BTS Lucas Quotes and Interviews about the starwars saga.

Just because it's in a novelization doesn't mean it came from GL. The authors of the novelizations were allowed to add their own information. For all we know, Brooks combined two events (the infighting that reduced their numbers and the Jedi ousting them from power.) For example, the TPM novelization says that Qui-Gon's master was 400 years old.

 

Not the point. There is that earlier quote you cited (from TIME magazine, BTW) where GL speaks of the Sith following the Rule of Two for 'thousands' of years, but that just sounds like a typical case of either muddling his timeframes or changing his mind (much as Obi-Wan speaks of the Republic having existed for "a thousand generations", i.e. anywhere between 25,000 and 35,000 years, then the line in AOTC from Palps where he refers to the Republic having existed for only one thousand years).

Although I don't necessarily subscribe to 'canon', the fact that Darth Bane's having established the Rule of Two 1000 years before TPM has been adopted by the wider lexicon, and GL didn't see fit to change it, is good enough for me. It certainly fits with the reference in TPM to the Sith having been "extinct for a millennium".
GL created the Sith backstory to begin with, including the character of Darth Bane, it wasn't something Terry Brooks made up for the novel.

 

GL never forced the EU to retcon itself beyond contradicting it in his own works, even when the EU did something he didn't agree with. After all, we all know how GL feels about Palpatine clones and Luke getting married. One of the old Marvel comics has Bespin as a solid planet that Lando walks on the surface of.

I never disputed the fact that Brooks was working with information that GL provided to him. Just because GL and Brooks spoke to each other doesn't mean that Brooks didn't add things afterwards. Tom Veitch and Kevin J. Anderson spoke to Lucas when they wrote Tales of the Jedi and yet those stories have a Sith species and Sith spirits (the latter contradicts the ROTJ screenplay. Also of interest is that in the TIME magazine quote, GL says that the Sith began "thousands of years ago", Tales of the Jedi says the Sith have been around for more than 4000 years, and the TPM novelization says that the Sith began "almost two thousand years ago."

 

Difference in this instance being that the timeframe regarding the establishment of the RoT was something that he was dealing directly with at the same time, and he never set a specific timeframe, beyond the vague "thousands of years" he mentioned in the TIME interview. One, two, ten - he was just speaking about something that happened quite some time ago. A specific number came into play with the novelisation (1000 years), and it has since become the figure which the rest of the franchise sticks to. There's not going to be a Darth Bane movie made by GL, he's not going to retcon it.

The fact that the Sith existed far beyond their apparent 'extinction' 1000 years prior to TPM is something I never disputed. In the old TOTJ comics, the 'Sith' were originally a species enslaved by Dark Jedi exiles 5000 years before TPM (which was a 1990s EU interpretation/development/riff upon GL's 1970s concept of the Sith being a mercenary organisation taken under the wing of a Dark Jedi named Darklighter, and instructed in the use of the Force). 500 years later a Sith Lord named Freedon Nadd started a rebellion which was squashed. 500 years after that, a Jedi Knight by the name of Exar Kuun turned to the Dark Side, and with the help of another corrupted Jedi, Ulic Qel-Droma, nearly overthrew the Republic itself, with the help of a group of warriors led by the warlord Mandalore.

There's plenty of Sith history between the Exar Kuun/Ulic Qel-Droma period that I'm familiar with, 4000 years prior to the GCW, and the supposed extinction of the Sith 1000 years BBY - all those 'Darths' that the video games love dragging in, and so on - but as far as the films/SW saga proper is concerned, what it comes down to is that the Sith, the most dangerous enemy of the Jedi Order, managed to wipe themselves out through their own infighting, despite nearly being in control of the entire galaxy. As far as the Jedi knew, they were done..

One Sith Lord, however, survived, and his name was Darth Bane. He took an apprentice, and established the Rule of Two. A master and an apprentice. No more, no less.

This happened 1000 years before the events of The Phantom Menace, and apart from some vague, non-specific mumblings from GL, there's never been any issue that it didn't. I'm not entirely sure why you're insisting that this wasn't the case.

