'Vanity Fair' Talks to J.J. Abrams About the Secret References He Snuck Into the New Star Wars

With Star Wars Day now behind us, the upcoming release of the latest addition to the franchise is sooner than ever. Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the new entry into the behemoth franchise, and director J.J. Abrams speaks to Vanity Fair about some references he cleverly snuck in. Although most details are still kept mum, Abrams delves into what production was like for the hotly anticipated film, which should tide fans over until the movie drops this Christmas. Head over to Vanity Fair’s website to read the extended interview which is a part of the June issue on newsstands now.

Your movie is taking place 30-some years after Return of the Jedi. Are you going to give it some of that fill-in-blanks quality, in terms of whatever’s happened in the Star Wars galaxy across those decades?

Well, what’s cool is we’ve obviously had a lot of time [during the development process] to talk about what’s happened outside of the borders of the story that you’re seeing. So there are, of course, references to things, and some are very oblique so that hopefully the audience can infer what the characters are referring to. We used to have more references to things that we pulled out because they almost felt like they were trying too hard to allude to something. I think that the key is — and whether we’ve accomplished that or not is, of course, up to the audience — but the key is that references be essential so that you don’t reference a lot of things that feel like, oh, we’re laying pipe for, you know, an animated series or further movies. It should feel like things are being referenced for a reason.

Tell me about what it was like working on the new film both as its writer-director and as a hard-core Star Wars fan going back to your childhood.

Maybe the weirdest moment, which came months after production, was the first time I sat down with John Williams to show him about a half an hour of the movie. I can’t describe the feeling. All I will say is, just to state the facts of it: I am about to show John Williams 30 minutes of a Star Wars movie that he has not seen that I directed.

I mean, none of what I just said to you was ever going to happen in any form. John Williams — he was the DVD or Blu-ray of my childhood because we didn’t, of course, have VHS tapes of movies to watch when we wanted to. So I would buy John Williams soundtracks, often for movies I had not seen yet, and I would lie on the floor in my room with my headphones on listening to the soundtracks which would essentially tell me the story of the movie that I didn’t know. And I’d look at the photographs on the back of the album and I tried to read what I could about the movie — but really, I would just listen to these soundtracks. So it was an amazing thing to get to know him. But the weirdest thing was the idea that I was showing him scenes from a Star Wars movie he hadn’t seen yet. And the fact that they were scenes that I directed — that’s probably as surreal as it gets in my professional life experience.