J.J. Abrams: Harrison Ford's injury led to improvements in 'Force Awakens'

NEW YORK, April 20 (UPI) -- Star Wars: The Force Awakens director and co-writer J.J. Abrams reveals some good actually came out of the hiatus prompted by an on-set accident involving actor Harrison Ford.

The filmmaker said the break the cast and crew had after Ford injured his leg allowed him to fine-tune the movie's screenplay to improve the relationship between Daisy Ridley and John Boyega's characters.

"When I was on the set of the Millennium Falcon and we started working with Rey and Finn... The first time we did it, it didn't work at all," Abrams said at a Tribeca Film Festival panel discussion with Chris Rock last week.

"As we wrote it, they were much more contentious. It was a very weird thing. I didn't direct it right. It was set up all wrong, and when Harrison Ford got injured, which was a very scary day, we ended up having a few weeks off, and it was during that time that I really got to look at what we had done and re-think it and then re-write quite a bit of that relationship. So, when we came back to work again, we actually just re-shot from the ground up, those scenes. It was an amazingly helpful thing to get these two characters to where they needed to be."