"So we go to the set, and they're actually shooting - and this is what I can't tell you what they were shooting - but what I saw I absolutely loved," Smith said in the above video (starting around the 35-minute mark). "It was tactile; it wasn't a series of fucking green and blue screens in which later on digital characters would be added. It was there; it was happening."
The filmmaker signed a non-disclosure agreement, which restricts him from revealing specific details about the project. But he did drop some intriguing hints, including a mention of a full-scale Millennium Falcon (which he viewed during a tour of "Stage M").
"What I saw, I absolutely loved. It was tactile - it was real. It wasn't a series of ***** green screens and blue screens in which later a bunch of digital characters would be added. IT was there, it was happening. I saw old friends who I haven't seen since my childhood, who aren't really friends, but I love them more than some of my ****** relatives. I saw uniforms, I saw artillery I haven't seen since I was a kid. I saw them shooting an actual sequence in a set that was real. I walked across the set, there were explosions. And it looked like a shot right out of a Star Wars movie." he said.
"He turns the lights on and there is the Millennium Falcon from my childhood. Now the ship outside looks like a movie set, but the inside, fully replicated, fully built. The guy told me, they took two blueprints: Star Wars and Empire, because the cockpit in Empire was bigger than the cockpit in Star Wars. So they went somewhere between the two. So he takes me over and I'm just looking at it. You look at it from the outside and you can still see inside. I don't presume we're going aboard or anything, and then Morgan (JJ's assistant) says "You ready to go up?" I said (excitedly) "We can go on it?!""
Smith said Abrams is "building a tacticle world, a world you can touch. And he's replicating it with all the love of somebody that has the world's greatest collection of Star Wars figures."
He then used an unlikely pop culture reference to explain the majesty of what he saw.
"It's like Field of Dreams," he continued. "And if J.J. builds it, we're all going to come hard because it's amazing. It looks fantastic. So anyone out there wondering if he's going to pull it off: He's pulling it off. He showed me cut scenes; he showed me sequences, images, pictures. I cried, and I hugged that guy. And I'm sure as I was crying and hugging on him that he was thinking 'time is money' because they're making a movie. But he got it. He was very flattered. And I was like, 'Honestly dude, you're doing it. You're making my childhood again. You're doing our Star Wars.' What I saw blew me away."
