In June 2014, the Millennium Falcon hurt Harrison Ford on the set of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It turned out to be a good thing.

In a new interview conducted this week at the Tribeca Film Festival, The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams revealed that the break they took to allow for Harrison Ford to recover helped him develop Finn and Rey’s relationship, which was lacking prior to the actor’s injury.

“When I was on the set of the Millennium Falcon and we started to do work with Rey and Finn, the first time we did it, it didn’t work at all,” Abrams said. “It was much more contentious. 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 rewrite 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.”

We imagine Abrams is referring to the scenes between Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Finn (John Boyega) on the Millennium Falcon, like the memorable ones involving BB-8 right before Han Solo arrives on the scene (Thumbs/Lighters up!).

The Star Wars VII director also addressed the parallels to A New Hope, of which there are many. Abrams admits this was a purposeful decision in order to keep the story as Star Wars-y as possible. “The weird thing about that movie is that it had been so long since the last one. Obviously the prequels had existed in between and we wanted to, sort of, reclaim the story,” he said. “So we very consciously—and I know it is derided for this—we very consciously tried to borrow familiar beats, so the rest of the movie could hang on something that we knew was Star Wars.”

You can watch his full talk with comedian Chris Rock here (where he also claims to be over the lense flare):

Star Wars: Episode VIII is filming now with Rian Johnson at the helm, and we’re sure Finn and Rey’s relationship will only continue to expand from here. Princes William and Harry visited the set earlier this week — check out the delightful photos.