How J.J. Abrams changed 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' after Harrison Ford's On-Set Injury
J.J. Abrams took full advantage of Harrison Ford's broken ankle during production for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and we would have seen a very different end product had the injury not happened.
“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 at the Tribeca Film Festival. “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.
"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.”
It's hard to imagine a different relationship between Rey and Finn, but it is interesting to consider how the film may have looked had this not been rectified.
This movie was a bridge and a kind of reminder,” Abrams said of fan complaints regarding the similar style of film The Force Awakens is to A New Hope. “The audience needed to be reminded what Star Wars is, but it needed to be established with something familiar, with a sense of where we are going to new lands, which is very much what 8 and 9 do.”
I'm not sure that the audience needed to be reminded, at least not seasoned filmgoers, but the sentiment makes sense.
Source: Comicbook
