Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  KYLE NEWMAN

  (director, Fanboys)

  When I came to watch, say, Phantom Menace, I embraced the spoilers because I didn’t look at Star Wars anymore as a movie, so much as it was the mythology and the story. So maybe I was ruining it for two years by following every little tidbit story, but I kinda felt I had an idea what it was, so I didn’t go in and I wasn’t shocked like some people. I accepted it for the mythology more than I was judging it all at once.

  LEWIS MACLEOD

  (actor, “Sebulba”)

  It is a movie without technical equal for its time. There are scenes where there are upward of four thousand digital effects interacting on-screen. An awesome achievement. I didn’t like some of the dialogue or the Obi-Wan Kenobi accent, but otherwise it was good, if a tad overlong. The John Williams score is breathtaking. My character even had its own track. Number 9 on the CD is “Anakin Defeats Sebulba.” I was thrilled. And the opening cue sounds like “Scheherazade,” which was my father’s favorite. He died before the movie was completed. It is very special to me.

  RAY MORTON

  The script’s biggest problem was that it doesn’t tell a story. Because Episode I is essentially a prologue, it is basically an expository piece. There is a lot of incident in The Phantom Menace, but very little plot in the traditional meaning of the term. The script is more of a chronicle—a presentation of events in order of occurrence—than a drama. There is little dramatic progression, momentum, or build, and the result is often a bit dull. Episode I also lacks a clear protagonist. Anakin is the protagonist of the overall trilogy, but in this particular film he is just a supporting character. Qui-Gon is the lead character in the film’s first act; he splits this role with Padmé in the second; and there is no main character in the final act, which cuts back and forth between three different subplots led by three different people without ever focusing in on any of them.

  JONATHAN RINZLER

  George really took a beating after Episode I. Really took a beating. He never said this to me, but I got the impression that it took a bit of the wind out of the sails, in general. I wasn’t at Lucasfilm yet, I went to see a preview of Episode I, because I was reviewing movies at that time. I took my older daughter, she was ten, and there had been nothing about it. There had been no buzz, I didn’t know if it was good, bad—I assumed it would be good, because it was George Lucas’s Star Wars, how bad could it be? And I was just blown away. I absolutely loved Episode I. And I will stand by that. I thought it was really interesting. When Qui-Gon says, “I didn’t actually come here to free slaves,” that’s an amazing bit of writing on many levels. The fight at the end was amazing. I thought John Williams’s music was incredible, and Liam Neeson? C’mon. And the podrace? George started filming the movie with no idea how they were going to film the podrace. John Knoll just figured out himself how they could do it, and he showed it to George on his laptop. And they were already shooting Episode I! I just love that. George was just constantly pushing the envelope on so many levels.

  RICK MCCALLUM

  The criticisms of The Phantom Menace are of value insomuch as everybody has the right to express their opinion. But do they affect us in any way? Not at all. They really don’t. I did all the Special Editions and the fan base got totally whacked out. I remember getting literally hundreds of emails and reading dozens and dozens of articles from people worried to death that we were changing this unique and extraordinary mythological and sacred thing. But they forgot that it was George who was changing it. It wasn’t some studio that was doing it. It wasn’t some marketing division doing it. It was us. And the only reason George wanted to change the Special Editions was that he wanted to make them exactly the way he wrote them.

  NATALIE PORTMAN

  The Phantom Menace was a very difficult film for me to make. It was probably the hardest film experience I’ve ever had. I wasn’t used to working with blue screen and I was sixteen years old and had no people my age around for an entire summer. This was back when my working schedule was my summer break vacation, so I always tried to find things that would be more fun than camp. That was my standard. In terms of the finished product, Phantom Menace is a really fun film and many people liked it. I personally would have preferred if there was a little more story, but I think it’s great, because we set up this background for these characters, which served the second film well.

  RICK MCCALLUM

  I do admit and I can concede that—especially to the hardcore fan base—Episode I is a disappointment to them. It deals with an eight-year-old kid. It’s the beginning film and it has to set up almost everything for the rest of the saga. And I do understand why certain people hated it. It’s the same thing with Jar Jar Binks. If you’re between six and twelve years old, Jar Jar is probably your second most favorite Star Wars character behind R2-D2. But if you’re over twelve or thirteen years old, Jar Jar is repugnant to you. There’s no in-between there. If you actually go back to the original reviews of A New Hope, C-3PO was hated. Just absolutely loathed. It’s definitely worth checking out. People said he was obnoxious, that there was something about his voice and manner that really, deeply offended them.

  LIAM NEESON

  The wonderful thing about the first Star Wars, I felt, was, from an acting point of view, these actors believed the world they were in. In that universe, you have to converse with things that fly and strange animal-like creatures and humanoids and stuff, and that’s an everyday occurrence. And just to keep it absolutely simple and try and believe absolutely everything you’re saying.

