Star Wars.
“The original Star Wars was a joke, technically,” Lucas insisted.22 “We did a lot of work, but there is nothing that I would like to do more than go back and redo all the special effects, have a little more time.”23 While he didn’t intend to go quite so far as to redo all the special effects, he did hope “to go back and fix some of the things that have bugged me forever,” as he told a reporter. “There were things I had to compromise on that weren’t the way I really wanted them to be.”24
Lucas had started plotting his digital changes to Star Wars several years earlier, at a 1993 meeting with McCallum and a team from ILM led by Dennis Muren. At that time, Lucas had complained most loudly about the cantina sequence, which he was still unhappy with nearly twenty years later, laying the blame squarely on tightfisted Fox executives who’d refused his requests for money to finish several creatures. With digital technology at his disposal, he hoped to excise some of the rubber-masked monsters dictated by his minuscule budget and fill the cantina instead with the kinds of exotic creatures he’d envisioned from day one. He also still regretted being unable to include Han Solo’s conversation with Jabba the Hutt at Docking Bay 94, and hoped now to incorporate a digital Jabba into the discarded scene. Muren nodded, and further suggested that ILM take the opportunity to clean up or even redo some of the other effects shots, making tweaks to a few of the dogfights and inserting better explosions. Lucas okayed those suggestions as well—and then suggested they go even further than that, eagerly proposing they insert new digital footage into both Empire and Jedi. He hoped the alterations could be made quickly enough to release the new edition of the trilogy in time for the twentieth anniversary of Star Wars in 1997.
It would be more difficult than he hoped—for when the films were removed from storage in 1994, Lucas discovered to his dismay that the negatives had severely deteriorated over the past fifteen years. Star Wars, in particular, was a mess, grubby with dirt, deeply scratched, its colors faded. Lucas groaned; before any work could be done on new footage, the original negative would need to be restored. It would take ILM more than a year to clean up the negative, often using the computer to digitally fill in scratches and match colors frame by frame.25 The new digital effects were then integrated into the film, sometimes cut directly into the original negative. “We called it an experiment in learning new technology, and hoped that the theatrical release would pay for the work we had done,” said Lucas. “It was basically a way to take this thorn out of my side and have the thing finished the way I originally wanted it to be finished.”26 The effort had cost nearly $5 million for the restoration and a little more than four and a half minutes of new or reworked material.
For many fans of the original Star Wars, it was four and a half minutes too much. Lucas released Star Wars: The Special Edition in theaters in January 1997—special editions of Empire and Jedi would follow in February and March, respectively—to enormous hype and impressive numbers, racking up $35 million in its first four days of release. But many fans, who had grown up with the movies in their original state, were furious with Lucas for tampering with them. In addition to the revised cantina sequence, ILM had digitally added characters and creatures to other scenes, sending more stormtroopers chasing after Han Solo on the Death Star, and inserting droids, dewbacks, Jawas, and other creatures in the streets of Mos Eisley with almost too much relish. Such digital clutter was distracting, and inconsequential to the story. The same could probably be said for the new sequence with Han and Jabba, which added a bit more backstory to their antagonistic relationship but ultimately left the two characters unchanged.
That wasn’t the case, however, with an alteration Lucas saw as little more than a minor tweak, but one that fans would come to regard as an unforgivable reinventing of one of the trilogy’s most popular characters. At Lucas’s request, ILM had altered the cantina confrontation between Han Solo and the bounty hunter Greedo—which had ended with Han gunning the hapless Greedo down—to instead show Greedo squeezing off a shot first, thus turning Han’s previously aggressive blast into what Lucas saw as simply self-defense.
Fans were apoplectic. To many, that single shot from Greedo had immediately changed the very nature of Han Solo’s character, denying him an evolution from selfish, morally ambiguous pirate to self-sacrificing hero. HAN SHOT FIRST! they insisted, a rallying cry that would soon be emblazoned across T-shirts, stickers, and, eventually, much of the Internet as a defiant reminder of the perils of meddling with a mythology.
