From Wired News:
George Lucas on Star Wars and his own legacy
By Steve Silberman
You've been working on Star Wars for almost 30 years and now it's finished. Do you feel a sense of release?
LUCAS: Yes. I've enjoyed Star Wars enormously, but it's great to be able to look forward to projects that I've wanted to do for a long time. [See "Life After Darth," issue 13.05.] I get to go back to what I was doing before this big thing happened.
What are you doing to reconnect with who you are, apart from being the guy who made Star Wars?
I try to stay in touch with that part of myself, especially when I'm writing. Unfortunately, when I was supposed to be writing Star Wars, I would end up doing more reading and thinking than writing. When you're writing for three or four months, you go places where ordinary human beings wouldn't care to go, unless you were a Tibetan monk. Most writers spend a lot of time trying to avoid that, so you make excuses as to why you should read this or that book. Usually I come up with lots of ideas for films that I really want to do.
None of the films I've done was designed for a mass audience, except for Indiana Jones. Nobody in their right mind thought American Graffiti or Star Wars would work.
But the second trilogy certainly had a built-in audience.
Yeah, everyone says the second trilogy was a slam dunk. But there was a lot of controversy around here about the fact that I wasn't doing the obvious -- I wasn't doing the commercial version of what people expected. People expected Episode III, which is where Anakin turns into Darth Vader, to be Episode I. And then they expected Episodes II and III to be Darth Vader going around cutting people's heads off and terrorizing the universe. But how did he get to be Darth Vader? You have to explore him in relationships, and you have to see where he started. He was a sweet kid, helpful, just like most people imagine themselves to be. Most people said, "This guy must have been a horrible little brat -- a demon child." But the point is, he wasn't born that way -- he became that way and thought he was doing the right thing. He eventually realizes he's going down the dark path, but he thinks it's justifiable. The idea is to see how a democracy becomes a dictatorship, and how a good person goes bad -- and still, in the end, thinks he's doing the right thing.
It's common these days to talk about good and evil in terms of gray areas, but in your films, good and evil are more strictly defined.
It's the more old-fashioned version of good and evil -- the version that those of us who grew up in the '40s and '50s had, when there was a strong sense of good and evil because of World War II. That's one of the few times in history when the bad guys were very clearly delineated for us. There really was a fight for survival going on between pretty clearly good guys and bad guys.
The story being told in Star Wars is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you're in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they're actually not.
Did you always intend to make a second trilogy?
The original story is really the first three films. I never thought I would get to tell the backstory, because I had to design Star Wars in a very limited way to fit it into the technology I had at the time. I did the same thing with THX 1138 -- I had to create a futuristic world without special effects and without sets. With each film, I pushed the envelope of technology. For Star Wars I had to develop a whole new idea about special effects to give it the kind of kinetic energy I was looking for. I did it with motion-control photography. I had a lot of experience with animation, so it was a matter of taking the technology of animation and moving it into effects. For The Empire Strikes Back, I had to create an actor who could do a believable performance and still only be two-and-a-half feet high. I had the whole center of the film resting on us being able to pull that idea off and not have Yoda look like Kermit. If I had failed at any one of those things, the films would have died a horrible death. I had to make it all believable somehow, even though it was completely ridiculous. I had to say, "This is real. We fly around in spaceships with Wookiees -- this is all real stuff, real people." That was the hardest part.
After Return of the Jedi, I said to myself, "Now I'm going to take some time off and raise my kids, and later on, I'll come back and do my personal films, because that's really what I want to do."
So why did you come back to Star Wars instead of making "personal films"?
Fifteen years later, we had made such advances at Industrial Light & Magic, especially with Jurassic Park. That was the watershed of being able to create realistic characters using digital technology. So I thought about it again. I could do cities like Coruscant, I could do a pod race, I could do other things that up to that point had been impossible. The defining factor was the Star Wars Special Edition, where the thing was to create a real Jabba the Hutt. Not a big rubber thing, but a digital actual character. I figured if I could do that, then I could do everything else. When we brought out the Special Edition, we didn't really expect it to bring in much of an audience. We had a sense that we hadn't sold very many VHS tapes -- I think about 300,000 -- which is nothing compared to the 11 million that E.T. did. So I said that this would be an experiment, and hopefully we'll get our money back.
The success of that rerelease not only told me that I could create these creatures and build better sets and towns than I could before, but that the Star Wars audience was still alive -- it hadn't completely disappeared after 15 years. I decided that if I didn't do the backstory then, I never would. So I committed to it, and here I am finished. So now I'm going to do what I thought I was going to do back then.
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George Lucas on Star Wars and his own legacy
