goggles and just go "Okay, is this good without the zing I feel from seeing Lightsabers and Stormtrooper-esque guys?" then I think it really ends up feeling flat.

The PT isn't the worst thing ever, but it does not have the passion or focus of the originals, and without the coolness cooked up in the OT there's basically no chance it would have been anywhere as successful as it was. You might not have people hating it so much, but that's because it wouldn't be some kind of grotesque appendage stapled onto something beloved. Really, the PT is just all flash with no substance, and all that flash is borrowed.

I'm more concerned that they started filming without full casting especially the villain if these stories are to be believed. It just creates a mess if they have new scenes to film, they are probably doing 2nd and 3rd unit shots but can still make the style and look of the film jump all over the place, if the tone changes in rewrite and based on how the actors portray them.