by Edward Gross
RICK MCCALLUM
George is very ruthless about technology just supporting the story. We were going through an evolutionary stage in filmmaking where people (directors, writers, producers) were just learning how to deal with the things they can actually achieve on-screen. It’s just like when sound or color first came out. You get so obsessed with what you can do that often you’ve got a great script, but you get so hung up about the twenty-minute action sequence that nobody’s ever seen before, that everybody’s efforts go to that. You’re not sure how to make it work and it gets to be a huge thing and everybody is obsessed by it, because they don’t know conceptually how it’s all going to come together. Even today, if you have a fantastic set-piece, but you’ve forgotten about the characters, the story, and the themes of the movie, you’ve lost the audience.
KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Think about the opening scene of Star Wars: Those were some nice effects, nice moving ships and everything, but I think it was the artistic eye that Lucas brought to it that made it the cinematic moment it was. Flash Gordon couldn’t have dangled a ship that kept coming and coming and coming in front of the camera. The Star Destroyer sequence wasn’t any fundamentally new technology, it was just a different way of looking at something.
BRIAN JAY JONES
In a way, what was scary about the Special Editions as far as paving the way for the prequels is when he goes into them, when we’re on Tatooine and they’re going to Mos Eisley. Ben Kenobi is talking to people and they’re now robots, with little droids buzzing around his head. Then there are creatures in the background floating, Jawas falling off creatures. This is exactly the way Lucas operates. This is why, when you get to The Phantom Menace and especially in Attack of the Clones, which I just think is a terrible movie, there was so much on the screen—so much shit going on—that you can’t tell what’s happening. You can’t follow the story. You can’t follow the chase sequences. You don’t know what’s going on, because Lucas is just throwing everything he can up on the screen. He’s so excited to have that technology finally working—God bless him, he invented it; it’s his technology—that he’s having the best time as a filmmaker.
JONATHAN RINZLER
(nonfiction editor, Lucasfilm, 2002–2017)
I hope for people who study his work, they come away with knowledge of something that is so often badly done today in movies—which are action scenes. The action scene is just as important as any other scene. It almost seems like people’s brains go out the window when it comes to action scenes [these days]. Just the fact that somebody’s fighting doesn’t make an action scene exciting. Obviously, there has to be emotional content. One of the things I love about George is—and I’ve watched him do this, I’ve sat with him for hours and hours and hours as he directed the animatics on Episode III—is that every shot, even if that shot was less than a second long, it was designed to the nth degree. It wasn’t that he put too much stuff in it, it’s just that it was wonderfully designed in terms of how it connected to what came before, how it connects to what came afterwards. He was very concerned that the audience understands what was happening. He’d be telling the animatic guys sometimes, “Well, they have to go from left to right, or it has to be bigger so people can follow it.” He was really concerned that the eight-year-old in the audience could understand what was happening, and why it was happening, and how it advances the story. It’s very rare for there to be an action shot in the Lucas action scenes that is not somehow advancing the story of that action scene.
PETER HOLMSTROM
(cohost, The Rebel & the Rogue podcast)
Lucas was first out the gate with digital technology and he was really thrown under the bus for that. It’s a shame. You go back and look at the early sound films, and the acting is terrible by today’s standards. Even Citizen Kane has some cringy performances. Because actors had been trained in the silent era to convey emotion with their body, or on the stage to project their voices for the people in the back. It took time. But we forgive those efforts, because we see them in the context with which they were made. People don’t give Lucas that. Actors were on blue screen for the first time, with all new technology—it’d throw anyone. But now Robert Downey, Jr., hasn’t worn a scrap of metal since ’08, and no one blinks an eye. We wouldn’t have Marvel films if it wasn’t for George Lucas.
JOHN KENNETH MUIR
(author, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of the 1970s)
I felt that this flaw—Lucas’s desire to fill every shot with CGI creations—was more evident in the Special Edition releases of the original trilogy in the late nineties. Perhaps because I was so familiar with those films, I found it very distracting, for example, in the Special Edition of Episode IV: A New Hope, to see all those additions. The prequels had the same problem, but perhaps because I hadn’t seen the films, I didn’t find the flaw as distracting.
KYLE NEWMAN
(director, Fanboys)
The prequels came out right after The Matrix, and all of a sudden Matrix was pushing all these technological boundaries and you were seeing all types of new visuals, and then you get a Star Wars movie and it’s gone back to kind of objective kind of framing. And everyone that summer was like, “Oh, I wanted it to be cooler.” You’re twenty now. You’re twenty-five. You’re twenty-eight. You’re thirty-five. Shut up. You’re being selfish. Look at it as a kid.
* * *
The writing of the Star Wars prequels officially began on November 1, 1994, with Lucas taking the fifteen-page outline he had written in 1976, which was actually intended to allow him to track the backstories of the different characters and events that took place prior to the original trilogy—some of which had been hinted at in those films.