At first, Lucas insisted lamely that Greedo had always shot first, and that muddy editing had made the true nature of the confrontation unclear. “What I did was try to clean up the confusion,” Lucas explained patiently. “It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.”27
And yet this was more of Lucas’s retroactive continuity—for his own shooting script for Star Wars, dated May 15, 1976, clearly never gave Greedo a chance to squeeze off a shot:
Suddenly the slimy alien disappears in a blinding flash of light. Han pulls his smoking gun from beneath the table as the other patrons look on in bemused amazement.
HAN: … but it will take a lot more than the likes of you to finish me off…
Han gets up and starts out of the cantina, flipping the bartender some coins as he leaves.
HAN: Sorry for the mess.28
But Lucas was determined to stick to his long-running narrative that he’d had all of the details of the entire Star Wars saga planned out from the start. “Han Solo was going to marry Leia,” he insisted, “and you look back and say, ‘Should he be a cold-blooded killer?’ Because I was thinking mythologically—should he be a cowboy, should he be John Wayne? And I said, ‘Yeah, he should be John Wayne.’ And when you’re John Wayne, you don’t shoot people [first]—you let them have the first shot. It’s a mythological reality that we hope our society pays attention to.”29
Another good try, but fans weren’t buying it, and never would. While Lucas would never regret the alteration—and never quite understand the objections—he would also never live it down, deflecting question after question about it for the next two decades. “The special edition, that’s the one I wanted out there,” he would state in 2004, throwing up his hands in annoyance. “This is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it.”30 It wasn’t just fans who were annoyed, however; Gary Kurtz, who had produced both Star Wars and Empire, argued that the digital changes were “probably a wrong philosophy.… It’s not the way it was in the first place. The way it was in the first place was the way we released it.”31 Lucas dismissed such razzing; as far as he was concerned, as the creator of the art, he and he alone had the right to do with it as he pleased—though for all his talk, one wonders how he might have reacted to, say, Kurosawa digitally altering even one frame of The Hidden Fortress. Still, he wasn’t above acknowledging the controversy to the fans, even wearing a T-shirt reading HAN SHOT FIRST as he directed Revenge of the Sith.32
Such controversies aside, the special editions had proven to him that he “could actually pull off the things that [he] wanted to pull off.”33 And the generally enthusiastic reception from fans old and new had further shown that audiences were still eager to see Star Wars in the theater—“a celebration of the theatrical experience,” Lucas called it.34 He stoked additional excitement that winter by publicly announcing a decision he’d actually made some time earlier: after twenty happy years out of the director’s chair, he was going to direct all three Star Wars prequels.
It wasn’t a decision he’d made easily. “[Lucas] didn’t necessarily want to direct them,” said Ron Howard. And, in fact, Lucas had approached Howard, Spielberg, and Robert Zemeckis about taking the reins of one or more of the prequels, only to re
ceive the same retort from each of them: “George, you should do it.” “I don’t think anybody wanted to follow-up that act at the time,” said Howard. “It was an honor, but it would’ve been too daunting.”35 Still, not everyone was as encouraging. Coppola—who’d seen his own career defined and consumed by The Godfather—believed that Lucas’s devotion to Star Wars had sidetracked him from making the small, arty films that were his passion. “I think Star Wars, it’s a pity,” said Coppola, “because George Lucas was a very experimental crazy guy, and he got lost in this big production and never got out of it.”36 Marcia Lucas likened the decision to focusing on a pea at the bottom of the inverted Lucasfilm pyramid, the seed from which a colossal and choking vine had sprung. For Lucas, though, it was a matter of control. “We were going to be attempting new things; and in truth, I didn’t quite know how we were going to do them,” he said. “So I figured I needed to be there at all times.”37
There was also just a touch of fatalism involved as well. “It took a long time for me to adjust to Star Wars,” confessed Lucas. “I finally did, and I’m going back to it. Star Wars is my destiny.”38
Lucas had taken a different approach to the casting for Episode I, handing off much of the work to casting director Robin Gurland, who spent two years compiling lists, collecting photos, meeting with actors and agents, and winnowing the roster of candidates down to a manageable size before handing it off to Lucas. There was still no script to speak of, but most of the actors were willing to meet with Lucas anyway, excited by the idea of appearing in a Star Wars movie. That was certainly the case with Samuel L. Jackson, who had made a very public appeal to Lucas on the British talk show TFI Friday in December 1996, begging to be considered for any role. “I got invited to the Ranch to see if I was serious about that,” Jackson said later. “[I said], ‘Yeah, sure! You can make me a stormtrooper if you want, I don’t care—as long as I know I’m in the movie, I don’t care if anybody else knows or not.’”39 Jackson would ultimately be a very visible presence in the role of Jedi master Mace Windu, a name Lucas salvaged from the opening line of his 1973 first draft of Journal of the Whills.
