From a certain point of view, A New Hope is more of a collage of other films than an original movie. George Lucas famously clipped in sequences from Battle of Britain when he screened an unfinished Star Wars to his friends, but even the completed movie borrows liberally, recreating visuals and scenes from classic Westerns to samurai movies to World War II epics.
When Jon Favreau set out to bring Star Wars back to the big screen with The Mandalorian and Grogu, he took a similar approach, looking at Lucas’s original influences to set the tone for his own movie. At a press event last week attended by Polygon, the director explained how he took inspiration from the same sources behind A New Hope — and the surprising neo-noir crime thriller scene he drew on for The Mandalorian and Grogu.
‘We’re all playing the same music’
Before making Star Wars, Lucas attempted to get the rights to Flash Gordon. For Favreau, that fact helped unlock what defines the franchise. “There was a pulpy thing that he [George Lucas] was drawn to, not just in the Star Wars films, but in Raiders,” he says.
When Favreau first set out to make The Mandalorian as a streaming series for Disney Plus, he leaned into the other obvious influences, like Clint Eastwood’s Western anti-hero The Man with No Name and the films of Akira Kurosawa. But as The Mandalorian continued, its story evolved and its bounty-hunter hero, Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal), took on a parental role toward a Yoda-like creature named Grogu.
“A lot of what Star Wars was about, too, is family and growth,” Favreau says, “but you need a fun, exciting backdrop. And that backdrop was inspired by the Flash Gordon space opera pulp storytelling.” Combine all those elements, and you get classic Star Wars.
“So we’re all playing the same music,” Favreau says.
The French Connection
As for that neo-noir thriller, when pressed to reveal if he brought any new cinematic influences into The Mandalorian and Grogu, Favreau pointed to one iconic movie scene.
“Rather than the whole film, it’s almost more like a little passage, little moments that echo things from other films,” he says. “You’ll see there’s a sequence [where] we’re clearly thinking about The French Connection, of a certain chase.”
Directed by William Friedkin and released in 1971 (six years before A New Hope), The French Connection is a crime thriller about two New York detectives (played by Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider) working to uncover an international drug-smuggling ring and intercept a shipment arriving from France. The movie won five Oscars (including Best Picture) and has a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.
In one of The French Connection‘s most iconic moments, the two detectives chase a drug smuggler as he attempts to escape on the subway, while Hackman’s character recklessly drives a stolen car through the streets of Brooklyn to keep up with the train. It’s a frenetic and tense chase sequence, which Friedkin only pulled off by breaking the law, bribing a transit authority official with $40,000 and a trip to Jamaica, and goading his stunt driver into speeds of 90 miles per hour through public streets. (Friedkin himself sat in the backseat of the car and filmed the entire thing.)
How exactly Favreau and his team translate The French Connection and its violent chase scene into The Mandalorian and Grogu remains to be seen, but it’s exciting to think that the filmmaker may have managed to introduce such a delightfully offbeat note into the “music” that is Star Wars.
The Mandalorian and Grogu will be released in theaters on May 22.
Disclosure: This article is based on a press event held in Los Angeles. Disney provided Polygon’s travel for the event. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
