Ron Howard and George Lucas have been friends since they worked together on Lucas’ American Graffiti. That made Howard taking over Solo, the prequel that explains how Han Solo got to shooting first and giving rides to scruffy nerf herders, an odd sort of full circle. Last night, speaking with Stephen Colbert, Howard got into both how he got the job, the long history of the movie’s production, and how Lucas weighed in on one little moment.
Howard, to his credit, doesn’t gloss over that his taking over the movie halfway through was an “unusual situation,” in his words, but he does note that a Solo prequel has been in the works for a long time, as Lucas and longtime collaborations Kathleen Kennedy and Lawrence Kasdan had been working with it for a while. And, interestingly, Howard reveals that when Lucas came by the set, he had an opinion about something, which you can find about six minutes into the above clip:
We were doing a scene and he was trying to stay out of the way, but he did lean over and he said, ‘You know what Han would really do there?’ I said, ‘What?’ And he told me the joke, he gave me a little joke. And I said [to the crew], ‘Hey, guess what? Here’s what we’re gonna do in the next take.’
Part of us hopes it was the bit in the trailer where a cheerful Han tells his terrified crew he has a good feeling about this, right before a Star Destroyer chases him into a nebula apparently occupied by a giant space squid. But we’ll have to see May 25th, when Solo arrives in theaters.
(via Entertainment Weekly)
