Kevin Smith’s Visit To the ‘Star Wars’ Set Was A Religious Experience

As you probably know, or could guess without much effort, Kevin Smith is a really big Star Wars fan. So, when he was given the chance to visit the set of Star Wars: Episode VII, it was an epic experience for him. How epic? Well, he released an 11-minute video talking about his time on the set, and he cries. A lot.

The video should be encouraging news for fans who are worried about what direction the new movies might be going in, as Smith was supremely pleased by everything he saw:

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 a bunch of 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 I haven’t seen since I was a kid. I saw them shooting an actual sequence in a set that was real. I walked across the set, there were explosions. And it looked like a shot right out of a Star Wars movie.

Granted, Smith doesn’t give any specific details — there was almost certainly a gag order limiting what he could say — but what we can glean from this is that the new Star Wars films will likely have a lot more in common with the original trilogy than the disappointing prequels.

The best part of Smith’s experience, however, was when he got to go inside the Millenium Falcon. The Millenium F*$%ing Falcon!

He turns the lights on and there is the Millennium Falcon from my childhood. Now the ship outside looks like a movie set, but the inside, fully replicated, fully built. The guy told me, they took two blueprints: Star Wars and Empire, because the cockpit in Empire was bigger than the cockpit in Star Wars. So they went somewhere between the two. So he takes me over and I’m just looking at it. You look at it from the outside and you can still see inside. I don’t presume we’re going aboard or anything, and then Morgan (JJ’s assistant) says “You ready to go up?” I said (excitedly) “We can go on it?!”

As I walked up that ramp I realized that the something that was missing from those other movies (the prequels) and its now in these movies. And its not the obvious like hey the Millennium Falcon or hey the characters that we know are returning. Its something else entirely — he’s building a tactile world, a world you can touch. And hes replicating with all the love of someone who 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: you use another pop culture reference to describe this pop culture phenomenon. Its like the field of dreams, the Kevin Costner movie. And if JJ builds it, we’re all going to come hard, because its amazing. It looks fantastic. So anyone out there wondering if hes going to pull it off, hes pulling it off. He showed me cut scenes, he showed me sequences, images, pictures. I cried and I hugged that guy. And I’m sure as I was crying and hugging on him that he was thinking “time is money” because theyre making a movie. But he got it. He was very flattered. And I was like “Honestly dude, you’re doing it. You’re making my childhood again. You’re doing our Star Wars. What I saw, blew me away.

So yeah, I’m pretty jealous about this. I mean, I’m not one iota the Star Wars fan that Kevin Smith is, but I would absolutely flip the hell out if I got to experience something like this. So, cheers to Kevin Smith for getting to experience something that every nerd dreams of, and here’s to the next round of Star Wars movies actually living up to our massive expectations.

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(Via Slash Film)

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