Behind the Scenes of Solo
May 23, 2018 | 6:00 AM
The cast and crew of Solo: A Star Wars Story is in the final PR push before the epic takes a bow Friday.
They talked to Variety to discuss the firing of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller in the summer of 2017, four months into filming.
- Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy famously then hired Ron Howard to replace them, adding four more months to the shooting schedule and raising the budget to $250 million.
- Howard shot about 70% of Solo, they reveal, and he landed the sole director credit, while Lord and Miller nabbed exec producer acknowledgements.
- Screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, who’s shepherded the series since 1980’s Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back, said he knew early on that Lord and Miller weren’t a fit.
- “Tone is everything to me. That’s what movies are made of,” he said. “But this was a very complicated situation. When you go to work in the morning on a Star Wars movie, there are thousands of people waiting for you, and you have to be very decisive and very quick about it.”
- Lawrence added that he was only willing to so far to change the story. “What we were very defensive of and wanted to have succeed was this tone, because this is not like any other Star Wars movie. Its connection to Star Wars is only in its spirit. It’s Han’s tone. It has very little to do with A New Hope. That’s a different thing we’ve seen play out in six or seven movies. This tone is reckless and unpredictable and feckless, as Han is. There is no Force. There’s no real Empire. This is about people scrabbling along,” he said, explaining that some elements are non-negotiable. “They’re not trying to save the galaxy.”
THE CAST REACTS