The original Star Wars blended elements of science fiction with fantasy and westerns, with an obvious influence from the work of Akira Kurosawa. George Lucas mashed genres and paved the way for a new generation of filmmaking. Rian Johnson is no stranger to mixing up genres, and with the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi he was asked if he continued that tradition with some other mashups for the new film in the saga. For Johnson, combining genres is just part of directing a Star Wars movie. He told comicbook.com "you got Western elements, you got sci-fi elements, you got soap opera, you got fantasy elements ? the fact that all of that was stuck together into this big ball and it worked, it's easy to lose sight of how miraculous that is and what a weird genre mashup Star Wars is just in general."
