“We were struggling to come up with a story,” Kasdan, 66, admitted. “There were elements that we would come up with and say, ‘Oh, that’s good! That’s strong!’ But it was not coming together.” With Abrams now part of the development team and the already tight summer 2015 release date looming ever closer, Michael Arndt was having difficulty finishing a script within the necessary time frame. “There was a ton of ideas and outlines, a lot of cards on the wall, a lot of writing on whiteboards,” Abrams said, but no screenplay. With pre-production chores already well under way in London, where much of the filmwould be shot at Pinewood Studios, Abrams and Kasdan took over the screen-writing process, starting more or less from scratch. “We said, Blank page. Page one. What do we desperately want to see?” Abrams told me. Though Abrams said both men had pet ideas from the development process they wanted to incorporate, and did, Kasdan made the process sound like more of a teardown: “We didn’t have anything,” Kasdan said. “There were a thousand people waiting for answers on things, and you couldn’t tell them anything except ‘Yeah, that guy’s in it.’ That was about it. That was really allwe knew.” This was in early November 2013, six months before filming was now scheduled to begin, in May of 2014. (This was when the release date was pushed back to December 2015.) By mid-January, Abrams and Kasdan had a draft, most of it hashed out in plein air conversations recorded on an iPhone as they walked and talked for hours at a time through cityscapes that changed according to the vagaries of Abrams’s schedule: first along the beach in Santa Monica, then through a freezing Central Park, in New York, and finally on the streets of London and Paris. One day, the two men spent eight hours at Les Deux Magots, the boisterous café on Boulevard Saint-Germain where patrons are jammed elbow-to-elbow and which is famous for having once been a hangout for the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir.“ We’re like yelling back and forth in this noise, saying, This should happen, that should happen, he can’t do that—and hoping no one’s there from Cinema Blend,” Kasdan said, referring to the movie- nerd gossip site, not a French film-crit journal. Fortunately, no one was eavesdropping, though if you are interested in spoilers you can find plenty online. The schedule got so tight that—as memorialized in a photo Kasdan showed me—he and Abrams were still hashing out story beats on the film’s London sound stage while extras in storm trooper gear were being drilled around them. At any rate, whatever Abrams and Kasdan came upwith apparently pleased everyone concerned—though everyone concerned may have had no choice but to be pleased at that point.