Abrams confirmed that Star Wars creator George Lucas provided outlines for the films before Abrams came on board, but “Disney had determined they wanted to go a different direction.” That direction was developed over the next six to eight months—basically the better part of 2013. He, Kasdan, Arndt and others came up with a structure and lots of elements everyone loved, but Abrams said “some things were still unsolved.”

At that point, they hit a bit of a bump. Arndt – who Abrams describes as a “precise gentleman” – said he needed 18 months to finish the script. He only had six.

“Despite my absolute, burning desire to direct a script that Michael Arndt had written, I realized I didn’t have that time,” Abrams said. “[Lucasfilm President] Kathy [Kennedy] didn’t have that time. Disney didn’t have that time. And so I sat with Larry and I said, ‘Look, there are things about the story that I know are right. And I believe we could actually answer the questions that we still need to be answered if we wrote this together.’”

Kasdan agreed, but because he was now coming on board with a different position, he decided he wanted to wipe the slate clean.

“For Larry’s psyche, he wanted to sort of start fresh” and abandon the script they had been working on with Arndt, Abrams said. “And I said to him, ‘Look, we’re gonna start to reincorporate very quickly many things because I know I want this young woman to be at the center of this thing. I know I want this Stormtrooper to abandon his post.’ There are just fundamental tenets of what we had come up with [with Arndt] that were gonna stick.”

“It became very clear that if we were adhere to the Expanded Universe, it would have been a very tricky thing to navigate,” Abrams said. “It wasn’t even clear what is canon in the Expanded Universe. And I don’t think the vast majority of Star Wars fans have ever read a [Star Wars] novel. We can’t try and please every fan of that universe first. We have to try and tell the best version of a Star Wars movie.”

That said, Abrams admitted they didn’t necessarily throw out every single thing.

“I thought ‘If ideas that come up feel like they overlap and feel like they work? Great,’” he said. “But we can’t adhere to something that is as vast [as the EU], and frankly [is] lesser known than the films.”