AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
John knoll star wars1/17/2024 “The big thing here is instead of centering it on a character we know, we center it on an event people know of,” he said. And it was a bold one: At the core of his pitch was the idea that Star Wars fans didn’t need their favorite characters to care about a movie. “I wrote out a six page treatment about what the events were, who the central characters were, the central themes that ran through the narrative.”Īfter over 30 years in Hollywood, working on some of the biggest blockbusters in history, this would be the first story pitch he’d ever deliver. “I used that time to flesh out and put it in writing,” Knoll said. It took six weeks from the moment he called for the appointment to actually get into her office. Given his stature in the company, getting a meeting with Kennedy wasn’t a problem - but getting it on the calendar, that was another story. “As soon as he said that, I thought, he’s right, because if I don’t, I’ll always wonder what would have happened if I had,” Knoll recalled. So the pitch grew and grew around the lunch tables at ILM, until a friend at the company suggested he actually go present his idea to Kennedy herself. All the while, Knoll had held strong to the belief that inspired his initial concept all those years ago: “The formula you need to have to be a Star Wars film doesn’t necessarily include a lightsaber and Jedi,” he told people, adding that, “I think we can be bolder with these experiments.” Nothing came of that show, but after the Disney acquisition, the movies were full-steam ahead. The kernel of Knoll’s idea actually originated back during the mid-2000s, when Lucasfilm announced that it was was developing a live-action Star Wars TV series. A group of Rebel commandos that go on a desperate mission to penetrate the most secure facility at the heart of the military industrial complex of the Empire to steal the Death Star plans.’ And I got a lot of intrigued responses, and in each telling it got a little bit more elaborate, with more characters and more of the plot structure.” “It was: ‘Imagine SEAL Team Six in the Star Wars universe. So I started pitching very informally this idea,” Knoll recalled. One might be a western one might be a war film. “Kathy had said at the time that we may explore different genres. And it helped that new Lucasfilm CEO Kathy Kennedy had, at least inadvertently, blessed the creative license he was taking. So when he talked around the cafeteria, people obviously listened. He was the visual effects supervisor on the prequel trilogy, and was bumped up to Chief Creative Officer shortly after Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012. Knoll began his career at ILM back in 1984, right as Return of the Jedi was being completed. “Just talking with friends, I’d say, ‘I think we’re missing an opportunity if we don’t also explore stories that don’t necessarily have any characters that we are familiar with, and that tell a compelling story in the Star Wars universe.’” The company had internally announced that it would be producing a Han Solo origin story, and Knoll felt as if there was a lot of fertile ground further out in the galaxy. “The story had grown over the course of a couple of weeks when, very naturally, the topic of these new Star Wars films was a big discussion point at lunch with friends,” John Knoll, now the Chief Creative Officer at Lucasfilm’s visual effect company ILM, told Inverse. Every great origin story has its own special origin story, and Rogue One is no exception: The new Star Wars movie was born in a cafeteria in the suburbs of San Francisco.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |