‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ Director & Producer Talk Deleted Scenes

'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' writer/director Rian Johnson and producer Ram Bergman discuss some of the deleted scenes from the final cut of the film.

Star Wars The Last Jedi Disney Lucasfilm

At a whopping 152 minutes, Star Wars: The Last Jedi is by far the longest film in the entire saga. With the heroes of The Force Awakens separated into different journeys, the film takes its time to explore these respective stories as it culminates into an epic finale.

But naturally, given the epic nature of this chapter in the saga, there were certain scenes that were deleted from the theatrical cut due to timing, narrative issues and more. Writer/director Rian Johnson and producer Ram Bergman recently discussed the extent of how much footage was shot for the film that was ultimately cut:

Bergman: There’s a lot of movie. Even more in the deleted scenes. There’s plenty more.

Johnson: We shot a lot, man. Just like any other film, it came together in the edit. The editing is the completion of the writing process. We were not at all precious about this film. We tore it apart. We ripped stuff out. There’s going to be a lot of great deleted scenes. I’m not trying to sell Blu-rays here, there are just going to be a lot of deleted scenes.

And it’s not just shots of characters walking down hallways, either. There are entire sequences that got lifted out of it, which taken on their own are some of my favorite sequences in the movie. But for the good of the whole, they had to come out. We rearranged stuff. We were constantly messing with the intercutting between the plot lines. There are very few of the intercuts that are in there as written in the script. We ended up re-engineering a lot of it during the course of editing because that’s what the edit is for. All bets are off, and you just have to make the thing work.

Fans hoping for an extended “director’s cut” of The Last Jedi are going to be sorely disappointed since Johnson has adamantly explained that the film currently playing in theaters now is in fact his director’s cut.

Here is the synopsis:

“In Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Skywalker saga continues as the heroes of The Force Awakens join the galactic legends in an epic adventure that unlocks age-old mysteries of the Force and shocking revelations of the past.”

Written and directed by Rian Johnson, the film stars Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Lupita Nyong’o, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Gwendoline Christie, Kelly Marie Tran, Laura Dern and Benicio del Toro.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is in theaters now.

Source: Deadline

Noah Villaverde

Noah Villaverde

Cinema lover. Saxophone player. Coffee consumer. Chronic complainer. Oh, I also write. #TeamHeroic