emanswfan said:

Full Vanity Fair article on TFA:

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/05/star-wars-the-force-awakens-vanity-fair-cover

So many great insights into the production of the movie, and very much worth a full read. Note some small segments of it had been posted previously.

Out of everything, what some are saying makes me so confident that this will be great, but I've really got to tell myself to hold back the hype train.

Nice to see that Michael Ardnt and Lucas really had essentially no influence whatsoever on the movie.

Great article! My favorite parts are:

Discussing the shoot, Abrams was quick with praise for his young cast but seemed most excited by his encounters with ghosts of Star Wars past: “The whole thing was as surreal and impossible as you can imagine. I mean, walking onto the Millennium Falcon set?” (That would be Han Solo’s iconic spaceship.) “To be on it, it’s insane. There were people who literally cried when they walked onto that set. It’s a strange thing, the effect it has.”

and

By all accounts things went smoothly aside from one serious hiccup, a month in, when a part of the Millennium Falcon set fell on Ford and broke his leg. Production was held up for two weeks, but in Abrams’s mind there were unexpected blessings. “In a weird way,” he said, “it was the greatest gift to the movie that, once it was clear Harrison would be O.K., the way that the crew came together. I’ve never seen a crew bonded like that. And when Harrison came back, when I say he came back better and stronger than ever, I can’t overstate that. There was a fire in his eyes that you see in the movie.” The hiatus also gave Abrams time to take stock of what he was doing and rethink some sequences that normally would have had to be fixed in postproduction or via expensive re-shoots.