Lucasfilm
In the mid-1980s, writer Bob Dolman was brought on board to work on the script for Willow.
Star Wars mastermind George Lucas had long tried to get the property up and running, even before Star Wars, but things didn’t get moving until filmmaker Ron Howard and then MGM came on board.
When Dolman came on after that, he and Lucas were very involved throughout the writing process. It was a very different experience from Dolman’s time on the just-launched Willow sequel TV series.
Speaking to THR about writing the new series, Dolman says it has “more of a corporate feel” than his experience with the original, pointing out that the studio may have been a little too involved in the creative process:
“It felt like the studio was pretty much over our shoulder – the studio was Disney and also Lucasfilm. They had good input; You got good grades. You have to drive a series and you have to be involved. But I felt like we weren’t left alone enough to share ideas and have the kind of freedom I had working with George and Ron.”
He says while he received a lot of input from Lucas on the film’s script, he was free to play with his own ideas:
“George was really hands-on, he wanted to go through each draft page by page, talk about everything we were doing and then send me back to do another draft. [I prefer to] not worrying about whether an idea was good or bad, just try things and take a risk and have the courage to find even a bad idea, knowing that it can lead to a good idea.”
Abridged decades later, that freedom in screenwriting no longer exists—and not just because of the different natures of film and television:
“There are many voices, and some of them aren’t necessarily voices that know more than the people who are hired. But those voices are heard and notes are taken. In the writing room of the TV series Willow, there was constant input from other sources outside of the room. So it felt like we were never really alone in the room.”
Despite its misgivings, the new Willow is getting a better reception than the original film. Ron Howard’s film only scores 53% on Rotten Tomatoes and 47/100 on Metacritic, while the new series fares significantly better at 83% and 70/100 on the same outlets.
In the new Willow, Warwick Davis and Joanne Whalley reprise their roles in a new dark fantasy adventure in which the character leads a new group to rescue a kidnapped twin.
Ellie Bamber, Ruby Cruz, Erin Kellyman, Tony Revolori and Amar Chadha-Patel co-star in the series, which released the first two of eight episodes on November 30.