Damon Lindelof Details His Scrapped ‘Star Wars’

Not so long ago in a galaxy not that far away, Damon Lindelof was plotting to leave his mark on the Star Wars universe.

The 3x Emmy winner recently opened up about being “fired off of a Star Wars movie” after struggling with “getting the tone right” in his planned installment in the Lucasfilm and Disney franchise.

“They asked me, ‘What do you think a Star Wars movie should be?’ And I said, ‘Here’s what it should be.’ And they said, ‘Great, you’re hired,’” he recalled on the House of R podcast. “And then two years later, I was fired.”

Lindelof added, “What we were attempting to do was to have this conversation in the movie, which is to say, there is a force of nostalgia and there is a force of revision, and they are at odds with one another. And let’s do the Protestant Reformation inside Star Wars. And it didn’t work.”

Although he things Lucasfilm “seemed to like the premise,” Lindelof thinks his concept “didn’t feel necessarily that risky.”

“The writing was really hard, it was slow — the tone, getting it right,” he explained. “Where it was inside of the canon, what its relationship was with to Episode IX, is it starting a new trilogy?”

Lindelof added, “It’s the old sort of like tanker equation, which is, you turn the wheel and it takes five minutes before it turns a little bit. We’re looking for the center of Star Wars, and when Episode VII came out, we all knew what it was. It was Rey and it was Finn and it was Poe and it was like all these, and then we were migrating back in, Luke and Leia and Han and Chewie and all those guys.”