Apple designer Jony Ive helped create a lightsaber for the new Star Wars movie

The New Yorker has published a new profile of Apple's design chief, and it reveals that he has been working on some extra-curricular projects.

Ive sat next to director J.J. Abrams at a dinner party in New York, where the pair got chatting about Star Wars. Abrams is directing the new Star Wars movie, which is going to be released in December.

At the dinner party, Abrams told Ive that he was working on Star Wars, and Ive came back to him with some "very specific suggestions" about how the movie's lightsabers should look.

Here's what Ive told the New Yorker about his conversation with J.J. Abrams:

It was just a conversation ... I thought it would be interesting if it were less precise, and just a little bit more spitty ... [a lightsaber should be] more analog and more primitive, and I think, in that way, somehow more ominous.

We don't know exactly what Abrams did with Ive's advice, but it's possible that it resulted in the unusual lightsaber seen being wielded by villain Kylo Ren in the movie's trailer.

Here's a still of the trailer showing the lightsaber:

You can read the full New Yorker profile here.

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