Kathleen Kennedy likes to tell a story. It's 1991, early in the making of Jurassic Park. "Steven [Spielberg] very much wanted a dinosaur to run in the movie," she says. As a producer, it was Kennedy's job to get the director's vision on screen. "You can usually find a way to execute what you're trying to do to tell a story. Sometimes it's what you don't see that solves it. But when you really want to see a dinosaur run, you need to figure out how you're going to do that."
Initially, the plan was this: the dinosaur close-ups would be filmed using animatronics, whereas the full-length creatures would be shot using stop-motion, the technique favoured for monster movies since the 1930s. For the rest, Kennedy and Spielberg turned to Industrial Light & Magic, the pioneering effects shop established by their close friend George Lucas to make Star Wars: touching out puppeteering cables and adding motion blur. But it wasn't working. The stop motion was still too jittery. It broke the illusion.
Meanwhile, two artists at ILM, Mark Dippé and Spaz Williams, were pushing to use full-CGI dinosaurs. They had worked with Kennedy before, to create the first completely CGI character in a film, for Young Sherlock Holmes. In secret, they had even built a mock-up of a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in full stride. One Monday in November, Kennedy dropped by ILM's offices in San Francisco, where one of the artists had left the T-rex up on a monitor. "It was a wire model that ran across the screen," says Kennedy. "And the minute I saw it I said, 'OK. Let's show Steven.'"
You know the rest of this story. Seeing ILM's demo, Spielberg dropped stop motion and decided to create Jurassic Park's most iconic dinosaur sequences using CGI. The film became, briefly, the highest-grossing movie of all time, establishing a multi-film franchise and sparking an explosion in computer-generated visual effects that fundamentally transformed Hollywood forever. (Oh, and it inspired Lucas to begin work on the Star Wars prequels.)
But Kennedy doesn't tell the story to brag. It's to make a point. "We were entirely focused on what we were trying to accomplish," she says. "We were just trying to get the movie made." Everything that came after was a bonus. What mattered was that the T-rex ran.
Chances are that if you had a formative film as a child, Kennedy produced it: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial; the Indiana Jones films; Back to the Future; The Goonies; Gremlins. Over the span of more than 90 movies - first with Spielberg at Amblin Entertainment, then at Kennedy/Marshall, the production house she established with her husband Frank Marshall - she's made critical hits (Schindler's List, Lincoln) and indie darlings (Persepolis) which have raked in more than $15 billion (£12.3bn) and in excess of 120 Oscar nominations.
So in 2012, when George Lucas decided to retire and sell Lucasfilm - and with it not only Star Wars, but Industrial Light & Magic and its recording facility Skywalker Sound - to The Walt Disney Company, he deemed Kennedy "the obvious choice" to take over the empire he'd created.
Read more: The Force Awakens review: almost the best Star Wars ever
Kennedy's first task, 2015's Star Wars: The Force Awakens, was by any metric a galaxy-sized hit, taking more than $2 billion and introducing a new generation of fans to the Skywalker clan's family problems. It currently sits third only to Avatar and Titanic in the list of highest-grossing films of all time. (Jurassic World, produced by her husband, sits fourth.)
But The Force Awakens is just the start of Kennedy's ambitions. Her real goal is even bigger, taking in spin-off movies, games, TV series, novels, even virtual-reality experiences. A vast, seamlessly connected narrative universe. An entire galaxy of stories, far, far away.
It's October 2016. Kennedy, 63, has dark brown, shoulder-length hair and lightsaber-blue eyes and is sitting in the restaurant at the Walt Disney studioses in Los Angeles, eating a cobb salad. She's jetlagged, just back from several months in London and on locations filming Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and the as-yet-untitled Episode VIII back to back.
When Kennedy joined Lucasfilm, there were already plans for spin-off movies. "George Lucas actually had the idea," she says. "He was the one that was really intrigued with the notion that there were other stories to tell in the universe." There had been an "extended universe" of Star Wars novels and games before, and the popular The Clone Wars animated series. But that universe was unwieldy. It varied wildly in quality and contradicted itself. Kennedy envisioned a unified narrative, tightly woven.
