Following the release of “The Last Jedi,” some fans had a bad feeling the movie was missing one iconic staple. But director Rian Johnson is here to set the record straight.
Fans feared that the new “Star Wars” movie had omitted a classic line that’s been uttered throughout the franchise ― some variation of the phrase “I have a bad feeling about this.”
Luke (Mark Hamill) says it in “A New Hope,” Leia (Carrie Fisher) says it in “The Empire Strikes Back,” Han (Harrison Ford) says it in “Return of the Jedi,” and so on. You can watch the different instances in the compilation below:
At first, it seemed like the line didn’t make it into “The Last Jedi,” and die-hard “Star Wars” fans took notice.
However, in response to tweets from his very concerned audience, the director confirmed that the phrase did, in fact, make an appearance in the movie. And now we know when.
In an interview Friday, HuffPost asked Johnson if the line came from BB-8′s anxious beeps when the droid and Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) are flying into battle against the First Order near the start of the movie. The director confirmed: Yes, that was it.
“Yes!” he said with a laugh. “Good catch!”
In 2016, “The Force Awakens” sound supervisor Matthew Wood broke down BB-8′s language and sounds for HuffPost, explaining that the droid’s beeps and boops start out as spoken words behind the scenes. That obviously made for a convenient way to hide the line.
Johnson told us he thought it would be cool to sneak in the iconic phrase. “It seemed like a fun character to deliver that line,” he said. “I think originally I had Poe respond, ‘Oh, I got a good feeling about it. Keep your chin up.’ And then I made it a little less explicit just to make it more fun.”
Though Johnson happily corroborated that Easter egg, he was more vague about a line that comes from R2-D2 later in the film. At one point, Luke tells R2 to “watch your language.”
Asking about what R2 said there proved a little too much for Johnson. The director said the words were “not fit for print!”
Now we know why that droid’s monologues are always beeped out.