Jon Favreau Explains How ‘Skeleton Crew’ Feels Like ‘Star Wars’ While Serving So Many Directors’ Visions
Of all the upcoming Star Wars live-action series, the one that may be getting the least attention is definitely Skeleton Crew, arguably because we still don’t know much about it. It’s been almost a year since the series was announced during Star Wars Celebration Anaheim, and we still are waiting for a few more plot details than “an Amblin-like story focused on four kids and a supervising adult who get lost in outer space”. The only story update we got during the past Celebration in London was that Jude Law, who plays said adult, is a Force user.
We know that the series is currently in post-production and is scheduled to debut in late 2023 (we’ll see if that turns into early 2024 at some point), and that it was co-created by Christopher Ford and Jon Watts, of Spider-Man fame. It will take place during the New Republic timeline, with Mandalorian overlords Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni acting as executive producers as well. The two of them visited Entertainment Weekly‘s Star Wars podcast, Dagobah Dispatch, last week, and were asked a few questions about Skeleton Crew.
Favreau has said before that Watts pitched him the story for it on the set of Spider-Man: No Way Home, and that he immediately got on the phone with Dave Filoni to talk about it. However, something we hadn’t really heard yet is how they told it to Kathleen Kennedy, who used to be a frequent collaborator in Steven Spielberg movies. Here’s how Favreau described it:
“With Kathy Kennedy running Lucasfilm, when John Watts and Chris Ford come in and talked about wanting to do something that feels like an Amblin movie and has that tone, it’s like you’re speaking right to the person who was there and knows the 11 herbs and spices that go into it. So it’s interesting hearing them pitch it and how she reacts to that.”
To Favreau, it’s all about the diversity of stories and voices. He explained how he appreciates that each episode of each show has a different director, and that is directly reflected in their work. And this is especially true in the case of Skeleton Crew:
“One of the things we really like about what the shows that we’ve been working on have turned into is that it the tone of each episode — and in certain cases each series — really reflects the storyteller of the filmmaker. So in The Mandalorian you could have many different tones. Even though the writing is consistent across them, different filmmakers will bring different perspectives. And so each episode hopefully feels different, though they should sit alongside one another.
With Skeleton Crew, I would go even further there because it’s Watts and Ford and a whole array of wonderful directors — some have worked with us before, some who haven’t. And so each episode has its own feel to it.”
These directors are, of course, Jon Watts, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (the Daniels), Jake Schreier, Bryce Dallas Howard, Lee Isaac Chung, and David Lowery. To Favreau, it’s important that the series feels like Star Wars, but you also have to ask — what does that even mean?
“When people think of Star Wars as a genre, it really is a number of subgenres within the Star Wars genre. Because those were [George Lucas’] influences, so it could feel like a Western, it could feel like a World War II film, it could feel like a samurai film. And so you could push limits.
Especially on The Clone Wars, they deviated into many different [genres] — to thrillers and to noir and different types of adventures and different tones. So that’s what’s keeping us engaged and why I’m continuing my collaboration here, is because it’s never like you’re just doing one thing. There’s always room.”
He ended with the following:
“As long as you adhere to a certain aesthetic, and we all agree that it feels like it’s Star Wars, there’s a lot of room for how you can move around. It’s interesting too, as you see at the [Star Wars Celebration] panel and these great trailers, how different they all are. But they all sit together. You would never group them together, but thanks to the world that George created, they all feel like they share a common underlying aesthetic.”
Those trailers included the first-ever look at Skeleton Crew, which is not yet public. For that, we will have to wait a few more months, as there is another Star Wars series coming in the meantime, Ahsoka, which is set to debut in August.
More on Skeleton Crew to come as more information comes out about it.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