One of the first decisions she made upon taking over Lucasfilm was to reset the Star Wars canon. She brought in Kiri Hart, a writer and Star Wars junkie with whom she'd worked at Kennedy/Marshall, to assemble the Story Group - a Pixar-like brain trust of storytellers who would set the tone for the new Star Wars. "The objective was to figure out what a development group could look like inside Lucasfilm, because it had never had that," says Hart, now the company's vice president.
The Story Group serves both as a Star Wars writers' room and as the guardian of its timeline. In secret at Lucasfilm's headquarters in San Francisco's Presidio Park, the group is plotting out narratives across the franchise, from the TV series to comic books. Whenever a film-maker or author comes up with an idea for a new film, book or product, it's the Story Group that helps to make sure it fits within the grand overarching universe.
Want to know what happened between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens? Read sci-fi author Chuck Wendig's Aftermath novels. Poe Dameron fan? Charles Soule and Phil Noto's comic fleshes out his backstory. And watching Star Wars: Rebels will tie-in with Rogue One, while putting Darth Vader in an entirely new light when you revisit A New Hope. Pick any frame in a Star Wars film - just where did Han Solo get those rathtars? - chances are that Hart not only knows, but has an entire story in the pipeline.
"Kiri has been very good about creating a narrative timeline, and having everybody involved in a certain narrative understand where it might fit. That's become important to the way we talk about these stories," says Kennedy. The Story Group is currently working on storylines sketched out through to 2022.
That's not to say everything is frozen in carbonite. The opposite: for Kennedy, the Story Group is about building a support structure, an incubator for Star Wars stories. The first two trilogies were the product of George Lucas's singular mind, but the next generation will be the product of a diverse collection of voices across different media - something which already shows in the stories being told. (It's no accident that two-thirds of the Story Group are women.) It also exists to help maintain a level of consistency - in other words, to help prevent another Phantom Menace.
That's vital, too: not every Star Wars story should be told, and not every gap should be filled. Star Wars is full of ellipses. Lucas's genius was in leaving enough kindling dotted through the films to ignite countless children's imaginations. "Leia says to Obi-Wan, 'Years ago, you served my father in the clone wars'," says Hart. "I had no idea that was going to turn into a whole thing. You're watching that and just thinking, 'That sounds cool.' It makes the history of the place feel real." The Story Group is designing the new canon with that in mind.
"There can be gaps in the timeline or biography of a character, and we track all these things, obviously," says Hart. "[But] it's something the group cares about a lot. You don't want to know everything. And when you do fill something in, it needs to feel worthy, surprising and exciting."
Lucasfilm is not the only company building a cinematic universe - even within Disney. During our lunch, Victoria Alonso, a producer on the Marvel franchise, drops by to say hi. "We look at Marvel, but we're not trying to emulate that in any way," Kennedy says afterwards. "In fact, we talked often about how distinctive what we're trying to do with Star Wars is from Marvel. They've been extremely successful in exploiting the characters in that universe, and we have a place. We have the galaxy."
What she means is: whereas Marvel's stories are about, say, Captain America, Star Wars is a firmament of planets, rich with lore. Tatooine is still there even when the Skywalkers aren't around. The Jedi is a whole religious order. And every cantina is a bustling hive of potential stories.
Kennedy has taken that idea - that Star Wars is a place - and made it core to how the company operates. In collaboration with Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasfilm is creating what Kennedy calls the "digital backlot", a kind of real-world Wookieepedia.
"When you delve into an environment in a game, it should feel authentically Star Wars," says Lynwen Brennan, Lucasfilm's general manager. "Like you've delved into a film itself. That led us to develop pipelines so we're actually able to take the film assets and put them into games and immersive entertainment. We're also able to take game assets and put them into films. So in that way you truly recognise and feel that the environment, the characters and the ships are all authentically designed by our art department."
So, a creature in Episode VIII could be sketched by a concept artist, then built as a puppet by Neal Scanlan's creatures shop at Pinewood Studioses. That puppet or model is then 3D scanned, touched up and finished in CG, and exported as an exact digital file. If that file is later needed for a Hasbro toy, or a character in a game, it can be shared. And vice versa: for December's Rogue One, Industrial Light & Magic ended up borrowing some assets that games developer Dice had built for the video game Star Wars: Battlefront. It's Star Wars as a platform.
