---
Text:
J(EDI) J(EDI) ABRAMS
F*** tracks the career of the man chosen to reawaken the Force
F*** tracks the career of the man chosen to reawaken the Force
By Jedd Jong
Getting the gig to direct the first Star Wars film in ten years is at once
an incredible honour and a daunting, Herculean task. After all, we’re talking
about one of the most beloved, iconic film franchises in history, and one with
a massive, passionate fanbase. Said fans have been burned before – once bitten,
twice shy and all that. The man taking the Starfighter controls behind the
scenes of Episode VII just so happens
to be a huge self-confessed Star Wars
fan himself. This is the voyage that the writer/director/producer embarked on
which led him to that fabled galaxy far, far away.
Jeffrey Jacob "J.J." Abrams was born in 1966 to TV
producers Gerald W. Abrams and Carol Ann Abrams. This would make him 11 when
the original Star Wars film was
released. “11 is a great age to have your mind blown,” Abrams said at the Star Wars Celebration convention in
Anaheim earlier this year. “I will never forget that feeling of seeing ‘Long
time ago, in a galaxy, far, far away’ fade out. It was the first time a movie
made me believe in another world that way.” He recalled that the title ‘Star Wars’ struck him as an odd one when
he first came across it in the classic sci-fi culture magazine Starlog. He saw the movie on opening
day, and left the theatre “never being the same again”.
At age 13, Abrams’ grandfather gave him a
Super 8 camera which he used to create his own homemade movies. “I would take
anyone who was available — my sister, my mother, any friends — and I would kill
them in crazy ways," he told NPR’s
Fresh Air program. As a teenager,
Abrams entered a short film of his into a festival showcasing Super 8mm movies
made by kids. Other contestants included Matt Reeves, who would go on to direct
Cloverfield and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, as well as Larry Fong, who would
become the cinematographer for 300
and Watchmen. Steven Spielberg read
an article titled The Beardless Wonders
of Film Making in the Los Angeles
Times and hired Abrams and Reeves to restore and edit his own childhood 8
mm films. A couple of years later, a 16-year-old Abrams composed the music for
Don Dohler’s low-budget sci-fi horror movie Nightbeast.
This was the beginning of a very promising career.
Abrams had planned to enrol in a film
school, but attended Sarah Lawrence college instead. The advice given to him by
his father was that “it’s more important you learn what to make movies about,
than how to make movies.” In his senior year, Abrams co-wrote a feature film
treatment with Jill Mazursky that became the 1990 movie Taking Care of Business, starring Charles Grodin and Jim Belushi.
Abrams and Mazursky also wrote the comedy Gone
Fishin’, starring Danny Glover and Joe Pesci. In between those two films,
Abrams wrote the amnesia drama Regarding
Henry, starring none other than Han Solo himself, Harrison Ford, and the
sci-fi romance Forever Young, starring
Mel Gibson. Abrams was one of four credited writers on Michael Bay’s sci-fi
action film Armageddon.
In 1998, Abrams and Reeves created the TV
series Felicity, starring Keri
Russell and set at a fictional New York university. "I miss writing for a
show that doesn't have any sort of odd, almost sci-fi bend to it," he told
The Hollywood Reporter in 2012,
noting the difficulty inherent in devising stories for a show without a villain
or high-stakes intrigue. Abrams co-founded the production company Bad Robot
with Bryan Burk, and created the spy action show Alias in 2001. Now, here was a show that was wall-to-wall
high-stakes intrigue. On Sydney Bristow, portrayed by Jennifer Garner, Abrams
said "She was a character with a secret, and that is always a fun place to
start. But she wasn't a superhero; she was terrified at almost every step. But
still, she would do the right thing. I think we would all like to believe we
would behave like that when the going gets rough."
