Wagner's Overture Shifts Rian Johnson's Focus to Emotional Core

Key Quotes

"I think what people think of wagner is the bugs bunny cartoon yeah killed the rabbit killed the rabbit killed the rabbit killed the rabbit also by the way if any true opera scholars or fans are listening i don't know when i'm talking i'm a casual i'm a fan of opera i'm not like a i probably say dumb shit probably in the context of opera but you were not an opera listener when you were growing up when i was a kid no and then i was pretty broke in my 20s and trying to get my first movie made i never traveled and so i scraped together some money and did a backpacking type trip to berlin but the nice thing about europe is you know opera is subsidized by the state and so you can get good tickets for not that much i went to see la traviata the verdi opera and the opera bug got me it was just so powerful and beautiful and that was just completely and from that point onward i'd say i was an opera fan"

Rian Johnson explains that his initial perception of Wagner was limited to popular culture references, like the Bugs Bunny cartoon. Johnson recounts how a trip to Berlin in his 20s, when he was financially constrained, led him to attend an opera. He describes this experience as powerful and beautiful, marking the beginning of his appreciation for opera.

"so i went and i just walked down alone and sat in the theater and the lights go down and in darkness that overture begins it's basically one chord it's an e flat chord and it starts as almost nothing and then slowly just rises and builds this single chord over the course of like three minutes it just is a slow hypnotic rising wave that evokes nothing less than the birth of everything immediately i found myself just closing my eyes and it pulled me and lulled me into this state where by the time it reached the climax of it i just felt like my heart was going to come out of my chest it was just an amazing experience it kind of really mucked me up because i went home that night and looked at my clever little idea and it just wasn't happening it was not like i can't make it has good as that but the emotional place that that taken me to i realized that's what was not in the thing i was writing"

Johnson describes the profound impact of Wagner's "Das Rheingold" overture, noting how its gradual build from a single chord created a hypnotic and overwhelming emotional experience. He explains that this encounter disrupted his creative process, making him realize his own "clever" ideas lacked the emotional depth he had just experienced.

"i'm a huge fan of cleverness yeah probably too much of a fan of it but it took me a while before i realized that it was maybe at odds with something that felt emotional yeah yeah i feel like it's impossible for me to get motivated to make something out of cleverness which is a little bit of a i'm sure my movies i think that i do have kind of a puzzle maker's brain and i'm sure they definitely feel clever for some people maybe too a fault for me i know though that the longer i do it and the more of these like murder mystery movies i make i don't know the more i come to sort of distrust cleverness"

Rian Johnson reflects on his relationship with "cleverness" in filmmaking, admitting he has a strong inclination towards it, perhaps to a fault. He explains that while his movies might be perceived as clever, he has come to realize that cleverness alone is not enough to motivate him creatively and that he increasingly distrusts it as a primary driver for his work.

"for me personally i'm not saying that like you know i perfectly captured or whatever but for me personally i it was nothing but just emotional resonance from the start man it was it was really nice can you perhaps remember a specific moment that you had where you were like oh right this is the thing i've been looking for yeah there was a moment on set i mean there are other moments in the finished movie but there was a moment on set where spoiler alerts kind of for the last jedi it's near the end of the movie the rebels are trapped in a cave they think they're doomed there's no way out and then adam nowhere we don't explain how he got there but luke skywalker shows up and it's a good by scene between luke and leia no one's ever really gone when mark and carrie did that scene together it felt like church on set and mark did a thing which he came up with on the day where he like kissed her forehead before he left and it was just this powerful beautiful moment not just for me for everyone on set and i felt both the star wars ness of it and also the emotional resonance of it tied to the emotional resonance of these two actors who have been on this journey together since they made this sci fi movie in the 70s it was so powerful and i thought okay yeah that's i never want to make something that doesn't feel for me in some way like i'm getting to this place you know"

Johnson shares a specific moment on the set of "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" where he felt he had connected to the emotional resonance he sought. He describes a scene between Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa, where Mark Hamill's improvised gesture of kissing Carrie Fisher's forehead created a powerful, "church-like" atmosphere that embodied both the essence of Star Wars and the actors' shared history.

"i was thinking about how for us star wars is essentially our norse mythology yeah i think it is yeah when i was a kid there was no way to really watch the movies beyond going to the re release in the theater or signing up for a waiting list where we waited six months to get the vhs tape and have it for 24 hours the reality is we didn't see the movies very much the toys were almost the bigger thing and playing with the toys meant that more than anything i think fused it to kind of the birth of the creative instinct in a lot of us because when we were telling our first stories they were in that world with those characters with those toys and i think that's why you hear stories of adults walking onto the millennium falcon set and bursting into tears it happened to me and what i was imagining was my kenner toy in my bedroom when i was a kid you know yeah so yeah i think there's something to that"

Johnson posits that for many, Star Wars functions as a modern equivalent of Norse mythology. He explains that due to limited access to the films in his childhood, the toys and imaginative play within the Star Wars universe were more influential, shaping the early creative instincts of a generation. This deep connection, he suggests, is why adults can have such profound emotional reactions to Star Wars sets, as it evokes childhood memories and formative creative experiences.