Han Solo actor Harrion Ford was injured filming Star Wars: The Force Awakens after a piece of the Millennium Falcon set collapsed on him, breaking his leg. We’ve now learned that the sci-fi movie was improved as a result of this unfortunate occurrence.
Director JJ Abrams said this week at the Tribeca Film Festival that during the multi-week shooting break that followed Ford’s injury, he was able to work with John Boyega (Finn) and Daisy Ridley (Rey) to help improve their on-screen chemistry.
“When I was on the set of the Millennium Falcon and we started to do work with Rey and Finn, the first time we did it, it didn’t work at all,” Abrams said, as reported by IGN. “It was much more contentious. I didn’t direct it right. It was set up all wrong, and when Harrison Ford got injured–which was a very scary day–we ended up having a few weeks off, and it was during that time that I really got to look at what we had done and rewrite quite a bit of that relationship.
“So when we came back to work again, we actually just reshot from the ground up, those scenes. It was an amazingly helpful thing to get these two characters to where they needed to be.”
Boyega and Ridley are currently shooting Star Wars: Episode VIII, which comes to theaters in December 2017. Just this week, British royalty including princes William and Harry visited the movie’s Pinewood Studios stage in England.
You won’t have to wait until 2017 for a new Star Wars movie, however, as the anthology film Rogue One is due to arrive in theaters this December. The first trailer was recently released and can be seen here.