These days, it seems like Star Wars: The Force Awakens director JJ Abrams can’t take a breath without making big news. It’s no surprise, then, that several storylines have emerged from his recent appearance on The Howard Stern Show. Here are a few takeaways for those who missed the interview:
He was terrified when he showed an early cut of the film to Disney execs
The director showed a cut of the film to Disney’s Bob Iger, Alan Horn, and Alan Bergman before any visual effects had been added, and was a complete nervous wreck before, during, and after the screening.
“We screened the movie, and it was horrifying,” said Abrams. “I’m nervous beyond words, I’m showing this movie that I know is so far from finished, there’s not an effect in it.”
Despite Abrams’ reservations, however, the three men were supposedly very happy with what they saw.
Abrams has fielded the Why isn’t Luke in the trailers? question countless times, but he gave Stern as straightforward an answer as we’ve heard from him on the subject: “I hate when I go and see a trailer and I feel like I’ve just seen the whole movie in an encapsulated form, it makes me nuts,” he said. “I’d rather be asking questions and feel that they’d been answered for me [by the film].”
He has no patience for the Boyega bashers
When asked about the backlash he’s received for casting a black man (John Boyega) as a stormtrooper, the director had this to say:
“All I know is that John Boyega is extraordinary in the movie … I think the people who are complaining probably have a lot bigger problems than [that] there’s a black Stormtrooper.”
He loved the idea of turning the original trilogy’s heroes into myths
This is the closest the conversation got to revealing any plot details. Abrams was psyched about the idea of turning the heroes from the original trilogy (Han Solo, Princess Leia, and Luke Skywalker) into legendary figures that younger generations would mythologize. We get a bit of this in the trailer when Han is assuring Finn (Boyega) and Rey (Daisy Ridley) that the stories they’ve heard are true, but judging by Abrams’ enthusiasm on the subject, we’re guessing this will be a consistent theme in Episode VII.
“That question of this young woman asking ‘Who is Luke Skywalker?’ I don’t know why, but it made me feel like ‘f–k, that’s so cool,’” Abrams said. “These would be essentially kids who didn’t see Star Wars themselves, in this movie, who would be in this universe … the idea of discovering or rediscovering this world that had been created.”
All in all, this was a pretty interesting conversation. It seems like the director can discuss the film a lot more freely than he could a few months ago, and we’re beginning to form a picture of what the end product might look like.
Of course, we can speculate all we want until December 18, 2015 rolls around. Until then, may the force be with you.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?