GEORGE LUCAS
When I have an idea for a character, usually the character comes alive and metamorphoses into something else, or another kind of character. If you take the first draft of Star Wars, you can find the central characters that always existed, but they had different names, shapes, or sizes. But the core of the character is still there and growing. It’s just trying to find the right persona to carry forward that personality.
RAY MORTON
(senior editor, Script magazine)
When Lucas subtitled the films in the original trilogy Episodes IV to VI, he created the expectation that we would someday get to see Episodes I to III. In interviews done at the time of the original trilogy, he stated that he had all of the stories for these early episodes worked out in detail. This was not true—he had many ideas, but no concrete narratives. In ensuing years, Lucas would sometimes suggest different possibilities as to what the first three films might be about. At one time he mused they would be stand-alone stories, with Episode I telling the origin of the Jedi Knights. In the early 1990s, when he was finally ready to make new Star Wars movies, Lucas decided that Episodes I to III would be a trilogy about the early years of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader.
The story outlined by Ben Kenobi in the original Star Wars would have been a strong tale to tell: Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker are Jedi Knights and best friends. Obi-Wan takes on a young apprentice named Darth Vader (perhaps over Anakin’s objections) and begins to train him to become a Jedi. At some point, Vader turns to the dark side of the Force and becomes evil. He then kills off most of the Jedi, including Anakin (thus orphaning Anakin’s infant son). Vader and Obi-Wan fight and Vader eventually falls into a pit of lava and is horribly scarred. However, Vader survives and is encased in a permanent life-support system. Feeling responsible for Anakin’s death, a guilt-ridden Obi-Wan goes into hiding to watch over his friend’s young son while Vader helps the Emperor conquer the galaxy. Someday, Obi-Wan and Vader will meet again for a final showdown. Again, that’s a strong tale.
However, that story became an impossible one to tell once Lucas decided to make Vader Luke’s father. At this point, it became inevitable that any prequel film or films would have to tell the story of how noble pilot and Jedi, loyal
best friend, and loving husband and father Anakin Skywalker became the evil Darth Vader.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
I feel that the first three episodes—Episode I, II, and III—are an attempt to justify the end of Empire when Vader tells Luke he’s his father. That’s a lot of material needed to justify one story twist. It’s not that Anakin wasn’t an interesting character—this is just a personal thing—but I like Darth Vader. He was really a bad guy. It’s like, I enjoy Garfield better when he’s just a cat talking about stuff, laying around like an actual cat. But that’s just me.
JOHN KENNETH MUIR
The first film [The Phantom Menace] is much more intriguing and successful than many other reviewers claim or viewers consider. Virtually every key relationship in the film is defined in part or completely by Lucas’s concept of symbiont circles—the idea that people and their fates are connected. This is the idea that such symbiont circles involve connections that aren’t always seen (hence the “phantom” of the title). Sometimes the real symbiont circles are merely hinted at, or only partially detected. Lucas’s leitmotif of symbiont circles allows him to reach beyond the binary “light side” / “dark side” dichotomy of the original trilogy and aim for some fascinating material.
For instance, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan attempt to convince Boss Nass, on Naboo, that their fate will be the same as that of the humanoids under Federation rule, because they share the same planet. Later, Amidala also presses this concern with them. The fate of Naboo is one that is shared, because the Gungans and the humanoids are linked. The underwater chase, with the big fish eating the smaller fish (which is attempting to eat Qui-Gon’s sub) also suggests this kind of symbiont circle. Certainly, in more familiar territory, the dominance of the Jedi has caused the fall of the Sith. But the arrogance of the Jedi has also given the Sith room to plot in secret and reassert themselves. Again, a symbiont circle. I don’t think I’ve ever read any analysis of the film that points out this theme or acknowledges how it runs through the film’s drama.
RAY MORTON
Using Ben’s revisionist speech and other revelations in Return of the Jedi as a jumping-off point, the tale Lucas decided to tell in the prequel trilogy was that of how Obi-Wan Kenobi meets ace pilot Anakin Skywalker, senses the Force is strong in him, and decides to train him to be a Jedi Knight. Meanwhile, Senator Palpatine, a member of the Senate of the Galactic Republic—who is secretly an evil Sith Lord called Darth Sidious—manipulates events to facilitate his rise to power and the formation of a military he can then use to create an evil empire with himself as its head. When Palpatine becomes aware of Anakin—who in the meantime falls in love with and marries Queen Amidala of Naboo—he seeks to turn the Jedi apprentice to the dark side so that Anakin can help him kill the Jedi and carry out his nefarious plans. Palpatine succeeds just as Padmé gives birth to twins. Learning Anakin has turned evil, Obi-Wan confronts him. The two fight and Anakin is horribly injured. Surviving, he is encased in a permanent life-support system, becomes Darth Vader, and continues to help the Emperor destroy the Republic and create his empire. Meanwhile, Padmé dies and Obi-Wan separates the twins and places them in foster homes to hide them from Vader and the Emperor. Obi-Wan then goes into exile in anticipation of the day when the twins will come of age and be ready to join the fight to save the galaxy.
