Star Wars: The Last Jedi took the idea of using the Force as a means of mental communication to the next level. Now, we've learned some new details about how that was done in order to make the scenes feel so connected. While the film showed us two characters in very different parts of the galaxy talking to each other, it turns out that each actor was actually speaking their lines directly to the other performer, as they were just out of the frame for every take. This meant Adam Driver had to fly to Ireland just to stand off camera for Rey's time on Ahch-To, but that's what he did. According to director Rian Johnson...
Every single time we shot one of their sides, the other person was off camera,. Even to the point where Adam flew to Ireland just to be off camera for Daisy's stuff, which was essential because they're such intimate conversations. And that also meant we had to shoot each of those scenes twice basically, which meant the rehearsal time was really important. And my editor Bob Ducsay did an amazing job then of making it feel kind of seamless after the fact.
In Star Wars: The Last Jedi Rey and Kylo Ren see their minds linked via the Force, leading to the pair having fairly intimate conversations with each other from across the galaxy. We saw them as two halves of a conversation, as each character spoke to the other while staring off into the middle distance, but according to what Rian Johnson tells People, each actor was actually looking right at the person they were speaking to, which is part of why the conversations work so well and feel so real.
However, this meant that both actors needed to be in the same place for every scene. They couldn't just have one actor film all of the conversation scenes at once while having the other do the same at more or less the same time. The time and expense were certainly increased, but Rian Johnson apparently felt it was worth it do that.
The relationship between Rey and Kylo Ren may be the most interesting the thing coming out of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. While Rey hated Ren for his actions in The Force Awakens, she eventually comes to believe that she can save him and that he will help turn the tided, but that doesn't happen and Ren appears to have become a confirmed villain by the end. It will be interesting to see how this relationship continues to evolve, leading to what one assumes will be a final confrontation between the two in Star Wars: Episode IX.
