Largely copying a post I made on the Ascendant thread:
I’ve mocked up four different versions of Luke’s exchange with Rey. All of them remove Luke’s one line of “It was fear that kept me here” for two reasons:
- It was a major goal of Rian Johnson’s when writing Ep. VIII to make sure that Luke wasn’t acting out of fear. “I know the Luke that I grew up with is not a coward; he’s not sitting out there hiding. So I had to come up with a reason he was there that was one, active; and two, positive.”
“It was fear that kept me here.” It feels wrong to me to undo all of Rian’s work with a throwaway line.
- Honestly, seeing it in practice, I like it even more this way - not only does it avoid ignoring Luke’s feelings of guilt in the previous movie; but it allows Luke’s declaration of “I was wrong” to hang in the air. The added space gives Rey (our protagonist) a moment of genuine self-reflection, one that is no longer interrupted by Luke’s prattling.
Version 1 - The Basic Trim: https://streamable.com/3qr20n
This version cuts out Luke’s one line, and then tightens the space around it a little to avoid excessive dead space. Space could obviously be tightened more if need be.
Version 2 - The Early Cutoff: https://streamable.com/wqo8f2
Luke interrupts Rey’s explanation, deciding not to entertain her flawed justifications. This version also plays with a slightly redone version of Luke’s “I was wrong” line, where I repitched it a little and made the word “wrong” a bit louder, to make Luke sound more forceful. (It’s less, "Oh yeah, I was wrong about that. Sorry. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ " and more “You moron, don’t you remember that I was wrong? You’re the one who told me that in the first place!”)
Version 3 - The Early Lesson Three: https://streamable.com/muk1wo
Luke frames their entire conversion around his long-promised Third Lesson to Rey, the lesson he never got to give her in Episode VIII - finding her courage, and embracing her title as a Jedi. For this version, I decided to reverse the shot of Rey between “I was wrong” and “What are you most afraid of” - Now she looks up at Luke when he mentions “Lesson Three.”
Version 4 - The Later Lesson Three: https://streamable.com/4742xw
Luke talks about fear and courage, and then imparts one final wisdom to her as his Third Lesson.
Both Versions 3 and 4 feature a slightly retouched version of Jar Jar Brick’s “Lesson Three” cleanup, which was based on JXEditor’s design. I’ve run the “three” through a compressor to balance out the audio levels a little bit more, and I condensed/overlapped the gap between the words slightly to try and make it flow better. I also performed some noise reduction on the word “Lesson,” because there was some slight music in the background that I was noticing with the absence of music in the Early Lesson version. We can play with that though.
Different pieces of each could also be combined. I’m mainly just curious as to people’s thoughts.