For those wondering about the noticeable lack of lens flares in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, J.J. Abrams has finally gone on record with his official reason for dialing it back. In a pal-to-pal chat with Late Show godStephen Colbert, Abrams named his wife Katie McGrath as the source of his revelation regarding the dangers of too many lens flares. For anyone Googling "Wait, what’s a lens flare?" while scratch one’s head, this is what a pre-revelation Abrams flare looked like:
"Honestly, every story is a different thing," Abrams told Colbert on Tuesday’s show of the process of successfully marrying the visual aspects of a story and the heart of its characters. "All you try to do is to tell a story that will engage people emotionally." Adding that it's often quite easy to just "rely on spectacle" in favor of emotion, Abrams argued that the best cinematic storytellers get to the heart of things despite the "crutch" of visual effects.
"Katie’s told me to stop with a lot of things," Abrams admitted when asked to let everyone in on why he started cooling it with the flares. "But with lens flares I was like, 'Okay. I’ll stop.' She was right." As for the single cinematic moment in his career that inspired Katie to finally intervene, that honor goes to Star Trek Into Darkness. "There was one scene in Star Trek Into Darkness where you literally couldn’t see what was going on," Abrams confessed. "And it was a very important emotional scene."
Good call, Katie McGrath.