"If they're building a ship in Rogue One that we have in Rebels but we've never been inside it, I can get [production designer] Doug Chiang on email and say, 'Hey, are you doing a cockpit for that thing? We want to make sure ours and yours are the same,'" says Dave Filoni, executive producer and creator of Star Wars: Rebels. "The next thing you know, there's a quick collaboration, and we know what the cockpit looks like. That kind of continuity is also something that Star Wars fans value."
There's been a conversation [in Hollywood] of the digital backlot for years, where people have toyed with the idea," says Kennedy. "Lucasfilm is uniquely suited to be able to do that, because it's a company in service to one IP. So we can create a narrative timeline that can be fuelled by this interconnectivity. That's a concept we started talking about the minute I got into the company: the potential of what we could do on the technical side that could liberate us creatively."
Kathleen Kennedy grew up in Redding, a small town in Northern California. She fell in love with film in history class. "I had a teacher who loved movies. He had a little theatre called The Flick, and he would let a bunch of us volunteer to work there, and he also let us make little movies in class," she says. (Her first: "My Vietnam statement, to John Lennon's 'Imagine'," Kennedy cringes.)
After college, she worked for a news channel in San Diego. She moved to Hollywood after seeing Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Pretty soon she was working as Spielberg's assistant on 1941 and then Raiders of the Lost Ark. He was so impressed he made her a producer on his next movie. "My story sort of sounds ridiculous, because the first movie I produced was E.T.," she laughs.
When you've worked with as many directors as Kennedy has - Spielberg, Scorsese, Fincher, Eastwood - you develop an instinct for them. For The Force Awakens, Kennedy had had only one choice of director: J.J. Abrams, whom Kennedy and Spielberg had known since they'd hired him to restore some of Spielberg's old Super-8 movies. But for the standalone films, Kennedy wanted to find film-makers who could bring new life to the franchise. "Because I knew George for so many years and I worked with Steven for so many years, there is a quality to the two of them that is not that dissimilar to the qualities we were looking for," says Kennedy.
One of their first choices was Gareth Edwards, the British director who had turned heads in Hollywood with 2010's low-budget Monsters, for which he had also created his own visual effects. Hart called Edwards, who was by then filming 2014's Godzilla reboot, to arrange a meeting. As it happened, Star Wars is the reason Edwards became a director.
"For my 30th birthday I went to Tunisia and slept in Luke Skywalker's house. I even took blue dye, so I could have blue milk," says Edwards, sitting in a meeting room in Lucasfilm's San Francisco headquarters, overlooking the bay. "You know when Uncle Owen says, 'That's what I'm afraid of,' and Aunt Beru says 'He's got too much of his father in him'? There's a blue stain on the floor there now, because of me."
He told Kennedy the story; she laughs recalling the moment. Although Edwards was a relatively untested film-maker, he had that Spielbergian quality they had been looking for. A certain charm. A sense of wonder. A sense of spectacle. "He had strong character development inside his stories, and just in talking to him, he expressed an ability to think much bigger," says Kennedy.
"It's one thing to come in and say you want to do Star Wars. It's another to say, specifically, this is something that I love about Star Wars and I feel like I could really own it," says Hart. "The very first thing Gareth said to me when we started talking about Star Wars was, 'I've always wanted to join the Rebel Alliance.'"
As it happened, Lucasfilm creative director John Knoll had pitched an idea about the rebels referenced in the opening crawl for A New Hope - the ones who stole the plans for the original Death Star. Edwards moved up to San Francisco to work with the Story Group and screenwriter Gary Whitta to flesh out the idea. "That early period when we were here was probably my favourite time in my whole career," says Edwards.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, out on December 16, is the first of an untold number of anthology movies. There are already two more in the pipeline: a Han Solo movie, written by The Empire Strikes Back and The Force Awakens co-writer Lawrence Kasdan and directed by The LEGO Movie's Phil Lord and Chris Miller, and a third as-yet-untitled project scheduled for 2020. That's besides episodes eight and nine, which will be directed by Looper's Rian Johnson and Jurassic World's Colin Trevorrow respectively.
