Deborah Chow has word of advice on bathroom breaks for future ‘Star Wars’ directors
‘Star Wars’ series ‘Obi Wan Kenobi’ director Deborah Chow, detailing her work on the series said that ‘Star Wars is like no other universe’.
Directing the show was a big challenge as the show acts as a connecting point between the prequels and the original trilogy.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Deborah Chow said that balancing the two storylines was “The biggest challenge of the whole project, and that’s also why it had gone through so much development. You’re between two trilogies with these huge, iconic characters.”
“Everybody knows what happened to them, before and after, and you’re starting with a character where the public perception is that he should be sitting on that rock for 20 years. But those 20 years (between ‘Revenge of the Sith’ and ‘A New Hope’) had so much to explore on an emotional level,” she added.
Talking about how she had imagined the development of Obi Wan Kenobi’s dialogue from ‘Return of Jedi’ to Luke Skywalker about Anakin Skywalker having been killed by Darth Vader was true ‘from a certain point of view’, Deborah said that no one can tell what George Lucas intended with that line, more so as there is tons of room for different interpretations.
“So for us, the big thing was emotional authenticity and that this felt innately like the right journey for these characters who were coming out of the prequels and into ‘A New Hope’,” she added.
Talking about connecting the series with the originals, as the prequels were being sidelined with the sequels aiming to capture the original story, she said “There’s one that grew up with the originals and another that grew up with the prequels. When we made the announcement that we were bringing back Hayden, that prequel generation became very clear all of a sudden.”
She further mentioned, “They loved the prequels, and Hayden was their guy. It was lovely, honestly, to work on something that was for a different generation of Star Wars fans.”
When asked about what advice she would give to future ‘Star Wars’ directors, she laughingly said: “Make sure all the creatures go to the bathroom before you bring them to set, otherwise you’re going to be waiting 45 minutes.”
“The biggest thing I learned from ‘The Mandalorian’ is to not get hung up on the ‘Star Wars’ of it all. It’s hard on a project where there is so much canon and so much responsibility to a fan base, but I would always go, If you take the ‘Star Wars’ out of this and it’s just people and human emotions, does this story still hold up?”