Kathleen Kennedy Admits Relief After Stepping Away From Lucasfilm
Image source: Deadline
Leading the company responsible for creating - and maintaining - Star Wars might seem like a dream-come-true job for many fans. Still, as Kathleen Kennedy reflects on stepping down as Lucasfilm CEO earlier this year and handing the baton to Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan, she admits it has not always been a bed of roses.
“I suppose there’s a bit of relief,” the long-time cinema juggernaut concedes. “These jobs are not easy and stepping into something like that that George [Lucas] had created was an incredible challenge.”
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Her 14 years at the helm of Lucasfilm had its ups, like 2015’s The Force Awakens, which she calls her proudest accomplishment, or Disney+’s Andor and The Mandalorian, but also its downs, like the massive rift that went through the fandom after the release of The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker.
“Well, I think that that’s the challenge that all franchises [face], certainly something that’s been around now for 50 years. You’ve got people where this means a lot to them,” she said. “But at the same time, the challenge is to try to create something new, something original. So finding that balance is really the toughest thing.”
She also reveals that George Lucas didn’t necessarily give her a care package when he handpicked Kennedy as his successor for Lucasfilm: Asked if there was any material she could use to help her steer the direction of the company, Lucas declined: “He [Lucas] said, ‘No, no, it’s all here,’” she said, pointing to her head. “I said, okay, well that’s going to be interesting to try and mine that.” All the creator of Star Wars gave her were “a couple of paragraphs” of ideas for new stories but no treatments for future Star Wars films. Nevertheless, she has no doubts that selling Lucasfilm to Disney was the absolute right decision: “And I think Star Wars was a perfect acquisition for Disney and it’s what George wanted. There was no other company he wanted to sell the franchise to other than Disney.”
Kennedy also addresses her decision to remove directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller from Solo: A Star Wars Story, due to creative differences: “I wasn’t required to do that. There are many complicated situations that develop that certainly reach a point where you have to make a difficult decision like that,” and added, “Well, that really only happened once, thank god.”
After leaving Lucasfilm, she returned to her role as an independent producer together with her husband Frank Marshall, at a time of massive disruptions in the movie business (like the Paramount-Warner merger - of which she is rather critical) or the rise of AI and its consequences for making movies (of which she is open-minded).
And overall, she admits that it takes time to get her groove back as an independent producer after nearly one and a half decades of leading Lucasfilm: “I’m also trying to get reacquainted with people that I’d lost track of. Because you get in a bit of a bubble when you’re doing something like Star Wars.”
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