The anticipation for Solo: A Star Wars Story got back on track after its trailer dropped last week. To keep the hype train going, co-screenwriters Lawrence and Jon Kasdan spoke to Entertainment Weekly about making the spinoff.
The pair revealed they looked to classic films like the Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski, Michael Mann's Heat, Disney's Treasure Island, the timeless western Unforgiven, and the 2000 British drama Gangster No. 1 as sources of inspiration. The Big Lebowski is probably the most unexpected choice out of the bunch, but Jon Kasdan and his father Lawrence are major fans of the Coen Brothers' work, which led to exploring the film. He told EW:
[We were] trying to create a crime movie where our character was entering a crime world where there were already dramas in place and relationships and complications, and we have to see him negotiate a lot more rivalries than he is expecting at the beginning of the story. [Solo] has that flavor of a crime world that has weirdness and surprise and people stumbling into things — and other people very intentionally getting into [trouble]. The Big Lebowski is a great example because Solo has a more off-kilter tone than you’ve ever seen in [Star Wars].
The basis of young Han’s relationship with his crime-riddled mentor Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson) seemed to have been partly derived from Heat. “We talked about the relationship between Val Kilmer and Robert De Niro in Heat, where there’s a sort of older, wiser criminal, and then someone who’s learning the ropes from them," the pair explains. "We wanted this movie to have that flavor and that swagger.”
The cast of Solo: A Star Wars Story includes Alden Ehrenreich as the titular character, Donald Glover as young Lando, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke as Qi'ra, Thandie Newton and Paul Bettany. Look out for the film on May 25, 2018.