  RAY MORTON

  Menace (and the prequel trilogy in general) does not draw as much upon the classical tropes and archetypes of the world’s myths, legends, and fairy tales as the original trilogy did. There’s not as much of the mystical or of “serious” fantasy in these new films, and the only element from the universal myth prominent in the prequel narrative is the notion of a “Chosen One,” which unfortunately is one of the hoariest and most clichéd concepts in fantastic literature. The prequel trilogy did lean more into religious elements than the earlier trio, most notably with the notion that Anakin’s birth had been a virgin one (although using a concept so closely associated with the Christ story for a character destined to become a mass-murdering monster seems an odd choice), as well as the design of Darth Maul, which was meant to evoke biblical images of the Devil.

  KYLE NEWMAN

  It was never going to be the movie in your head for sixteen years, and if you step outside of that—that’s my point—to look at it, you realize that there are merits. Would I have chosen to have Anakin be nine years old? No. I would’ve rather seen the same actor through all three films. There’s just little things I would’ve rather seen happen, but I get it, and then I can look back at it for the story outside of the film.

  I’m crazy with Star Wars. I look at it like it’s history, and that’s how I break it down. I can step out of the movie. And I always look at people like, “If you like three Star Wars movies out of six, then guess what? You give Star Wars an F, that’s a failing grade. You’re not even a Star Wars fan. Get out of here.”

  GEORGE LUCAS

  Many people commented on the fact that The Phantom Menace was kid-friendly. I don’t think it is any more kid-friendly than the other films. When I did the other films, I said, “This is for twelve-year-olds, and it’s a kid’s movie.” At the time, everybody said, “Fine,” and that was, I think, one of the reasons we got a lot of bad reviews. But then somehow over the years, people have sort of drifted away from that and tried to make it into something other than what it actually is. Look, this is a Saturday afternoon serial for children. The Phantom Menace was the perfect title for a film like this. You have the roll-up, you have Episode I. People forget what the movies actually are.

  11

  SEND IN THE CLONES: ATTACK OF THE CLONES

  “Begun, the Clone War has.”

  In the aftermath of the release of The Phantom Menace, some might say that Geor
ge Lucas was left in a state of confusion and, according to others, was reluctant to sit down and start writing the follow-up, Episode II: Attack of the Clones. It certainly wasn’t because of the film’s box office: Episode I did remarkably well and proved that there was very much an appetite for new Star Wars. But the critics weren’t kind and the “fans” were merciless in their vitriol, a common online refrain being, “George Lucas raped my childhood.” Ouch.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  (executive producer, screenwriter/director, Attack of the Clones)

  With The Phantom Menace, I gave people as much as I could. I gave them 110 percent. Even though it became the most successful Star Wars film of all time, the second most successful film in the history of the movies, and 60 percent of the critics thought it was fantastic, people say, “Why did you do this?” I knew when I made the film a lot of fans weren’t going to like it, because I wasn’t making the movie they wanted me to make. They wanted me to start with Episode II. They wanted to see Jedi fighting, they wanted to see battles. They wanted to see The Matrix.

  I knew that I was telling a story that I wrote thirty years ago and I had to start at the beginning and I had to do all the groundwork. Which means you have to lay all the pipe for all the characters for the world you are creating. What is the Republic and how does it operate? What is the Trade Federation and how does it operate? How did Anakin become a Jedi? The relationship between Anakin and his mother, the fact that he has special skills. All these things had to be laid out. Otherwise, the second one doesn’t work that well. You take them all together, they will work better than any one individual or even this first trilogy. It’s a six-part story that I wrote thirty years ago that I’m just finishing.

  KEVIN J. ANDERSON

  (author, Jedi Academy series)

  Dune was Frank Herbert’s second book he published. It was a fabulous book, one of the best I’ve ever read. He went on to a long and distinguished career, and wrote dozens and dozens of really special books. And each time one of his big ambitious books came out, instead of people recognizing that it was a really good book, all they ever said was, “This is good, but it’s not as good as Dune.” It’s like you’re cursed by doing something good. I think it’s too bad that we can’t just celebrate the fact that the first trilogy was monumental and look at the next one to see how good it could be. Let’s accept the fact that these new movies are Star Wars prequels, but look at them as independent movies in and of themselves rather than having this predetermined attitude of, “It can’t possibly be as good as the first.”

  SAMUEL L. JACKSON

  (actor, “Mace Windu”)

  I think what happened is that people had expectations they didn’t feel were met, because they didn’t understand what George was doing, and George is the only person who knows how all of this stuff fits together. So when he made the first one and it was a kiddie film, the adults who fell in love with Star Wars when they were kids had forgotten what they were like when they saw A New Hope. They couldn’t appreciate that The Phantom Menace is a story about a little boy who’s going to turn out to be Darth Vader. George was creating a new audience and hoping the old audience would enjoy it, too. And all these children who didn’t know anything about the original trilogy found this kid, Anakin, they could relate to and then they moved on to the next film.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  All of the films were intended for twelve-year-olds. They’re aimed at adolescents. They’re aimed at that period of time where they’re transitioning from being young to being mature, and maturing into adolescence. Mythology is designed to take the values and information and knowledge from one generation and move it on to the next. That’s what it’s all about. It started out as a storytelling medium and it was an oral storytelling medium. It had a lot of psychological meaning as it was presented live to people. It had to resonate, otherwise the storyteller wouldn’t get their dinner. In Star Wars, the mythology part is the motif; the sort of underlying psychology of the whole thing.

