STAR WARS creator George Lucas gets dressed up for the 2001 MTV Movie Awards.
© 2001 Sue Schneider

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Attack of the Fans: George Lucas Speaks! Part Two

In part one of CINESCAPE's George Lucas interview, the filmmaker discussed his rocky relationship with the press after the critical lashing he received for THE PHANTOM MENACE. In this installment, the director explains why exactly he returned for a prequel trilogy in the first place.

While many fans "remember" the days when there were supposedly nine chapters in the complete STAR WARS saga, Lucas insists that this was the result of a misunderstanding.

"That was a media thing," says Lucas. "They originally said, 'Are you going to do sequels?' 'Well I have two other films, I'm going to do these films.' 'What about more, are you going to do more?' 'Well, there's a back story, some day I might go back and do the back story,' but technically I thought I would never do that. 'Then what about after that, will you do anymore?' This was actually ROLLING STONE, and I said, 'Well, it might be fun to come back when Harrison and Carrie are in their 70s and do another one.' But I forgot I would be in my 70s, too. Actually, I wasn't very serious about it. I hadn't written it."

What Lucas had written was a huge epic film that needed to be chopped into pieces... or the first STAR WARS would never have been shot in the first place.

Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), and Han Solo (Harrison Ford) search for an escape route in the maze-like hallways of the Imperial Death Star in STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE

© Lucasfilm LTD.

"I wrote a simple movie based on mythological motifs," says Lucas. "I was using the genre of the Saturday morning serial, and the idea was, this is something you saw that came in on EPISODE IV you missed the first three episodes and it's over with. I started writing it and it got bigger and bigger and I realized I didn't have the money to tell the story. It was a five-hour movie, so I [took] the first third. This is one movie [and] I am determined, no matter how much a failure the first one is, I'll get the second two made somehow. So I did that. In order to start with EPISODE IV, I had to write a back-story to get myself there.

"The first trilogy was written within the bounds of the cinematic medium as it existed at that time," adds Lucas. "I knew what I could get away with on film and what I couldn't get away with. I knew I had to push the boundaries and push the technology. 2001 was the paradigm of what you could reach in special effects. That was as far as I could push the medium. But the back-story wasn't written that way. It was the back-story; I didn't have to worry about it. It wasn't going to be a movie. So when I got to the end and everybody was saying, 'Are you going to do more,' my feeling was I probably wasn't going to do more. There were other movies I wanted to do. And at that point I really wanted to go off and raise my family and do other things. So I did other things."

But the lure of the saga was too great even for its creator, and soon the world of STAR WARS beckoned its master to return for more.

"When I came back, now my kids are old enough, I can come back and direct," says Lucas. "My companies are all established, I'm independent, I can do any kind of movies I want to do. I'm going to start directing again. If I did this digitally, I could probably go to Coruscant. Before if I went to Coruscant, it was like a $15 million dollar miniature set. I couldn't possibly do it. I knew Yoda swordfights, it's really active, and I couldn't get him to move more than three feet and I couldn't shoot him below the waist and if I had to move him, I had to stick him in a back pack or something and run around with him or shoot him forced perspective one way with a little midget. I couldn't do the things that were in the back story."

The march of time and technology proved to Lucas that now he had the chance to accomplish everything he knew he couldn't manage in the first trilogy. It was at last time for that back-story to be shot.

Yoda (voiced by Frank Oz) in ATTACK OF THE CLONES

© and TM 2002 Lucasfilm Ltd.

"I knew it was a 10 year commitment, and I knew if I didn't do it now, I probably wouldn't do it," says Lucas. "The biggest challenge ultimately was to take digital characters and actually have them act in a movie and have them fit in with the live actors and not have them look like Roger Rabbit, and we accomplished that. At the same time, I knew I had to get a real Yoda creating a digital character from scratch and having him fit in, [as well as] having to replicate an existing character and make it look real and make it look like that existing character, with all the nuances."

"We tried to do it in PHANTOM MENACE and stopped half way through. We just said we're going too far too fast. So I went to the puppet again. I couldn't do a digital Yoda. So we kept that crew working and struggling. In cinema you have to create the impression or illusion it's the real deal, otherwise it won't work and now people are more sophisticated, so you really have to be pretty good at it. It used to be King Kong, he moved and everyone said, 'Wow, that's great.' Unfortunately we live in a very different world now, and the art form has become very sophisticated, so the demands of what is credible and what is not credible is much more difficult."

Check back for part three of CINESCAPE's George Lucas interview as the director discusses the shift in moviemaking technology.