 

The idea of a massive Sith Order existing in the distant past before being wiped out actually predates the release of TPM, though not by much. The Battle of Ruusan, which marked the end of the Old Sith Order a thousand years before the SW films, was mentioned in the three Dark Forces illustrated novellas which tied in with the release of LucasArts' Jedi Knight in 1997.

 

He was mostly interested in making films that were experimental, rather than traditional style films. He did "American Graffiti", "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" because those were the kinds of films that he felt were missing from Hollywood, when he set out to make them. But after ANH, his intention was to divide his time between overseeing the Saga and making those smaller, quieter films. He was never interested in doing the type of film that his friends did, other than when he wanted to do "Apocalypse Now", but that whole thing went a different direction and it was probably for the best, since it nearly killed Coppola.

 

Indeed, in this recent video interview, GL claims he's going to direct more movies in the future, but... "not movies that will be shown anywhere."

(One wonders who you have to bribe to get an entrée into GL's screening room for thoese private "experimental films"....)

 

^ He's been saying that for 10 years.

 

Indeed. One wonders if he'll ever produce in public anythig to show for those years of labor... or if these so-called "experimental" films are snowflakes too special to risk in the wider world.

 

http://www.starwarsunderworld.com/2015/11/george-lucas-talks-greedo-shooting.html

By: Dominic Jones

Although he's not involved in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, as we race towards the film's December 18th release everyone wants to talk to Star Wars creator George Lucas. The Washington Post sat down with Lucas recently and talked to him about a variety of topics including his relationship with the new films, the status of The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, and the controversial "Who shot first" debate.
On his relationship with the new film, Lucas echoed what he said on CBS This Morning a few weeks ago, (via TWP,)
“I call it like a divorce,” Lucas says candidly. He always knew that at some point he’d have to part with “Star Wars” in order for the franchise to go on living.

“There is no such thing as working over someone’s shoulder,” he says. “You’re either the dictator or you’re not. And to do that would never work, so I said ‘I’m going to get divorced.’ . . . I knew that I couldn’t be involved. All I’d do is make them miserable. I’d make myself miserable. It would probably ruin a vision — J.J. has a vision, and it’s his vision.”

As recently as a couple weeks ago, with fans going ape over tidbits and new trailers for “The Force Awakens,” Lucas had still not seen the film. Not a frame.

He expected that he would soon see it here at the ranch (“I’ve got the best theater in the world,” he notes), perhaps even with Abrams and Lucasfilm Ltd. President Kathleen Kennedy (a longtime Lucas collaborator) in the room, watching him watch it. What then?

“Now I’m faced with this awkward reality, which is fine,” Lucas says. Extending the metaphor, he says it’s like when a grown child gets married. “I gotta go to the wedding. My ex will be there, my new wife will be there, but I’m going to have to take a very deep breath and be a good person and sit through it and just enjoy the moment, because it is what it is and it’s a conscious decision that I made.”

About The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which Lucas is working on opening in Chicago, Lucas said,
“The great thing about art is that you get a feeling about something, you get knowledge about something, but you don’t know why. Describe the Sistine Chapel — it’s very hard. ‘It made me feel spiritual feelings and thoughts I’d never had before.’ Well, what do you mean? ‘I don’t know what I mean — you’ll have to just go and see it.’ ‘Star Wars’ was like that. People couldn’t describe it; they just kept saying, you gotta go see it, you gotta go see it, you gotta go see it. Now we’re like that with [the Broadway hit musical] ‘Hamilton’ — you gotta go see it. Why? . . . To try to describe these things is very hard.”

