‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ Director Compares Snoke To Palpatine

Force Friday is over and your room is probably already covered with Porgs, but we are left with a big question when it comes to The Last Jedi, a big, gold bathrobe wearing, creepy uncle of a question. In a new interview with Empire, Director Rian Johnson took some time to talk about the approach to Snoke and how inspiration for how he is presented was inspired by the way Emperor Palpatine was approached in the original Star Wars trilogy:

“We got the whole story of Palpatine’s rise to power in the prequels, but in the original films he’s exactly what he needs to be, which is just ‘The Emperor’” Johnson tells Empire in the new October issue. “He’s a dark force: the scary thing behind the thing. That was entirely how I approached Snoke. I wasn’t interested in explaining where he came from or telling his history, except where it serves this story.”

While we won’t be getting much in the way of Snoke’s origin, Rian is promising that a lot of focus will be placed on Kylo Ren’s current situation:

“Writing Kylo Ren is just so much fun,” says Johnson “Star Wars boils down to the transition from adolescence into adulthood. That’s the heart of these films and Rey is most obviously the one that hangs on. But it’s also Kylo. In the originals you project entirely onto Luke, while Vader is the scary other — he’s the minotaur. The fascinating thing about Kylo and Rey is that they’re two sides of something. We can all relate to Kylo: to that anger of being in the turmoil of adolescence and figuring out who he’s going to be as a man; dealing with anger and wanting to separate from his family. He’s not Vader — at least, he’s not Vader yet — and that’s something I really wanted to get into.”

Source: Empire