You’d have to live on Mars (or perhaps the ice planet Hoth) to have missed the rising crescendo of publicity for this holiday season’s biggest flick: Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

The toys and collectibles are starting to come out. (That little round rolling robot is seriously cool. He’ll be getting underfoot everywhere this winter.) But details about the film itself remain under wraps, subject to the severe legal sanctions of Disney. We only know that the original crew is back (Ford, Fisher, Hamill) and new hot actors like Oscar Isaac are making their first appearances in George Lucas’s old galaxy.

Another beloved Star Wars actor just gave a fun interview to the Guardian. Anthony Daniels, CP30, shared what little he could, given the legal embargo on any details about the film. He himself was spanked by Disney for mentioning another actor in an innocent Tweet.

He notes that the prequels of 15 years ago were a pretty dismal affair. (I couldn’t agree more.) But his report from the set this time around is encouraging:

“All the signs are that The Force Awakens will be different. ‘It became clear early on that with JJ we were getting back to the old-fashioned kind of film-making. We have walls. Actual sets! All right, so you might not have a view out of the window, but you have a window. Now, what else can I tell you?’ [Daniels] mulls something over, then says: ‘No, I can’t tell you that.'”

You can read Daniels’s interview here.

I was among the first thousands to ever see the original. I was a newspaper editor and got an invite to the screening in Minneapolis. I loved it and knew it was a game changer for the movies and science fiction. But after the first two in the series, the four follow-on films disappointed me a lot. I also feel a little foreboding, because I’m no fan of J. J. Abrams’s two Star Trek movies.

Nonetheless, sometime this holiday season Sue and I will be ponying up our sixteen bucks to once again visit that galaxy far, far away.