Lucas also addressed Greedo shooting first in the 1997 Special Edition of Star Wars: A New Hope. He explained the change, saying,
“Han Solo was going to marry Leia, 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.”
I think that's a very interesting response from Lucas. For the record, I've never had a problem with Lucas' changes. Some I like, some I don't, but I firmly believe that Lucas had the right to do what he wanted to do with his film. Greedo shooting first never bothered me, but I understand why it did some people. But I like Lucas' thinking on this, it makes sense. Han's still a killer, he shows no remorse. Having Greedo shoot first doesn't put him "on the side of the angels", but it does give him a bit a code. And again, that code doesn't make him a good guy, he's not doing a good thing because he waits to kill Greedo until Greedo shoots first. He's still killing people without thinking twice about it and was ready to kill Greedo the moment he took blaster out of its holster.
I really think the rage about Han shooting first and the changes in general has been way overblown, because they have so little effect on the films themselves. Star Wars has remained popular since the changes, with many new fans joining the club, so to speak, since 1997. Even if you say this is in spite of the changes, it just goes to show how unimportant they really are. They don't affect the overall mythology in a significant way and they don't affect the enjoyment of new viewers. It's a real shame that these debates have become such a feature of Star Wars fandom, because they really don't matter.

 

Indeed. It's just sad that the article is about the absence of Lucas from Star Wars forever but it appears in other media sites with the futile "Han shot first" debate taking center stage.

 

I think most people don't care either way whether or not Han or Greedo shot first. It's mainly the jarringly inept way, visually, that it was conveyed in the SE that bothers people. It could have been easily done by showing a very brief CLOSE UP of Greedo's blaster going off, followed by smoke, followed by Greedo slumping over dead. Instead, they had to show the laser coming out of the gun at an angle and give Han a fake-looking head movement. It just takes the visual artistry of that moment away. I think the same is true of the Jabba scene. SE Jabba bore so little resemblance to ROTJ Jabba that the visual continuity seemed compromised.

 

Of all the bull I had to listen to or read in the past (not the first!) decades, this is simply the worst and Lucas reveals that he has obviously lost some of his key notes.

First, mythologically speaking he himself portrayed with Vader in ROJ that people can change from bad to good ways. The same applied for Solo who changed from a cynic and selfish egotist to someone who did also care about others (and not just his Wookiee pal). It's the New Testament's story (or mythology if you prefer) of Saul who turned into Paul.

Second, although he made it clearer in his "authentic" 4th draft from March 15, 1976 where Greedo asks Solo whether he wants to be shot inside or outside the Cantina, the film dialogue is still clear enough that Greedo was going to kill Han Solo. Han Solo simply acted with a pre-emptive shot in self-defence.

Apparently Mr. Lucas was clouded misremembering where he got the original inspiration from, i.e. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly where the Lee van Cleef character (a bounty hunter) shot a guy from under the table, as the other guy - having just learned that Lee van Cleef would kill him - went for his gun. For ANH he simply reversed the situation.

 

Seems to me Lucas drew inspiration just as much, if not more so, from this scene featuring Tuco:

 

I agree. Also reminded me that I would have liked to see a re-encounter of "Ponda Baba" (with his right arm missing) and Ben Kenobi (of course that would not have been possible, especially considering that Kenobi also decapitated that Buttface, according to some authentic behind-the-scenes images).

 

“They looked at the stories, and they said, ‘We want to make something for the fans’….They decided they didn’t want to use those stories, they decided they were going to do their own thing….They weren’t that keen to have me involved anyway — but if I get in there, I’m just going to cause trouble, because they’re not going to do what I want them to do. And I don’t have the control to do that anymore, and all I would do is muck everything up,” he said. “And so I said, ‘Okay, I will go my way, and I’ll let them go their way.'”​

 

I'm curious as to the reliability of the Making Of books. There was a famous quote about midichlorians that Making of SW claims is from the 70s but Rinzler later claimed that GL edited his past words. Was the Making of Book telling the truth or is Rinzler's later claim telling the truth? I wonder about other things in the Making of Books. For example, Making of SW references Palpatine having been "Chancellor" but the ANH novelization and Making of ROTJ reference Palpatine having been "President."

 

I wouldn't worry too much about the various titles - 'Chancellor' is clearly meant to evoke 1930s Germany, and the rest would have shifted back and forth. Chancellor, President, Senator - what's important is that he eventually declared himself Emperor, after having previously held a more 'democratic' title.

Nevertheless, you're quite right to be skeptical about any such details, thanks to that brazen act of chicanery regarding the midichlorians. Really unprofessional and a bit sleazy (although I think Rinzler himself probably realised as such, hence the retraction). Was that quote from the same publication about C-3PO having originally been built by a little boy in a junkyard from 1977 or 2007? Are the ESB and ROTJ tomes full of other such little, well, lies?