In 2002, Abrams wrote the screenplay for Superman: Flyby, a project that
eventually failed to materialise. Abrams’ script contained many deviations from
established Superman lore, including
a Kryptonian civil war between Jor-El and his evil brother Katar-Zor, Krypton
remaining intact and Lex Luthor as a UFO-obsessed CIA operative who is revealed
to be have been a Kryptonian sleeper agent all along. The leaking of this
script played a large part in Abrams’ desire to keep as tight a lid as possible
on later projects. “To have a script that is nowhere near the latest draft, let
alone the final draft, being reviewed online, it frankly made me a little bit
paranoid,” Abrams told NPR. “There
are certain things that are, I think, important to keep quiet." He further
explained that “it's not a Machiavellian sort of thing”, but that the secrecy
stems from a desire for “people to have a good time and to have a little bit of
a surprising time.”
2004 saw the premiere of Lost, which Abrams co-created with Jeffrey
Lieber and Damon Lindelof for ABC. The network thought that Alias was too serialised in its
storytelling, and Lindelof and Abrams promised the network that the show would
be self-contained, with no ‘ultimate mystery’ to be solved. This might well be
one of the great ruses in TV development history, as Lost was all about ‘ultimate mystery’, the show and its complex
mythology soon becoming a pop culture phenomenon. Busy with other projects,
Abrams left the show in the hands of Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, though it is a
common misconception that he was involved throughout Lost’s six season run.
To return to the topic of secrecy, Abrams
explained the appeal he finds in this practice in a TED Talk in 2007. During
the presentation, he brought out a “magic mystery box” that he bought 35 years
ago from a magic shop and which he refused to open. “It represents infinite
possibility. It represents hope. It represents potential,” he declared. “What I
love about this box — and what I realized I sort of do, in whatever it is that
I do — is I find myself drawn to infinite possibility and that sense of
potential. And I realise that mystery is the catalyst for imagination...What
are stories besides mystery boxes?"
Abrams’ first feature film directing job
was 2006’s Mission: Impossible III,
starring Tom Cruise. In an interview with IGN,
Abrams said he was able to create elaborate set-pieces, the likes of which he
would love to have done on Alias but
“we could never in a million years afford.” Mission:
Impossible III proved that Abrams could handle explosive spectacle with
sequences like an ambush on a bridge, a helicopter chase, the IMF team breaking
into the Vatican and a heart-stopping leap off a Shanghai skyscraper. Abrams
also set out to “see who these characters were as people not just as spies,”
showing Ethan Hunt’s home life and his relationship with his wife. Abrams would
take a stab at the spy genre again with the 2010 show Undercovers, which was cancelled after a season.
In 2008, Cloverfield, which was produced by Abrams and directed by Reeves,
was released. The found-footage monster movie was promoted using a viral
marketing campaign that captured the curiousity of many moviegoers. Abrams said
the seeds of the project were sown when he was in Japan to promote Mission: Impossible III and was visiting
toy stores there with his son. "We saw all these Godzilla toys, and I
thought, we need our own American monster, and not like King Kong,” Abrams said
at Comic-Con in 2007. “I love King Kong. King Kong is adorable. And Godzilla is
a charming monster. We love Godzilla. But I wanted something that was just
insane and intense."
Later in 2008, the sci-fi procedural
television series Fringe premiered. Abrams
co-created Fringe with Alex Kurtzman
and Roberto Orci, citing The X-Files
and The Twilight Zone as
inspirations. Abram’s favourite TV series is The X-Files, and there is a large collection of memorabilia from
the show on display at his Bad Robot offices. The show’s overarching mythology
involves the presence of a parallel universe, similar in some respects to the
“mirror universe” of Star Trek.
Speaking of which, Abrams directed the 2009
Star Trek reboot in what is likely
his most high-profile feature film directing gig prior to The Force Awakens. Co-writer Kurtzman said "I always think of
it as, Star Trek is beautiful
classical music and Star Wars is rock
'n' roll, and it felt like Star Trek
needed a little more rock 'n' roll to connect to a modern audience.” Abrams
certainly brought the rock ‘n’ roll with a kinetic, exciting and action-packed
take on Star Trek, which alienated
some stalwarts of the original series but which opened what had become a
slightly stodgy franchise to audiences at large.
