Pablo Hidalgo’s official title at Lucasfilm is creative executive. Unofficially, he is the company’s in-house Star Wars geek, a repository of everything known—history, planetology, starship specifications, alien taxonomy, proper spellings—about the galaxy George Lucas created.

Originally hired to interact with fans, Hidalgo has become a key member of the Lucasfilm story group, headed by development executive Kiri Hart, which has been generating ideas for the ambitious slate of new Star Wars films that begins this December with the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I recently talked with Hidalgo about what his job at Lucasfilm entails, where the franchise is headed, and how he managed to turn a childhood obsession into a career.

Click here to read the June Vanity Fair cover story on The Force Awakens and to see Annie Leibovitz’s exclusive photos of the cast and creators.

Bruce Handy: Tell me about how your job developed.

Pablo Hidalgo: I’ve been here for 15 years now, and I started off ages ago working with marketing as part of the online group that was tasked to build up starwars.com as a destination for fans to find out what we were up to during the making of the prequels. And as part of the job requirement, it required all kinds of skills that you’d need as a writer, but also expertise to know about the Star Wars I.P. [intellectual property], to know about George Lucas’s own history, to know about Indiana Jones. As it happened, there just became more and more need for that specific expertise, so it just expanded beyond that. I became the kind of go-to guy for any sort of deep Star Wars mythology questions.

Now we’re at this new point in our history where we’re going to have a very production-focused future with [Lucasfilm president] Kathleen Kennedy leading the way. And if we’re going to build onto this franchise, it’s important to know what’s happened in the past, to know what’s been established, to know what George’s intentions were and stuff like that. So I just got more and more roped into this process to the point where I’m now part of Kiri Hart’s story group. Among things that I do is I offer that kind of level of deep knowledge. I’m able to give my two cents when I see something that isn’t tracking, maybe pointing out that, well, you know, that spaceship doesn’t have that capacity or these two planets are closer than the script is suggesting that they are. That kind of deep universe history.

In terms of history, you’re not just talking about the films and the TV shows, but also novels, comics, games?

Yeah, any sort of storytelling that’s been done in the Star Wars space. We kind of break that out to different degrees of what we call canon, you know—whether or not we’re beholden to it in new storytelling going forward. It’s like if someone will come into a situation and say, “Have we ever done a story like this?” And I could be able to say, “Yeah, we did that, but it was, like, in a 1978 comic book, so, you know, take that as you will.”

In the past, our storytelling had been a little bit more haphazard, and we had to make those maps after the fact and make realizations of like, Oh, if we move this story here, it connects properly, right? But now we’re able to be bit more formal and organized beforehand, and that’s super-exciting. I’m the kind of guy who responds well to whiteboard illustrations that show, Oh, this is where we’re going next and this is where we’ve been, because that kind of builds the world in my mind as we start going towards there.

So all the novels that have come out over the years about, for instance, what happened to Han and Luke and Leia after Return of the Jedi, those are all “inoperative” now?

We’ve now branded that as Star Wars Legends, because, you know, there are great stories told there, but in all honesty they were written in an era where there was no expectation that we were going to add new movies or cinematic content onto that. So they blazed new trails there without the benefit of that knowledge, and they told really cool and compelling stories, but it’s not necessarily the stories that we want to tell on-screen.

But I always thought George Lucas had ideas in his back pocket for a third trilogy. He spoke about it from time to time, though sometimes he denied it, too. Whatever those ideas were, did they necessarily guide the different novels and comics and whatnot?

It was sort of guidance by absence, in a weird way, like he told us what not to do but not necessarily what to do. It was like, “Don’t do this with that character, don’t do that.”

Do people try to stump you on Star Wars trivia all the time?

That happens a lot. My favorite thing is that when kids know that my job is to know Star Wars, they’ll throw all sorts of trivia questions at me. But what I’ve noticed is that they tend to ask questions for answers they already know, and then they’ll supply supplemental information once you’ve answered them in order to prove that they know. So they’ll ask me like, “What kind of starship does Darth Maul pilot?” I’m like, “Well, you know, Darth Maul pilots the Sith Infiltrator.” And they’ll say, “Yeah, but it’s a Star Courier and it was made by Sienar.” It’s like they know all of this stuff; they just wanted that validation.

Tell me about how you got caught up in Star Wars in the first place. I assume the first movie you saw was A New Hope.

Yep.

Was that a transformative experience for you? How old were you?

It came out when I was three, so I didn’t see it right out the gate, at least I don’t think so. I think I saw it during the re-release when it was paired up with The Empire Strikes Back. But the funny thing is, it came out when I was so young, and it was such an integral part of your childhood, that it’s really hard to distinguish when it was I first saw it because it was just a solid stream of Star Wars growing up. Like, even if you hadn’t seen it, it was part of the playground growing up. You had the toys. You had the storybooks. You had everything around you. So it was like, in a weird way, I don’t have this kind of lightning-bolt moment when Star Wars entered into my existence. It was just always there.

Also, I grew up in Winnipeg, Canada. And I have a feeling that this kind of mindset of just knowing all this stuff and studying just comes out of—you’ll find a lot of, for lack of a better word, obsessive hobbies coming out of any sort of setting that has winters that last six months. You’ll have people who build elaborate train sets or do a lot of detail-oriented hobbying, and so for me Star Wars just became this hobby. It was a thing that I would draw, a thing that I would do my own stories with, and when they came out with the role-playing game in the late 80s I would do that kind of stuff.

That was vaguely a Star Wars version of Dungeons and Dragons?

Yeah, tabletop dice, role-playing game, invite a bunch of friends over, and you tell your own Star Wars story. When that came out in ’87 or ’88, I started doing that as a hobby. And in order to be the best Star Wars storyteller for that particular audience of friends, I took it upon myself to learn the history of the universe as much as I could. Obviously, it was something that I did as a passion—it was fun. And I recognize how fortunate I am, because there’s a small number of jobs in the world where being a Star Wars expert is actually something that you get hired for and have a career made out of, and I’ve managed to find one of those jobs.