At Entertainments Weekly’s Capetown film festival on Saturday May 4th, a 30th anniversary screening of Return of the Jedi was shown. Mark Hamill, formerly Luke Skywalker appeared to the crowd as a surprise guest. Not only did Hamill share plenty of nostalgia in making the entire trilogy of Star Wars, but affirmed to fans that he is back and signed on for the next sequence of movies. LucasArts hasn’t immediately said that they are infinitively reprising any roles, however, Hamill made it extremely clear without blatant statement that he will be included. Hamill spoke a lot about speaking to Lucas about the making of the trilogies. Hamill stated, “I don’t even think I believed that the third trilogy would feature us. I thought it would be all different characters. To my knowledge, we were just going to do a beginning, a middle and an end [in the original trilogy] and it was over.” When questioned about details about the new film he stated that the fans probably knew more about the story line than he did. While talking about previously filming of the movies Hamill released that he was called in to talk to Lucas about something vague. Hamill speculated wildly about all of the possibilities that it could have bee. He tossed around ideas of Lucas released the previous trilogy in 3D and wanting to do an announcement amongst other things. However, it was Hamill’s wife to suggest that they wanted to do a new movie. Hamill spoke briefly about his latest encounter, “I’ve only had one creative meeting about the new films, but I do remember saying, ‘We’ve got to find a proper balance between CGI and old school [FX].”Hamill added, “That’s what the challenge is, is to try and meet expectations of what you guys want. I think there’s nothing wrong with CGI, but I think you have to have a balance, because the camera perceives the width and the depth and the weight – even if it’s a miniature model, the camera just realizes that. So when you have too much CGI and the clouds are CGI and the trees are CGI and the buildings are CGI, you’re getting to a point where the figure in the shot is like a hybrid of an animated film and live-action. And I want it to have an organic look so that we don’t get into Roger Rabbit territory.” He then added, with a laugh, “But I don’t imagine that the priority is what I want!”
The most surprising was that Lucas didn’t reveal to Hamill that he was selling LucasArts to Disney, Hamill found out by watching the news. This has been an extremely confrontational topic of discussion for fans. Many people are afraid the franchise is going to be watered down for younger audiences considering the Disney title. However, Hamill’s comments on the whole endeavor run in tangent with how I fell when he stated “They haven’t done too bad with the Marvel franchise. They did really well with the Muppets. The more you think about it, the more it makes sense. Plus, it was nice to see George seeming so happy!”
There’s a lot of extremely exciting things coming. Potential to see Luke as a Jedi Master, much less of Jar Jar Binks’ obnoxious face and lightsabers galore. Get ready! JJ Abrams has been slated to direct the newest series of films and has earned his place in being one of the major crossover Sci-Fi directors. Between his new rendition of Star Trek and movies such as Super 8, he’s definitely showed his colors and renown as a sic-fi director and I’m extremely excited in seeing what he does with this franchise. Especially because Disney has the funding and animation means to create just about anything they want to.