David Fincher, who has Gone Girl opening this Friday, has a reputation both as a brilliant director and an awesome misanthrope. Which makes somewhat hilarious the idea of him taking a meeting with Lucasfilm (now a subsidiary of Disney – heil!) to direct a new installment of Star Wars, the ultimate hero’s journey. Yep, that actually happened. Though not surprisingly, Fincher’s ideas about the franchise didn’t exactly fit into Disney’s plans for Operation Starwarossa, as he explains in this new interview with TotalFilm.
“I talked to Kathy [Kennedy] about it, but I think that it’s a different thing from… I don’t know what Disney-Lucasfilm will be like,” he says of the studio merger that resulted in a new batch of Star Wars films being greenlit.
“It’s tricky,” he adds. “My favourite is The Empire Strikes Back. If I said, ‘I want to do something more like that,’ then I’m sure the people paying for it would be like, ‘No! You can’t do that! We want it like the other one with all the creatures!’
“I always thought of Star Wars as the story of two slaves [C-3PO and R2-D2] who go from owner to owner, witnessing their masters’ folly, the ultimate folly of man… I thought it was an interesting idea in the first two, but it’s kind of gone by Return Of The Jedi.”
I love you, David Fincher. And while I’m mildly curious as to what JJ Abrams will do with Star Wars VII, at least insofar as which aspects will incur the wrath of the jorted hordes, I’d much rather read David Fincher’s treatment for 12 Light-Years a Slave.