Damon Lindelof has explained why he was “fired”. Star Wars.
The Lost co-creator was brought on board to write one of the films in the sci-fi franchise in 2022, but he was let go from the project the following year and has now revealed that his vision for the film simply ‘didn’t work’.
During a performance at the House of R podcast, Lindelof explained, “I got fired from one Star Wars film. They asked me, ‘What do you think? Star Wars movie should be?’”
“And I said, ‘This is what it should be.’ And they said, ‘Great, you’re accepted.’ And two years later I was fired. And so I was wrong, at least through that prism,” he added.
He added: “What we were trying to do, my [writing] partner Justin Britt-Gibson, [writer] Rayna McClendon and I tried to have this conversation in the film, which is, there’s a force of nostalgia and a force of revision, and they’re at odds with each other, and let’s do the Protestant Reformation in Star Wars, and it didn’t work.
“You have your cake and eat it too. The conversation that the fandom is having, without winking and looking at the audience, didn’t necessarily feel that risky,” Lindelof further said.
He went on to explain that writing the film was “really difficult” and that he struggled to find the right “tone”.
He said: “The writing was very difficult. It was slow. Like the tone, the right tone, where it was in the canon, what the relationship was to Episode IX.”
“Is it starting a new trilogy? Is it like all those things? They’re so huge. They’re so big. It’s kind of like a tanker comparison: you turn the wheel and it takes five minutes for it to turn a little bit like that,” Lindelof said.
“When Episode VII came out, we all knew what it was Rey and it was Finn and it was Poe and then we migrated back in and Luke and Leia and Han and Chewy and all those guys,” he said, talking about the final part of the Star Wars franchise, he added: “But we got the feeling that when this new trilogy was over, we would launch with these new characters, and that was the centerpiece of the game.” Star Wars. The new question is: are Mando and Grogu the center of Star Wars?
