One of the best scenes in Star Wars: The Force Awakens - which finally comes to DVD and Blu-Ray this month - is the interrogation between Daisy Ridley's Rey and Adam Driver's Kylo Ren. Ren removes his mask for the first time, placing it on a table full of ashes. As it turns out, that moment is even more significant than we thought.
"The backstory is, that that table has the ashes of the enemies he’s killed," JJ Abrams told Entertainment Weekly. "He originally had his mask off the first time we shot that scene. Then we reshot it with his mask on, but we had that shot which I loved and thought was so cool of the mask being slammed down into that ash. He used to place his mask gingerly onto a piece of the set, which was incredibly unimpressive. So this moment made it a much cooler beat."
Abrams also revealed the impressive bit of editing trickery that allowed for the shot to make it into the scene:
“That moment was actually shot for, and meant to be used in, the scene where he was talking to the Vader mask. So that shot was stolen from the scene that we had changed and put into the scene with Rey. Sometimes bits and pieces of one scene end up being something that you use in another scene that you didn’t expect. That’s always kind of fun, when you realize that something you’ve shot actually has a use you didn’t expect."
Although we can take the (VERY) small comfort that the pile of ashes doesn't include Han Solo - whose body is probably still falling through space - something tells me that Ren's kill count will keep rising in the upcoming episodes. If it wasn't already clear, he is not a foe to take lightly.
Directed by JJ Abrams and starring Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, and Adam Driver, Star Wars: The Force Awakens will be available to digital download on April 11, 2016, and out on DVD and Blu-Ray on April 5, 2016 in the US and April 18, 2016 in the UK.
