Entertainment

These 'Star Wars Ep VII' Descriptions Are Magic

by Alanna Bennett

We don't know exactly what we gotta do to nab an invite to the set of Star Wars Episode VII, but it certainly seems like a fun time. There was Chris Colfer jumping for joy outside of the set Saturday, and now we've got Kevin Smith talking about his Episode VII visit and all the ways it threw him back into a fanboyish tizzy. We would like in, please. Pretty please?

Smith — who apparently as a famous nerd just gets to, like, have access to the secrets of things like Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice and what Leia and Han are up to these days (not that we're bitter) — snagged an invite to the set. It's a mystery as to how he snagged this invite, as it's a J.J. Abrams set and the director tends to try to keep things pretty close to the vest. But he did it, and then he went to a film festival in Switzerland and gave a Q&A, in which a fan asked what is was like "being on-board the Millennium Falcon" and Smith responded properly, AKA with a minute spanning longer than ten minutes.

Here is one small part of what he said, lovingly transcribed by First Showing:

What I saw, I absolutely loved. It was tactile — it was real. It wasn't a series of fucking green screens and blue screens in which later on digital characters would be added. It was there, it was happening. I saw old friends who I haven’t seen since my childhood, who aren’t really friends, but I love them more than some of my fucking relatives. I saw uniforms, I saw artillery that I haven’t seen since I was a kid. I saw them shooting an actual sequence in a set that is real. I walked across the set, there were explosions. And it looked like a shot right out of a Star Wars movie. I watched them do it four times, standing next to JJ...

We'd bet a good amount of money at least one of the old friends he's talking about is Carrie Fischer. Oh, and what he says later about the difference between the (generally hated) prequel movies and this one will probably ease some worried hearts and minds:

As I walked up that ramp I realized that something was missing from those other movies [the prequels] and it's now in these movies. And its not the obvious of like, hey, the Millennium Falcon or, hey, the characters that we know are returning. It's something else entirely — he's building a tactile world, a world you can touch. And he's replicating with all the love of somebody that has the world's greatest collection of Star Wars figures. And when you walk on that set, man, I don't know how else to describe it except thusly: to use another pop culture reference to describe this pop culture phenomenon. It is like the Field of Dreams, the Kevin Costner movie. And, if J.J. builds it, we're all going to come, hard, because it is amazing. It looks fantastic. So anyone out sitting there wondering if he's going to pull it off, he's pulling it off.

And here is a picture of his (proper) reaction to being on the set in the first place:

Same.

You can watch his whole description over at First Showing.

Image: Kevin Smith/Instagram