Many fans, including myself, appreciated how The Last Jedi democratized the Force. While I understand the choice to connect Rey to a notable bloodline, does your film still recognize the existence of the galaxy’s broom boys and girls (i.e., Force users without famous ancestry)?

Of course. Hopefully, the film also suggests that Finn is discovering that he is a Force user and is Force strong. Finn feels the death of Rey, and in a crucial moment during the battle, Finn senses the command ship where the navigation signal was coming from. So, we wanted to begin to plant the idea that Finn is Force strong and that there are other people in the galaxy who are Force strong. Yes, of course, the galaxy is full of Force users, and you don’t have to be a Skywalker or a Palpatine in order to be strong with the Force. But Luke does say very explicitly in Return of the Jedi, “The Force is strong in my family,” and we know that there is an inherited element to Force power. So, considering that this was a story of the Palpatines and Skywalkers, at least these nine movies, we decided to focus on the family part. Rey descending from a Palpatine doesn’t negate the idea that kids with brooms, Finn and any other number of people in the galaxy can be strong with the Force. It just so happens that this young girl that we found in Episode VII — which really has the structure of a fairytale — is royalty of the Dark Side. What we discover in this movie, and hopefully in retrospect, is that she’s essentially a princess who’s being raised as an orphan. The idea that this royalty of the Dark Side would be found as a scavenger in the middle of nowhere, literally living off the ruins of the old war that was created by her ancestors, felt really strong to us. We couldn’t agree more with the debate about the democratization of the Force, but for purposes of this story, we thought that it was a more interesting and mythic answer if it turned out that Rey descended from one of the families that has been at the center of this whole saga the entire time. In the end, the film asserts that there are things stronger than blood because she chooses a different family for herself.

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Since the soundtrack on Tatooine is titled “A New Home,” is Rey now living on Tatooine even though it’s a return to the isolation she suffered on Jakku?

I can say with confidence that neither the screenplay nor the film suggest that Rey is going to live alone on Tatooine. The track names on the soundtrack were at the discretion of the master himself, John Williams. I can't presume to say what John meant when he titled the piece "A New Home," but I can say that Rey's arc over three films has to do with her finding the belonging she seeks with the new family she's found inside the Resistance. The very last thing Rey would do after all that is to go and live alone in a desert. In our thinking, Rey goes back to Tatooine as a pilgrimage in honor of her two Skywalker masters. Leia's childhood home, Alderaan, no longer exists, but Luke's childhood home, Tatooine, does. Rey brings the sabers there to honor the Skywalker twins by laying them to rest -- together, finally -- where it all began. The farthest planet from the bright center of the universe, but a beautiful and peaceful place to bury two sacred objects.

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Rey Palpatine. What were the ins and outs of that significant choice?

We also thought that Rey’s arc cannot be finished after Episode VIII. You can leave Episode VIII and say, “Well, now, Rey is content. She’s discovered her parents aren’t Skywalkers, or whatever, and that’s fine.” But so much of her personal story was about where she came from, what kept her on Jakku all those years and the trauma that shaped her. We see quite strongly in Episode VII that something mysterious and troubling happened to her. Although she did get some answers in Episode VIII, we didn’t feel that that story was over. We felt that there were still more questions in Rey’s head about where she came from and where she was going. So, that was the other big idea that we had to address in this film. Rian’s answer to “What’s the worst news that Rey could receive?” was that she comes from junk traders, and that’s true. She does come from junk traders; we didn’t contradict that. But when J.J. and I spoke, he said, “Well, what’s an even worse answer or elaboration of that news?” And we thought the worst answer was that she descended from the family who are the enemies of her new family, her adoptive family. Leia is a mother figure to Rey in a way that no one has ever been since she lost her real mother (Jodie Comer). So, the idea was that Rey, who’s had inclinations towards the Dark Side, would learn in the course of this movie that Leia is training the descendant of her greatest enemy and that she has the Force strength of Leia’s greatest enemy. Discovering that you actually descended from your adoptive family’s greatest enemy, the same enemy who corrupted Anakin Skywalker and is responsible for the destruction of the Skywalker family in the first place, felt most devastating to us. Based on that, we were very moved by the idea that Leia would have known that from the very beginning, but since she still saw such hope, heart and spirit in Rey, she decided that she was going to take a chance on putting all the hope of the galaxy into the hands of a descendent of her greatest enemy. As Luke says, some things are stronger than blood. That felt like a really strong story point to us.

Therefore, at the end of the movie, when Rey declares herself a Skywalker, that felt like the end of that conversation, which is to say that you get to choose your family, and really, you get to choose your ancestry. Rey rejects the blood ancestry that she has inherited, and instead, she chooses the ancestry of the Jedi. When all the Jedi come to Rey at the end, one of the Jedi lightly says, “We are your ancestors now,” in the background, and I think that’s true. She chooses the spiritual ancestry of the Jedi instead of the blood ancestry of Palpatine.

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When Luke appeared on Crait in The Last Jedi, he apologized to Leia for turning his back on the fight, the Jedi Order and his legacy. He basically admitted that the guy who tossed his lightsaber aside on Ahch-To was wrong before sacrificing his life to save the Resistance and spread hope throughout the galaxy. However, I’ve already noticed that people are projecting the notion that Luke’s line — ”A Jedi’s weapon deserves more respect” — was a swipe at Rian Johnson's first-act choice to have him throw the weapon away. However, I thought you were reaffirming the very conclusion that Rian arrived at for Luke and how Luke was wrong.

That’s exactly it. Those people who see it as a meta-argument between J.J. and Rian are missing the point, I think. At the end of The Last Jedi, Luke has changed. When people look at that, I feel that they misread the ending of The Last Jedi. Throughout The Last Jedi, Luke is stuck, just as so many of the characters in The Empire Strikes Back were stuck. The Falcon’s hyperdrive is literally stuck. The Last Jedi is a really strong middle act because it seems like everyone is spinning their wheels and stuck in certain ways — just as they are in The Empire Strikes Back. I mean that in the sense of everyone is trying to move forward, but as in any middle act, they can’t quite get there. When Luke says, “A Jedi’s weapon deserves more respect” in Episode IX, that’s Luke speaking. That’s his own character. He’s making fun of himself. He’s saying to Rey, “Please don’t make the same mistake that I did.” That’s another theme of the film. How do we learn from our ancestors? How do we learn from our parents? How do we learn from the previous generation? How do we learn from all the good things that they did but not repeat their mistakes? In that moment, it truly is a character moment because we quite deliberately set up the same situation of tossing a saber, but this time, Luke is there to save Rey from making a bad choice. I think it would be a bad misreading to think that that was somehow me and J.J. having an argument with Rian. It was more like we were in dialogue with Rian by using what Luke did at the beginning of The Last Jedi to now say that history will not repeat itself and all these characters have grown.