While Lucas had in the past expressed an aversion to working with name actors—“I don’t think George is interested in collaboration with an actor,” said Ron Howard; “he’s not a ‘kick-it-around’ guy”—he had no such qualms when it came to Episode I.40 Besides Jackson, Lucas brought in Irish actor Liam Neeson, who’d rocketed to A-list prominence as the star of Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning Schindler’s List, and spent most of his first meeting with Lucas swapping stories about their families. Lucas liked Neeson immediately—he thought he would lend Episode I the same kind of gravitas that Alec Guinness had brought to the original Star Wars—and hired him to anchor the film as the astute Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn.
Very briefly, Lucas had considered an even bigger name than Neeson, indulging a phone call from Michael Jackson, who wanted to play the role of Jar Jar Binks in full makeup and prosthetics, rather than as the CGI creation Lucas preferred. Lucas gently refused the superstar—and dancer Ahmed Best, who would eventually land the role, thought he knew why. “My guess is ultimately Michael Jackson would have been bigger than the movie,” said Best, “and I don’t think [Lucas] wanted that.”41 Instead, the part went to Best, who would stand in for Jar Jar during filming, wearing a headpiece with the character’s eyes so actors could match sightlines, and a costume with bits that resembled gills, so computer animators could mimic the way the light played off him. Lucas also liked the way Best moved and sounded, and permitted Best to endow Binks with a voice—which Best played as a kind of West Indian patois—and a loping, hand-flapping stride, which would be digitized over Best later. “George told me that we were really going out on a limb,” said Best. That would be putting it mildly.42
Principal photography on Episode I—still titled The Beginning—would start on June 26, 1997, at Leavesden. Security was tight; the script—which Lucas hadn’t finished until practically the last minute—would remain strictly guarded, and even Lucas would be required to wear a name tag on set, though his would read YODA. While Lucas hadn’t directed in nearly two decades, he found “it wasn’t a hard thing” to get back into the familiar rhythms. “As soon as Liam Neeson walked on the set, dressed as a Jedi, I said to myself, ‘I guess I’m back,’” said Lucas. “It was as if those twenty years had never elapsed.”43
Still, there were some marked differences between 1977 and 1997. In contrast to the year he had spent making the original Star Wars, when he would come in each morning and walk the sets, mapping out camera angles between his fingers and running his hands over still-wet paint, in 1997 most of his sets were barren—usually just a platform, a flight of stairs, or a piece of sculpture, set against a gigantic blue screen. “We built as little as we could get away with, and then put up bluescreens,” said producer Rick McCallum.44 That still didn’t stop Lucas from touring all of the production departments each day, picking up and poking at masks, examining costumes, and fiddling with props. For the first time since 1982, a new Yoda puppet had been built, completely redesigned not only to look younger but also to be much lighter on the arm of Frank Oz, who had complained about the original Yoda being “really fuckin’ heavy.”45 There were also several new R2 units that ran much more smoothly and reliably than the malfunctioning droids from the original trilogy. Threepio—a bare-wired skeletal version of himself in Episode I—would be a life-size rod puppet, manipulated by a puppeteer who would later be removed digitally. The reliable Anthony Daniels, however, would continue to provide his voice.