Abrams has been upfront about being far
more of a Star Wars fan than a Star Trek one. "I was never really
a fan of Star Trek to begin with but
the idea of working on something that is not necessarily your favourite thing
can actually help, because it forces you to engage with it in a way an outsider
can appreciate,” Abrams told The Sunday
Times. “My love of Star Wars, the
energy of it and sort of the comedy and rhythm of it I think affected Star Trek,” he said in a separate
interview with PBS. Naturally, there were many ardent Trekkers who weren’t on
board with this new take on the material and they felt further maligned with
the sequel Star Trek Into Darkness,
but both films received an overall positive critical reception. While Justin
Lin is taking over the director’s seat for Star
Trek Beyond, Abrams is remaining as a producer.
Beyond his early screenplays, Abrams has
dabbled in comedy, directing an episode of The
Office and starring in the musical sketch Cool Guys Don’t Look At Explosions alongside Will Ferrell and Andy
Samberg. Abrams also got to perform a rockin’ keyboard solo in the video which
spoofed the “unflinching walk” cliché seen in many an action movie.
Abrams was contemplating two ideas for an
original movie: a coming-of-age movie about a group of kids making their own
movie, drawing on his childhood love of film, and a thriller about the Air
Force transporting an alien creature to a secret facility, with said creature
naturally escaping. He combined both these ideas into Super 8, which was an unabashed love letter to his childhood idol
Spielberg. Things came full circle in a way, from Abrams editing Spielberg’s
Super 8 home movies to having Spielberg produce a film about the Super 8
movement in the late 70s-early 80s. Abrams told The Guardian that he loved how Spielberg’s films carried “a sense
of unlimited possibility,” but that way lay around the corner “could be
terrifying, it could be confusing, it could be disturbing, or it could be
wonderful and funny and transportive."
Interestingly enough, it was super-producer
Kathleen Kennedy, now the head of Lucasfilm, who suggested to Spielberg that he
should hire the then-teenaged Abrams and Reeves to restore and edit his home
movies. “We followed J.J.’s career, so when he committed to Star Wars, it was this kind of fantastic
coincidence of fate, I guess—preordained destiny or something,” she said. Abrams
was handpicked by Star Wars creator
George Lucas over directors including David Fincher, Brad Bird and Guillermo
del Toro.
In 2008, Lucas told Total Film that he’s “left pretty explicit instructions for there
not to be any more features. There will definitely be no Episodes VII–IX." In 2012,
after the acquisition of Lucasfilm by Disney, Lucas said “I always said I
wasn't going to do any more, and that's true, because I'm not going to do any
more. But that doesn't mean I'm unwilling to turn it over to Kathy [Kennedy] to
do more."
As a mega-fan taking the reins of a
storied, long-lived franchise, there is the danger of being self-indulgent.
Abrams addressed this in a Vanity Fair interview, saying he resisted the
temptation to make The Force Awakens “meta-Star Wars” as that would be “an ironic
approach, which feels anti–Star Wars,”
saying he was focused instead on “inheriting and embracing the elements of Star Wars that are the tenets of what is
so powerful.”
Like all Star Wars fans, Abrams was enamoured of the iconic John Williams
score. In the era before home video was readily available, the biggest piece of
the movie Abrams could take home was the soundtrack, which he would often buy
before the movie was even released. “I would lie on the floor in my room with
my headphones on listening to the soundtracks which would essentially tell me
the story of the movie that I didn’t know,” he said. For Abrams, the most
surreal moment in the making of the film was getting to meet the legendary
composer. “I can’t describe the feeling. All I will say is, just to state the
facts of it: I am about to show John Williams 30 minutes of a Star Wars movie that he has not seen
that I directed.”
While Abrams won’t be sticking around to
direct Episodes VIII and IX, which are being helmed by Rian
Johnson and Colin Trevorrow respectively, there is no doubt that The Force Awakens will shape the
franchise in a monumental way. “I do feel like there’s a little bit more of a
burden on [co-writer] Larry [Kasdan] and me to come up with a story that could
at least be the beginning of what transpires over three films,” Abrams told Wired. The framework has already been
planned, the foundation for the new trilogy been laid, and, according to
Abrams, Episode VIII has already been
written.
As Yoda said in Empire Strikes Back, “always in motion is the future.” Abrams has
set a course for the future of the Star
Wars franchise and there’s no stopping the jump to hyperspace now.