We're not talking about actual history being fabricated, but given the way these books were presented to the world - as definitive, authoritative texts regarding the development of these films - citing a quote from c. 2007 concerning an extremely controversial issue as having come from 1977 is just a flat-out lie, and brings everything else in the text (plus its sequels) into question. Omission is one thing - there's probably loads of material GL has kept to himself - but fabrication is another.

It might seem like an over-reaction, but if this was in a newspaper concerning a real-life issue, Rinzler would have been sacked, and anyone above him who pushed it would have followed (coincidentally, the 2003 film Shattered Glass, starring none other than Hayden Christensen, is about such journalistic shenanigans). If it had come from the top, the newspaper would have faced all manner of investigations, and could have been ruined.

Fortunately, the Rinzler books contain enough material that's been published elsewhere to be considered authentic enough, and plenty of pretty pictures, but for me, the integrity of them has been forever tainted when it comes to any revelations that exist in them alone. I'd advise anyone else approaching them to do so with the same cynicism.

 

For me the tipping point came with The Making of ESB, when Rinzler deliberately omitted any mention of Luke's father from his citations of the GL-Leigh Brackett story conferences. Ever since zombie's book came out a few years prior, people had been wondering about whether Vader was "really" meant to be Luke's father all along -- especially since the Brackett draft definitively ignores that particular plot point, by featuring Anakin's ghost as a separate person from the living Vader.

It was obvious somebody "on high" had censored that particular bit of the story conferences -- why else would Rinzler not only not include such a crucial moment, but also fail to mention that (against all logic) GL and Brackett never talked about Luke's father? Quite the contrary: Rinzler explicitly states that the identity Luke's father was indeed one of the topics discussed in the sessions.

So presumably the GL of 2010 didn't want it known in retrospect that he hadn't yet arrived at a final decision for how to handle that particular plot thread, and had Rinzler cut that bit out of the book. Since then I've been aware of just how much even the supposedly "candid" Making Of books toe the LFL party line.

 

One can surmise that IF during those late '77 discussions Lucas had disclosed that Vader indeed was Annikin/Skywalker Sr, he wouldn't have had any qualms about putting that in the book in 2010.

All we get is this undated quote: "Somewhere the good father (Ben) watches over the child's fate, ready to assert his power when critically needed. Father changes into Darth Vader, who is a passing manifestation, and will return triumphant. Luke travels to the end of the world and makes sacrifice to undo the spell put on his father. He succeeds and happiness is restored. ".

Now, I could buy this as a note for ROTJ's development, but TESB? The fact that it's undated, makes this quote a little suspect to me. That being said, the quote does not say that "Annikin" or "Skywalker"changes into Darth Vader, so I am not certain that it is a latter-day, 2010 insertion into the narrative. Calling Ben the 'good father' makes it sound like it's from that contemporary early period when the OT was still in production, and Luke "makes a sacrifice" sounds intriguing.

 

The whole concept of 'covering your tracks' regarding the evolution of the stories is what I find really odd. I find it bizarre that someone would be so....well, dishonest, about the process of making the movies. The thing is people actually swallow this stuff down, and believe that there was a form of fixed narrative that was always in place, always intended. I think it has been an incredibly divisive course to take and I am puzzled by what motivates such an urge to...lie about the real course of events.

 

In 2010...years after the PT had been released, there was no longer any need to keep the public 'un-spoiled' that Vader was formerly Anakin Skywalker, Luke's father. So there was no earthly reason to keep those father discussions out of the TESB book. The ONLY logical explanation, is that the they would have revealed something other than Annkin/Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader - perhaps, revealing that Vader was Luke's father, but Annikin/Anakin/Tan Skywalker was not.

 

Ya it's all some grand conspiracy on George Lucas's part! Let me get my pitchfork!

 

You see me being angry? Nope. I am wondering at why Lucas made efforts to obfuscate the real artistic process - which he clearly has, not whingeing about it. You think that if anybody questions something it must mean they're, like, really mad about it...or upset?

 

Your tone indicated otherwise.