* * *
From the start, this was going to be a challenging story to tell, especially since Lucas’s intent was to make Anakin (rather than Obi-Wan) the protagonist of the narrative. Had the reverse been true, the overall story would have been about a man with the best of intentions who inadvertently creates a monster and must then defeat and destroy that monster. The decision to make Anakin the central character made that much more problematic.
RAY MORTON
Lucas’s stated intent was to craft a classical Greek tragedy about a good man who brings about his own downfall. While a valid concept, the difficulties of it stemmed from the fact that in a Greek tragedy, the damage the protagonist does is to himself, where in Star Wars the damage Anakin would do would be to others—which doesn’t make him a tragic hero, but an outright villain. In essence, Lucas’s story would be about a good man going bad.
RICK MCCALLUM
All told, it’s the story about one of the most extraordinary kids who ever had the power of the Force. It’s the story of Anakin and what happened to him and that inevitable moment when he chose between good and evil. Why did that happen and how did that happen? Where did he come from and how could he have made that choice? That was the real saga. The ultimate moment is when you see Darth Vader reveal himself—the impact of that moment was incredible.
HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN
(actor, “Anakin Skywalker”)
Putting on the Darth Vader costume was exhilarating. I was really hoping that I was going to get to put on the outfit when I got cast in these films. When we got to Sydney for Episode III, George told me that I would have the chance of finally getting to put on the helmet and what not. It was really one of the coolest things I’d gotten to do. And it was a very emotional experience for me. And empowering. There was a certain hint of sadness as well.
RAY MORTON
This would be a tricky story to tell, because it would require Lucas to create a character who was so likable and sympathetic and whose motivations were so relatable, that viewers would be willing to invest themselves fully in him and his story at the beginning and then stick with him as he grows worse and worse and worse. It would also be a tricky story to tell, because a properly conceived and constructed dramatic narrative should contain both a protagonist and an antagonist—a protagonist to drive the story and an antagonist to oppose him. In this tale, Anakin would be protagonist and antagonist, a nearly impossible concept to make work both dramatically and structurally. And it would be a tricky story to tell, because it wasn’t clear there would be enough narrative in this concept to fill three entire feature-length films. These were issues he would wrestle with as he made his way through his new trilogy.
GEORGE LUCAS
Throughout the writing and making of Episode I, I always stayed focused on ten years later when the new trilogy would be completed. Then people would be able to watch all six films together as they were intended to be seen. The Star Wars saga is, in a way, symphonic in nature. I have certain musical refrains that I am purposely repeating in a different chord, but still repeating. In the first three films, I told a specific story. With the new trilogy, I was telling nearly the same story, with many similar emotional, psychological, and decision-making moments.
Some people may not even understand that sort of thing. They think it’s just Star Wars with a shorter Luke Skywalker. But it was all done on purpose to create a certain feeling when you watch all of them in order. Certain lines become more meaningful. It changes the first three movies rather dramatically. That was my whole reason for doing it. If it didn’t change them, I wouldn’t be doing it. I like the idea that you can take something and look at it one way, then you turn around and you are given more information and you look at it completely differently.
RAY MORTON
The question of whether or not there was enough narrative in Lucas’s story to fill three movies became apparent as soon as he began to write this first episode. The answer? No, there wasn’t. As a result, the plot Lucas developed for this first episode would essentially serve as a prologue to the main story he was planning to tell in the new trilogy. It would introduce the main characters and the primary situations, but the only plot points that would be relevant to the trilogy’s overall narrative would be Obi-Wan meeting Anakin and deciding to train him to be a Jedi; Anakin and Padmé meeting for the first time; Palpatine meeting Anakin and taking notice of how strong he is in the Force; and the notion that Darth Sidious is working in the shadows to manipulate events to his sinister benefit.
GEORGE LUCAS
What I started with was just a little story outline with bits and pieces. But it had a structure that hasn’t cha
nged much in all these years. Everybody then started asking, “How many are you going to make?” So I thought I could go back and do the backstories of the original trilogy. When people saw Darth Vader, they didn’t know what he was. Is he a monster? Is there a guy in there? Is it a robot? They didn’t know. He was just the villain and he was such an iconic villain, although at the time I didn’t have any idea any of this would work or have the impact that it did. You just don’t think that way. You just do your best and it comes out and maybe in the end you do the first three movies. I had this whole backstory, because I wanted to start with Episode IV, because I wanted to be like a serial. “I don’t know what’s happened before. What’s going on? Who are these people?” So I wanted to throw you right into the middle of something you don’t have any idea about. But then later on I realized that the tragedy got lost in that. And if I told the backstory, which was obviously written before the actual film, that it would make sense. You know, he started out as a nice little kid and turned bad.
