Obi-Wan Kenobi Interview: Deborah Chow On Why Hayden Christensen Needed To Come Back

thegamer.com:

Deborah Chow has quietly been establishing herself as one of the most important players in the post-Episode Nine era of Star Wars. Having directed episodes of The Mandalorian, Chow was entrusted to helm the upcoming Obi-Wan Kenobi series, where she directs every episode to fully mould the project. As such, she knows a lot about what it means to tell a Star Wars story, and I asked her how she differentiated Obi-Wan from The Mandalorian while keeping them firmly within the same universe.

"There are certain sets of elements that make something feel Star Wars," Chow says. "In terms of the world building, the characters, the droids, the creatures, all of that goes into it. It's also a little bit in the tone. But I think what's exciting, especially in the streaming era, is that it's a big timeline [and] it's also a very vast galaxy. We have the opportunity now to tell different stories, and different people telling different stories with different visions. We're telling a different type of story. Yes, we're still in the Star Wars galaxy. but we're in a different time period, with different characters. So it's just following the story within that universe for me."

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These "certain elements" go all the way back to the beginning of Star Wars, and the initial inspirations George Lucas used as his building blocks in the 1970s. "The DNA is always in Westerns, and samurai films, particularly samurai films with such a similarity to the Jedi Code and the ethics," she says. "When we were doing The Mandalorian, I approached it [with the idea] the tropes were a little bit more classic Western, so we were looking at classic Western references for that. Whereas with this one,