It’s significant, I think, that at the end of this months-old Vanity Fair video that Mark Hamill talks about the joy and satisfaction of “giving Star Wars fans what they want,” or words to that effect.
Monumental, world-class cinema had never been about giving ticket buyers what they think they want because they don’t know what that is, not really. They only know what they liked before, and so an attitude of “give them what they want” amounts to a kind of creative death sentence.
It’s always been the task of first-class filmmakers (and innovators in other industries, for that matter) to deliver the next essential thing — to give the public what it will want once it sees and hears and understands what that thing is. [Video after jump.]
