If the embed won’t play, the interview is also here on YouTube.
Nine years after Lucasfilm took Solo: A Star Wars Story away from them partway through filming, Phil Lord and Chris Miller say there are no hard feelings, or at least none they’re prepared to air on a podcast. Talking to Matt Belloni on The Town, in an episode that also covers Project Hail Mary and the existence of good studio executives (a rare species, but apparently not extinct), the pair said they had made their peace with the 2017 sacking that handed the film to Ron Howard. “I always look forward,” said Lord. “I never look back.”
They did look back fondly at the original trilogy, though. “Those films are independent films,” they said. “They started that way, and they have that spirit.” That’s a reasonable description of George Lucas’s 1977 gamble, and a not especially subtle hint about what tends to go missing once a franchise becomes a corporate asset with a release calendar. Asked whether they’d ever go back to a galaxy far, far away, they offered the time-honoured Hollywood formula: “Never say never.”
Relations seem cordial enough. According to Dark Horizons, Kathleen Kennedy, who presided over their exit, contacted them earlier this year to congratulate them on Project Hail Mary, their adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel about a schoolteacher who wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory and the Sun in trouble. Their next job is Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, due in 2027, so there is no immediate danger of anyone being handed a lightsaber.
Still, there is a certain cosmic tidiness to it. Only this week, Andy Weir revealed his idea for Star Star, a Trek and Wars crossover in which Spock becomes a Force ghost and McCoy patches up Darth Vader. Weir has already given Lord and Miller one film. If the Mouse is feeling brave, he may have just given them their way back in, too. We’d watch it, which is more than can be said for most of the Star Wars projects announced since 2017.
For the full story of what made it to the screen, Rob Bredow’s Making Solo: A Star Wars Story remains the official account, and pointedly has a foreword by Ron Howard.
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