Delving into the lore of “Star Wars” can be incredibly daunting even for fans who try their best to keep up with the mountain of material that’s constantly being released. In theory, you could consume “Star Wars” content on a loop and still never catch up to everything happening within the official canon alone.
Favreau is well aware of this and was careful not to dedicate an inordinate amount of time to something that he wasn’t already deeply passionate about. “First, it’s not just any IP [Intellectual Property] that I will engage with, it has to be something that I already connect with and feel passion for — and that I could dedicate a big chunk of my life to doing something with, and contribute to what is already there,” he told Film Stories on a recent trip to the UK for the season 3 premiere of “The Mandalorian.”
To wrap his head around the lore, Favreau’s second step is to make a list from memory of all the things he personally remembers to find out what’s special and what stood out to him, personally. “Memory has a way of prioritising things that are most relevant,” he said. “So the things I remember are going to be more important in some regards than the things I research because they’ve surfaced themselves.”
The next step in the process leads into intense research, something that’s a must for “Star Wars,” but not necessarily for “Iron Man” when Marvel was starting the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Marvel benefitted from Stan Lee’s guidance that was then carried out by a lot of different people who spun the stories in their own ways. With “Star Wars,” Favreau had to work within George Lucas’s original vision.