  DAN MADSEN

  (owner, the Official Lucasfilm/Star Wars Fan Club, 1987–2001)

  I ceased publication in 2001, and I sold the company to Wizards of the Coast. Part of the reason that happened was because I had invested so much money into the Star Wars action figures from Hasbro. I had three warehouses full of that product. And then the movie opens. You know, Episode I was both a blessing and a curse to me, because everybody had those action figures and toys—everybody from Walmart to Toys “R” Us, everyone’s mom-and-pop shop to Walgreens, and unfortunately, the Walmarts and Targets were just able to buy in much greater bulk than I was, so I couldn’t sell at the prices they could.

  We had the Jawa Trader inserted into every issue of Star Wars Insider, and it was just full of all we sold. We sold every product from the licensees. We also were the first ones to do the Star Wars online store at StarWars.com. We did all the backend of that. We did all the product fulfillment for that. Prior to the movie opening, we were just going gangbusters, and then the movie opens, and a week to two weeks after, sales just dropped. Unfortunately, a lot of times with those action figures, you know, we’d get a case of them, for every five Jar Jar Binks figures, we’d get one Darth Maul. And everybody wanted Darth Maul, I couldn’t sell enough Darth Mauls, but Jar Jar was everywhere, I couldn’t get rid of them! The fan club had to go on, so that was the only alternative. It was a painful time, but it was the right decision to make as I now know.

  At any rate, I got stuck with so much inventory, and I couldn’t sell it, and once the movie came out, the reception was a little less than what we had all hoped it would be, and the sales started to decline, and I was stuck with this huge debt to Hasbro. So I had no other choice but to sell the business, so that it could go on and it could survive. Wizards of the Coast had just been purchased before that by Hasbro, so it was a subsidiary of theirs, so it was the only way to keep the fan club going, to make it survive. So as much as it was painful for me to do it, it was the only way to do it.

  KYLE NEWMAN

  (director, Fanboys)

  It became cool to hate Star Wars. Before the Special Editions, it was still underground, and then the Special Editions repopularized it, and then by the time of the prequels it was Pepsi and it was Taco Bell. It was everywhere. And then it became cool to hate it. I remember I was living in New York at the time, and I went to film school, so everyone that was at film school at NYU was like, “Star Wars is the stupidest thing in the history of cinema ever. It’s so dumb.” And they intellectualized it in a way. I was like, “Whoa, let’s chill out. It’s not that bad. I’ve seen many, many bad movies.” It’s still fashionable. People still say George is evil. “George raped my childhood. George only puts out movies because he wants money.” George didn’t trick us into buying toys. We wanted the toys.

  DAN MADSEN

  Everything kind of changed after Episode I came out. All that anticipation and eagerness changed. Critics were panning the movies, and some fans hated it, and some fans liked it. There was a lot of negativity, and then there was this whole “Jar Jar Binks is racist”—it’s just one thing after another. It wasn’t what everybody had expected it would be. I don’t know what people’s expectations were, but at the time, it wasn’t what people wanted it to be. And it created some disappointment.

  SAMUEL L. JACKSON

  In the next one, you have a story that these kids probably can’t go and see yet, but they can catch up with it later. Revenge of the Sith is a very dark tale. The fans really didn’t understand the progression of these prequels; that this pivotal person, Darth Vader, had to start somewhere. These films change the way you view the first three movies, because you can look at Darth Vader as a sympathetic character, whereas before he was simply the personification of evil. We’ve seen Anakin grow up and now we know how he went to the dark side and how he was duped by this evil person into going to the dark side.

  HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN

  (actor, “Anakin Skywalker,” Attack of the Clone
s)

  As an actor, you look for characters who change and who are affected by the stimuli around them and grow and don’t stay on the consistent plane they’re introduced at. Anakin probably goes through the most change of any character I could possibly imagine.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  (author, George Lucas: A Life)

  After The Phantom Menace is released, Lucas kind of throws his hands up and walks away from the internet, and I don’t blame him. But he actually co-opted the internet film nerds for Attack of the Clones and brought them in on the process, because I think getting shit on for The Phantom Menace hurt him terribly. But by the time he gets to the next one, Revenge of the Sith, he was like, “I don’t even care what Bleeding Cool has to say, because I’m not reading anything,” which is probably not entirely true.

  The irony is that you can go on YouTube and type something like “The Phantom Menace, First Preview,” and that was the time when people were paying to see Happy Gilmore or whatever it was just to see the trailer. You can hear the crowd just going ape shit as soon as the Lucasfilm logo comes up; the place burst into this spontaneous applause. That’s where Lucas is at that point, and that’s an amazing place to be. It just doesn’t last.