Variety has a long feature on the production troubles of the movie.
So what wasn’t working? For screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, the elder creative statesman of the enterprise whose work on the “Star Wars” series goes back to “The Empire Strikes Back” in 1980, it was an issue of tone on the screen and exactitude on the set.
“Tone is everything to me. That’s what movies are made of,” Kasdan says. “But this was a very complicated situation. When you go to work in the morning on a ‘Star Wars’ movie, there are thousands of people waiting for you, and you have to be very decisive and very quick about it. When you are making those split-second decisions — and there are a million a day — then you are committing to a certain tone. If the [producers] think that isn’t the tone of the movie, you’re going to have trouble. It may not always end this way, but no one was happy about it. It was agony.”
Reports suggested Lord and Miller had gone overboard with improvisation, moving farther and farther away from what was on the page. But Kasdan’s son and co-writer Jonathan has a different take.
“The issues we were having were much more in the bones and practical,” he says. “Chris and Phil did everything they could to make it work, as did we. The questions only became about how to make the movie most efficiently in the time we had to do it.”
Production was originally slated from February to July 2017. By June, with the film behind schedule, crew members were told they would not be wrapping until August. When Howard came aboard, it was mandated that 85% of Lord and Miller’s “Solo” be reshot, including second unit material. Howard’s work ultimately comprises 70% of the finished film. The shoot would extend four more months, finally wrapping on Oct. 17.
A crew member who worked on the film under both Lord-Miller and Howard, but declined to be identified because he was not authorized to disclose the information, says Lord and Miller drew Kennedy’s ire for stretching days out with experimentation.
“I got a lot of overtime [under Lord and Miller], which ultimately was their downfall,” the crew member says. “The first assistant director brokers that with production. He ultimately went to the well one too many times, and Kathleen Kennedy blew up.”
The crew member also says Howard had a firmer grip on what he wanted and how he wanted to shoot it. Under Howard, one second unit sequence took up half the stage space at Pinewood Studios that it did under Lord and Miller and a fraction of the time, the crew member says.
Lord and Miller would not agree to an interview, but a source close to the production says that their ideas were constantly overruled.
“In their minds, Phil and Chris were hired to make a movie that was unexpected and would take a risk, not something that would just service the fans,” says the source. “They wanted it to be fresh, new, emotional, surprising and unique. These guys looked at Han as a maverick, so they wanted to make a movie about a maverick. But at every turn, when they went to take a risk, it was met with a no.”
