SPOILER WARNING: This story includes major plot developments for the entire first season of “Star Wars: Skeleton Crew,” currently streaming on Disney+.
In 2017, when filmmaker Jon Watts and his writing partner Christopher Ford first approached Lucasfilm with their idea for a new standalone “Star Wars” movie, all they really had was the bare essentials.
“The only thing that I pitched was, ‘It’s about a group of kids that get lost in the “Star Wars” galaxy that have to get home again,’” he says. “That was as much as we had worked out.”
Watts’ career exploded that year with the release of “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” and by the time he was able to untangle himself from Spidey’s web following the release of 2021’s “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” Lucasfilm’s focus had pivoted to making TV series for Disney+.
So Watts and Ford refashioned their idea into what became “Skeleton Crew,” a rousing adventure focused on four kids — Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), KB (Kyriana Kratter) and Neel (Robert Timothy Smith) — who accidentally escape from their secluded planet, At Attin, on a buried ship that once belonged to a legendary space pirate. As they strive to find their way home, they forge a shaky partnership with another wayward pirate, Jod Na Nawood (Jude Law), who uses his rudimentary knowledge of the Force to trick the kids (at first) into thinking he’s a Jedi.
Over the course of the eight-episode season, the kids come to realize that, one, their planet has remained totally hidden from the rest of the galaxy because it used to serve as the central mint for the long-defunct Old Republic; and two, knowledge of At Attin has faded into pirate myth as a fabled planet filled with treasure. Jod uses the kids to get past the barrier protecting At Attin, commandeer the droid infrastructure that had kept the planet humming on its own for centuries, and plunder its vaults filed with piles and piles of gold Old Republic credits. In the finale, the kids are able to contact the New Republic to warn them about the pirates, and permanently drop the barrier around the planet, revealing the existence of At Attin for the first time to the rest of the galaxy.
Watts and Ford spoke with Variety about the process of creating such a significant addition to the “Star Wars” canon, what it was like working with a murderer’s row of directors on the show, why Jod’s lightsaber doesn’t turn red and the truth behind the rules of “Star Wars.”
Other than Jon directing a couple episodes of “The Old Man,” both of your careers have focused on feature films. So as you were building out the show, how did you want to make it feel like a TV series?
CHRISTOPHER FORD: This format that we’re working in is this new world. These limited series, eight-episode stories are really a hybrid between movies and television, so it’s just a process of making sure that each episode is satisfying and does have its own piece to it. But it’s a balance.
JON WATTS: I mean, we went back and watched like old 20-minute pirate serials from the ’20s and ’30s, rather than going back and watching, you know, TV shows.
FORD: Those are amazing, because when you look at them now, the cliffhangers were complete cheats. They would show the character being crushed by a boulder, and the next episode they jumped out of the way. There was no clever, “How do you get out of this one?” They just would redo it.
Along with Jon, the list of directors is ridiculous for the show — David Lowery, the Daniels, Jake Schreier, Bryce Dallas Howard and Lee Isaac Chung. It’s rare that other directors get to work together, so what was that like? Especially since you were, essentially, their bosses?
WATTS: Jake Schreier and Bryce [Dallas Howard], I knew from film school. It’s great. I’ve come from working with producers that were so open-minded to my ideas and just let me go do my thing, so I tried to take that same philosophy and apply it on this show. What was helpful was that everyone understood the tone and the world, so there wasn’t a lot of lording over the directors when they were on set. If anything, we encouraged them to take what we had done and run with it, knowing that they would bring their unique perspectives to each of their episodes. As a director, like you said, you never really get to watch other directors direct — selfishly, I was just sitting on set watching to see how Isaac would handle the scene, versus Bryce or David.
FORD: But not Jake.
WATTS: Not Jake. I’ve known Jake forever. I knew what Jake was going to do.
You also expanded “Star Wars” canon considerably with the creation of At Attin. How did Lucasfilm work with you on that process?
FORD: They’re so open to it. If anything, it was our hesitance, because we, at first, had “Star Wars” up on this pedestal, not wanting to mess it up. And they’re saying, “No, make up your own thing.” There’s little bits and pieces that you futz with to make it all make sense. But if anything, it was them encouraging us to go further.
WATTS: There’s this incorrect notion that there are all these hard-and-fast rules that you can’t do, and that there are these gatekeepers that won’t allow you to make up new things. We found it to be the complete opposite. We were like, “Could we do this? Could you add this? Could we make this kind of a world?” And they were like, “Yeah, great, go for it.”
FORD: Neel is a good example of that, because we started off with, well, he can be like a Max Rebo [from “Return of the Jedi”]. That exists already. But that didn’t have expressive enough eyes to be a main character. So we had to redo it a little bit, and we thought, “Uh oh, they’re not going to let us do this.” Then they said, “Yeah, there are lots of aliens that look like elephants already. There doesn’t have to be just one.”
I will say, Jude Law has talked about how there were some rules…
WATTS: You know, he was talking about a shot or something, and I was like, “Who said that?” And then I was like, “Oh, I think I said that.” It was something about, like a snap zoom?
He’s said that you can’t take the camera from space into a ship within the same shot.
FORD: We were trying to avoid that thing where you, like, David Fincher-through-glass. Sometimes when we were blocking the spaceship stuff, we tried to use the limitation of what you would be able to do if it was on a motion controller rig. You would never go full 360 around it, because that would show where the armature is connected.
