With STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS, J.J. Abrams successfully launched the Disney-era of the long-running franchise, but it was never his intention to return for more. With STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI written and directed by Rian Johnson and STAR WARS: EPISODE IX slated to be co-written and directed by Colin Trevorrow, Abrams had set up a new story which would be concluded by someone else. When Trevorrow departed the project due to those dreaded creative differences, Lucasfilm desperately needed somebody to step in and bring the Sequel Trilogy across the finish line, and it was soon revealed that J.J. Abrams was the man for the job.
While speaking with Fast Company recently, Abrams revealed that he actually considered turning down the chance to return for STAR WARS: EPISODE IX.
I wasn’t supposed to be there. I wasn’t the guy, ya’ know? I was working on some other things, and I had something else that I was assuming would be the next project, if we’d be so lucky. And then Kathy Kennedy called and said, “Would you really, seriously, consider coming aboard?” And once that started, it all happened pretty quickly. The whole thing was a crazy leap of faith. And there was an actual moment when I nearly said, “No, I’m not going to do this.”
Abrams added that his wife and Bad Robot co-CEO Katie McGrath eventually convinced him to return. "I felt a little bit like I was playing with fire. Like, why go back? We managed to make it work. What the hell am I thinking? And there was a moment when I literally said, 'No,' and Katie said, 'You should do this.' And my first thought was, has she met someone? And then I thought, she’s usually right about stuff. And when she said it, I think that she felt like it was an opportunity to bring to a close this story that we had begun and had continued, of course. And I could see that even though the last thing on my mind was going away and jumping back into that, especially with the time constraints that we were faced with," Abrams said.
With a release date already set and no script (Abrams tossed out Trevorrow's draft), it was going to be quite the challenge to bring the film to life, especially as he'd be following in the footsteps of a film he had had little involvement with.
It was a completely unknown scenario. I had some gut instincts about where the story would have gone. But without getting in the weeds on episode eight, that was a story that Rian wrote and was telling based on seven before we met. So he was taking the thing in another direction. So we also had to respond to Episode VIII. So our movie was not just following what we had started, it was following what we had started and then had been advanced by someone else. So there was that, and, finally, it was resolving nine movies. While there are some threads of larger ideas and some big picture things that had been conceived decades ago and a lot of ideas that Lawrence Kasdan and I had when we were doing Episode VII, the lack of absolute inevitability, the lack of a complete structure for this thing, given the way it was being run was an enormous challenge.
STAR WARS: EPISODE IX is set for a December 20, 2019 release, but we'll likely see our first real look at the concluding chapter of the Skywalker saga soon as the upcoming Star Wars Celebration (which runs from April 11-15th) will have a panel devoted to the film.