George Lucas Says Ideas in the Original “Sort of Got Lost” in Post-Disney ‘Star Wars’ Films [THR]
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/george-lucas-cannes-honor-star-wars-films-1235907998/
Star Wars is the franchise most folks in the audience came to hear Lucas discuss, and the director did not disappoint. He talked about securing licensing and merchandising rights for the first film, something unheard of at the time. “The studios didn’t have licensing departments … it took longer to design a toy than it did to make a movie,” he recalled, and how he got control of the sequel rights, in part because Fox at the time was teetering on bankruptcy. “They didn’t have faith in the movie,” Lucas said. “The studio was going bankrupt anyway, they had a lot of movies already and they were desperate.”
Lucas defended his Star Wars prequel films against the haters, arguing that critics have forgotten that Star Wars was never meant to be a grown-up movie. “It was supposed to be a kid’s movie for 12-year-olds that were going through puberty, who don’t know what they’re doing, and are asking all the big questions: What should I be worried about? What’s important in life?” he said. “And Star Wars has all those things in there. They’re buried in there but you definitely get it, especially if you’re young.”
The negative response to his Star Wars prequels, Lucas argued, came from “critics and fans who had been 10 years old when they saw the first one” and didn’t want to watch a children’s film. The public trashing of Jar Jar Binks — one of the first figures to be canceled on the then-nascent internet — reminded Lucas of the original response to C-3PO. “Everybody said the same thing about 3-PO, that he was irritating and we should get rid of him,” said Lucas. “When I did the third one it was the Ewoks: ‘Those are little teddy bears. This is a kid’s movie, we don’t want to see a kids’ movie. I said: ‘It is a kids’ movie. It’s always been a kids’ movie.'”
Lucas also defended his decision to go back and “clean up” his original trilogy, using new digital technology to make the film look the way he always wanted it to.
“I’m a firm believer that the director, or the writer, or the filmmaker should have a right to have his movie be the way he wants it,” says Lucas. Fans hoping for a 4K restored version of the original 1977 Star Wars shouldn’t hold their breath.
“We did release the original one on laserdisc and everybody got really mad, they said, ‘It looks terrible.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I know it did,'” said Lucas. “That is what it looked like.”
Discussing the Star Wars sequels made after he sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012 (for $4.05 billion), Lucas said the new corporate bosses got a lot wrong.
“I was the one who really knew what Star Wars was … who actually knew this world, because there’s a lot to it. The Force, for example, nobody understood the Force,” he said. “When they started other ones after I sold the company, a lot of the ideas that were in [the original] sort of got lost. But that’s the way it is. You give it up, you give it up.”