Comic-Con Exclusive: Simon Kinberg Talks Star Wars Rebels

Simon Kinberg looks like what you would expect a lifelong fan of all things “X-Men” and “Star Wars” to look like – that is, like a successful writer-producer in a buttoned down blue pattern shirt and grey sneakers. That is just a cover, he says, for the “Star Wars” fan underneath.

“If I wasn’t lucky enough to be doing this for my job, if I didn’t get to be a writer for a living, I would be at home writing Star Wars fan fiction every day,” Kinberg confessed. “I love this world.”

Sitting in a meeting room at the San Diego Hilton, he is discussing the first of his Star Wars projects to take fruit, “Star Wars Rebels,” a new animated series on Disney XD. The slight grey at his temples is the only clue that he’s old enough to have seen the original films at the theater when they came out, but that reality has definitely led his view on how “Rebels” should be.

If there?s one thing Simon Kinberg and the folks behind “Star Wars Rebels” want to make clear from the get go, it?s that the new series from Lucasfilm Animation is primarily concerned with aping the look and feel of the original “Star Wars” films rather than anything from the recent past (to the point where almost all of the design was lifted from original Ralph McQuarrie designs for the first Star Wars). Kinberg and his cast repeat some variation of that statement a dozen odd times during the “Rebels” panel at San Diego Comic Con.

“It’s not quite like X-Men where there are stories you definitely want to do. I always wanted to do Dark Phoenix and Days of Future Past and I got to do both, and one of them I’m really proud of. Star Wars is more of a universe and you can go anywhere and do anything so it was more about playing in an era, and for me that was the era of the original films. About finding out about what came before A New Hope. Not way before, but right before, as that story begins in the middle. And it stays fresh because that’s a big story to tell. We know the destination of it, but that’s a long way off.”

CS: How far before the first Star Wars does “Rebels” take place?

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