When the Han Solo actor was first injured filming ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ after a piece of the Millennium Falcon set collapsed on him, breaking his leg, it felt like an ominous sign that perhaps the universe was not ready for another ‘Star Wars’ movie.
But making lemonade out of lemons was the only way to battle through the set back, and with the film’s biggest star sidelined to recover from a serious injury, it was time to retool the other characters in the script since they weren’t creating the proper onscreen chemistry that the film so desperately was going to need if the story had any hope of actually working.
And as it turns out, the filming break after Harrison Ford was injured gave director JJ Abrams the much needed time to rewrite “quite a bit” of the Finn-Rey character relationship.
“When I was on the set of the Millennium Falcon and we started to do work with Rey and Finn, the first time we did it, it didn’t work at all,” Abrams said.
“It was much more contentious. I didn’t direct it right. It was set up all wrong, and when Harrison Ford got injured–which was a very scary day–we ended up having a few weeks off, and it was during that time that I really got to look at what we had done and rewrite quite a bit of that relationship,” the director told the media.
“So when we came back to work again, we actually just reshot from the ground up, those scenes. It was an amazingly helpful thing to get these two characters to where they needed to be,” JJ beamed at the successful rewrites and reshoots like a proud papa.
The whole cast is currently shooting ‘Star Wars: Episode VIII’, which hits theaters nationwide in December 2017.
You won’t have to wait until 2017 for the force to be with you, however, as the anthology film ‘Rogue One’ is due to arrive in theaters this December. And you can check out the trailer HERE!