WATTS: It’s less of a “Star Wars” rule and more like, what creates an aesthetic that feels “Star Wars”-y versus an aesthetic that feels like something else? In ’77, they would never pass through the glass digitally, because they wouldn’t be able to do that.
In the episode set in the pirate city of Port Borgo, there are even more brand new aliens that you introduce into the canon. How does that process work with Lucasfilm?
WATTS: Usually, it’s Ford drawing a rough thumbnail on a piece of paper, and then you give it to [“Star Wars” lead production designer] Doug Chiang, and they come back with the most incredible 10 different versions of that rendered by the greatest artists.
FORD: And then that’s turned into a working animatronic suit that is so insane. That big crab shell-headed guy — I still look at that and think, “That’s CG.” It’s all real. The way his mouth moves is so cool.
WATTS: Yeah, I want to see more of that guy. I want to see more of Port Borgo. I want to see more of all of it.
As the show progresses, the show implies that At Attin’s origins come from a much earlier era in “Star Wars” mythology. How much was all of that in your heads?
WATTS: There are drafts where we we really explained everything at certain points in the show.
FORD: They get into the Supervisor’s room, and he explains everything. And then we were like, “Wait, we can’t do this. It’s really boring.”
WATTS: On our side of it, you have to figure out all of the details, and then decide how much of it is dramatically expedient to reveal. So you build a world that has that depth, and don’t necessarily show everyone every side of it.
FORD: It’s always a bit of a “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” exercise, because there’s this existing history. The fact that our planet was purposely hidden helps it fit in without making too many ripples.
So how long had At Attin existed with zero contact with the outside galaxy?
FORD: Um. Well? Should we just say stuff? Tell our secrets?
WATTS: I always talked about it as, like, being a potential wedge [of time].
FORD: If someone needs that for future story, we don’t want to [say it].
WATTS: “Star Wars” is such an active, smart, involved community that it’s great watching people make different connections and coloring in parts of the illustration that we’re thinking about. It’s fun to let it be out there with some of that ambiguity, and then if we come back to it in a second season, decide what you want to lock in.
FORD: Honestly, it’s because it’s slightly too complex for especially episodes that are like a ride. It’s like, well, the planet was hidden on purpose a really long time ago. Then it was kind of half-forgotten about, except for a few people, and then those people were killed. It’s many layers of forgetting.
Did you talk with Lucasfilm about the implications of At Attin being revealed to the full galaxy?
WATTS: Yeah. If you talk about what a second season would look like, there’s so many repercussions to all of those things that we did.
FORD: Even beyond this story of these characters. When we first proposed this, I think [executive producers Dave] Filoni and [Jon] Favreau and everyone realized, “Oh, you’re giving us this giant pile of treasure that can be an element in a Star War.”
WATTS: We’ve put that now on the board. There’s a big pile of treasure out there, if anyone wants it.
Maybe I’m over-nerding here, but the fact that the lightsaber that Jod uses doesn’t turn red like it does when the lead character of “The Acolyte” turns to the Dark Side made me think he wasn’t truly a bad guy.
FORD: The lightsaber turning red thing is a bit more specific. I think the way they did it in “The Acolyte,” the crystal was exposed because it’s part a ritual and stuff. We didn’t want to get into that because he’s not a Sith.
WATTS: When I saw that in “Acolyte,” I was texting Ford, “Is that how that works?” [Laughs]
FORD: And I was like, “It checks out.” Honestly, what I was most excited for with Force-user aspect of Jod, was that he was, like, a low level, not a powerful Jedi.
WATTS: Yeah, he wouldn’t be able to change anything to any color.
FORD: He can do a few tiny things. I really liked that few people online were like, “You can tell by the way he’s using the lightsaber that he was not trained.” I wonder if Jude would be insulted by that, but it was kind of the intention.
WATTS: He’s like a guy that took a couple piano lessons when he was a kid, so he can play the one song that he learned.
Was there a version of the story where Jod does cross a line and hurt one of the kids or one of their parents?
FORD: I don’t think we seriously considered that he would do that, because so much of his character was that he’s more of a con man and a liar and a bluffer than a violent murderer.
WATTS: He’s like a really, really bad good guy. Jude is able to play the role in a way where you feel his conflict the whole time. Whenever he’s doing bad things, he’s able to weave in this struggle. He doesn’t want to have to be doing this, but you’ve given him no choice.
FORD: That’s what the intention behind that last moment with him is [when] he throws his gun away. He could shoot the kids. He knows that Wim can’t block it with the lightsaber. And he’s just like, “I’m not going to kill them. I’ve lost.”
Separate from a second season of this show, would you ever want to do television again?
WATTS: Yeah, I love television. I like having that expanded format. The idea of getting deeper into that kind of episodic storytelling is really exciting for me. We’ve been talking about what a second season of this would be like, and maybe leaning into that a little bit more. If the first season felt more like a miniseries kind of structure, now that we’ve met the characters, we spend time with them and explore their world in a slightly different narrative way.
Are you optimistic about a second season?
WATTS: Yeah, I am. You never really know when you make something and you send it out into the world what people are going to think. But the “Star Wars” fan base is very vocal, as everyone knows, and we’ve got such positive responses from everyone about this. We just want to make sure as many people see it as possible. We have a lot more stories to tell.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
English (US) ·