"You can recognise when a film-maker really, really cares about what they're doing," says Kennedy. "I felt that about Colin. Rian's an unbelievably smart, fascinating film-maker, and he's done a beautiful job onEpisode VIII. He's introduced some new things and new ideas. That's what I want. That's what is exciting about bringing in this new variety of talent - you always want to be surprised."
That, Kennedy says, is the whole reasoning behind the Story Group, behind the Digital Backlot. It's the same instinct that she developed as a producer: to liberate storytellers - whatever the platform - to be creative. To let their imaginations run wild, then let her make it real.
"What has been so wonderful about Kathy is there was a real creative freedom from the start," says Johnson. "She gave me a script for The Force Awakens and then sat down and said, 'So what happens next?' That was the last thing I was expecting."
Edwards remembers a pivotal meeting early in the development of Rogue One. "We made a big assumption at the very beginning," says Edwards. "And Kathy, I remember in one meeting, turned around and went, 'Well, why are you assuming that? We can do what we want.' It changed the direction of the film. Our film is not your average blockbuster. It takes a few more risks. Kathy was very supportive of that and defended it to everybody."
"I think what this movie is going to do is say to the audience: Star Wars is going to go many, many different places. These movies are not all going to look alike. They're all going to be very different," says Kennedy.
Not every film-maker is the right fit - such was the case with one aborted anthology project that was being helmed by director Josh Trank, before he reportedly ran into problems on the set of Fantastic Four. "At a certain point you just develop this sixth sense of where you know it's either starting to click into gear or it's not," says Kennedy.
"You've got to convince Kathy," says Edwards. "But once you've got her, you're invincible."
Lucasfilm is not just Star Wars. When Kathleen Kennedy inherited the company from George Lucas, she also took over Industrial Light & Magic. ILM has long been a creative force in the industry - moving on from Jurassic Park to create dozens of visually groundbreaking films, from the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy to the Marvel films. That airport fight in Captain America: Civil War? ILM created it almost entirely digitally. (Try watching it again knowing that Spider-Man in that sequence isn't real.)
But Star Wars is ILM's raison d'etre. And, with Lucasfilm and ILM sharing a physical space, it can use the franchise to explore its most innovative work. "Usually for a visual effects company, you're very hand to mouth," says Brennan. "You're trying to figure out how to get a technology ready that's going to appear in a year or 18 months. Being able to know we can really invest in technology that it's going to take a little bit longer to come to fruition."
One example is ILMxLAB, the company's new advanced technology division established under Kennedy to explore the potential for alternative technologies in storytelling, such as virtual reality. "The idea with ILMxLAB is to explore what storytelling looks like in these new, immersive worlds," says Bredow.
Early in the lab's creation, the team had Kennedy test a VR experience they were working on. "We took the Millennium Falcon we had just done for Episode VII and we landed it on her head," laughs Bredow. "Skywalker Sound came in and set up 12 speakers - suitable for a large-scale movie theatre. It shook the whole building." They rigged up a wind machine, a suggestion from one of Disney's Imagineers. "She took the headset off and said: now that's what I'm talking about!"
That test became Trials on Tatooine, Lucasfilm's first VR experience in which visitors (as xLAB calls them) are put in the shoes of a Jedi in training. It's only a few minutes long, but it gives a revealing glimpse of what ILM is doing. The assets are film-quality; it really feels like you're standing beneath Han Solo's spaceship. When the xLAB team took the experience to Star Wars Celebration and watched thousands of fans flick on their lightsabers in VR for the first time, every single face was grinning like a child.
ILMxLAB is now working with Batman Begins writer David S Goyer on a Darth Vader VR experience, and is working closely with the secretive AR startup Magic Leap on mixed-reality experiences. But the group's experiments aren't just impacting how the Star Wars franchise will live on in virtual reality, or in Disney's imminent Star Wars attractions. They're also changing how Star Wars films are made.
Rogue One follows Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), the leader of a band of misfit rebels tasked with working out the Death Star's weakness. There's a family connection too: Erso's father is one of the battle station's designers. As Edwards had pitched it: if The Force Awakens is grand melodrama, Rogue One is a second-world-war movie, gritty and chaotic. On Monsters and Godzilla, Edwards was known for using handheld shots and unexpected angles - something shared by Greig Fraser, the film's director of photography. "They'll be searching for camera angles the whole time. It's very natural - it gives it a sort of earthy realness," says animation supervisor Hal Hickel.