There were other things, too, that would never change: Lucas was still as bad with actors as ever. Despite working this time with several big-name actors, Lucas wasn’t about to indulge any deep drills into character or ponderous method acting. “It isn’t about trying to find the motivation for every moment,” he insisted. “I’m not like some directors who will sit for days and analyze what is going on.” And it didn’t seem to matter to Lucas that digital filmmaking was a new experience not just for him but for his actors as well, who were being asked to work with incomplete sets and react to characters that didn’t exist. “It took about ten days or two weeks before everyone felt really comfortable with the bluescreen,” recalled McCallum, but even then, Lucas remained unresponsive to the needs of his performers.46 “Sometimes I say cut,” he said with a shrug, “[and] sometimes I forget.”47
While Lucas had initially intended to shoot the film digitally, the available technology, to his disappointment, wasn’t yet advanced enough for him to film the entire movie in an acceptable widescreen format. Lucas would shoot a few scenes digitally anyway as a kind of test run, recording some sequences on digital high-definition tape, which would then need to be recorded back to film to be shown in theaters. Watching the footage later, Lucas was convinced he would never shoot on film again. Nevertheless, despite his earlier boast that his digital back lot would make it possible to shoot the movie for around $50 million, costs had escalated rapidly throughout pre-production and continued to climb right on through filming. But Lucas, who in the past had begged studio executives for the money he needed to finish a film, vowed not to scrimp when it came to financing his own movie, no matter the cost. Consequently, he was now pouring all of his money down a funnel labeled Episode I, risking everything, just as he had done with The Empire Strikes Back. “When you’re making a $100,000,000 movie and it’s your money—pretty much all the money you’ve got—there’s a huge risk,” said Lucas. “Studios can take that risk and then write it off onto something else. I didn’t have anything else.… I was gambling everything again.”48 Episode I was fast becoming the most expensive independent film in history—and it was all being paid for by one person.
Lucas surrounded himself with much of the same crew he had used on Young Indiana Jones, from costumers to his director of photography, who were familiar with his working style and “knew the kinds of tricks we would be using on this movie.”
Beyond that, “there was a language that had been developed in the course of doing [the Star Wars] series,” said Lucas, “[and] I wanted to continue it on this film, without having to train a whole new group of people.”49 He relied particularly heavily on McCallum, who saw his job as “enabl[ing] a director to achieve everything that he can.”50 But even McCallum was a subordinate, not a collaborator. “The great thing about Rick is that he never says no,” said Lucas—and that was part of the problem.51 Unlike the first trilogy, when Lucas had often been subjected to pushback from Gary Kurtz, Irvin Kershner, Lawrence Kasdan, and Marcia Lucas—who offered differing opinions regarding production, directing, writing, and editing—the prequels would be entirely Lucas’s vision, without compromise. His control was complete.
Not that he could control everything. While they were shooting on location in Tunisia, doubling again for the desert planet Tatooine, a massive storm blew through the region, destroying most of the crew’s carefully constructed sets. It was 1976 all over again, when a rare rainstorm had washed out most of the sets for Star Wars. “It was as if the storm had hidden away for twenty years, just waiting to come back,” remarked Lucas, who continued filming on what sets remained intact as the crew, along with military assistance provided by the governor of Tozeur, cleaned up and reconstructed everything.52
Lucas would wrap things up back at Leavesden, completing principal photography on September 30. He had maintained a brisk pace over the past three months, personally overseeing more than 2,500 shots, but now the post-production work was going to continue at an accelerated pace that ILM supervisor Dennis Muren wasn’t sure they could maintain. “George wanted us to produce 2,200 shots in a year and a half,” said Muren. “And you just think, there’s no way you can do it. And then he says, as he usually does, ‘Well, just think about it,’ and he walks out.”53
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