So, early in Rogue One's production, ILM built virtual sets for several of the film's locationss that Edwards and his production designer could explore inside an HTC Vive. "The first time we did it, he was visualising the inside of the U-wing [starfighter]," says Bredow. The art team had been working for weeks, translating concept art into a digital model. "We took the rough model that we had and put it in VR, and we put Gareth in the goggles. After two minutes, he said, 'This looks way better in real life.'"
These new tools translated over to filming. "We'll pre-animate a section of, say, X-wings diving on an Imperial facility, and then we'll bring that on to our motion capture stage, and he can view it through a camera viewfinder," says Hickle. "The action just keeps looping, so he can walk around it just like he can with actors on set and find cool angles. It's great to give them real-time tools they can use the same way they're used to with a live-action process."
Those tools will go on to have a life for ILM's other clients - both within Disney and the wider industry. But just as the Story Group is about building a foundation for a narrative universe, Star Wars is providing a testing ground for the company to innovate from. It's changing not just how Star Wars is made, but how movies are made, period.
Much of that comes from Kennedy's drive to push boundaries. "One of my favourite quotes from Kathy: she is always saying that good is the enemy of great. If it's not great, why are we doing it?" says Brennan. "She wants to make sure every time Star Wars touches any platform - whether it's a book, a game, a consumer product, or immersive entertainment - it has a reason for being on that platform, and that it ties in with the story."
If making The Force Awakens exerted a toll on Kennedy, it doesn't show. She's confident, funny, a natural leader. (At school, she played American football. On the boy's team. As quarterback.) "It's a similar feeling I remember having had making E.T. many years ago, where there's so much a sense of overload happening that you get kind of numb," she says. Well, not quite the same: as a novice producer making E.T., Kennedy would be physically sick from nerves.
"[The Force Awakens] was a tremendous weight on her shoulders," says Marshall. "I think she felt a huge responsibility of maintaining the legacy and taking care of Star Wars on George's behalf. But she always approaches these things with a great enthusiasm and a sense of humour. She was the same on E.T. as she was on Star Wars: always trying to make the movie better."
"I think George knew that Kathy could handle the pressure of running Lucasfilm," says Abrams. "She has an animal instinct to produce. She intuits and identifies problems and within milliseconds takes action to address them."
Kennedy knows that the film industry is undergoing a foundational shift again, not for the first time in her career. That's one of the reasons she took over from Lucas: to help shape its future. "When we made E.T., nobody was talking about the foreign market to the extent they do today. Now, from a standpoint of business, you have to do that," says Kennedy. "But I don't feel drastically different about how I approach things."
Of course, the difference is that back then, when she talked to directors about their childhood inspirations, they'd mention the same directors she loved growing up: David Lean, Antonioni, Truffaut. Now, they'll talk about Kathleen Kennedy movies.
"Kathy and Frank were two of the first producers' names I recognised as a kid," says Johnson.
"I had a shelf of VHS tapes, and on it were Star Wars and Kathy Kennedy movies," says Edwards.
"That's really weird," says Kennedy, laughing. "It makes me feel old."
At Lucasfilm, Kennedy is trying to create for a new generation of storytellers the environment that she and Spielberg had in those early days at Amblin and Kennedy/Marshall, when they weren't fretting about China's box office or licensing deals. Sitting around with Spielberg and Marshall, figuring out how to make Raiders of the Lost Ark. ("I remember reading the script and saying, 'That's amazing, but I've no idea how we're going to do it.'") That's always been her gift. Whether the story is a movie, a comic or a VR experience is beside the point. The point is the story. The point is: if the next Spielberg comes to Lucasfilm and wants to see a dinosaur run, she'll find a way.
"The story of Kathy relayed to me when I joined was the story of her making Jurassic Park," says Bredow. "Her mandate was: look for our next dinosaur."
"I've been around long enough that I've had moments where I step back and say: 'Oh my god, that's a game changer. That allows us to tell stories in a way that we never could have imagined,'" says Kennedy, in a rare moment of reflection. Then she smiles. "I want to be a part of that, over and over again, until I can't do this any more."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
