ST George Lucas created the exiled Luke on Ach-To idea

Cue the mind blown gif. No wonder he didn’t want to direct any more. One of his last big ideas was the Luke in exile training a female at the first Jedi Temple narrative. Yes, the spine for VIII was what Lucas had imagined for Luke and how he wanted this new sequel trilogy to begin.

Read more here:
http://www.slashfilm.com/george-luc..._medium=referral&utm_campaign=zergnet_2350063

 

Training a Jedi, not waiting to die as the last Jedi while his dark side nephew rampaged the galaxy?

Edit - those images are so cool. Neither JJ nor RJ have touched Lucas’s vision for world building.

 

This is old news, Arndt said last year that the story (which was based of off GL's treatments) he was writing dealt with a girl finding and training with Luke Skywalker.

 

That George had envisioned him falling on Dark Times is new and I don’t think we knew that it was Lucas’ idea for him to be on the island of the first Jedi Temple in exile. JJ moved it to the back, which forced Rian to have to come up with some psychological torment and life lessons for him to work through.

 

That art is indeed great. I love that the natural landscape is contrasted with an alien looking structure. Definitely more fantastic and evocative than the version we got, imo.

 

Wow this stuff is just the twist of the knife know. The idea of a Lucas concieved ST written and directed by other people is just a pipe dream now. I suppose when he sold it there just wasn't much to be done, but imagine if they had stuck to his ideas and had all of the same talent in front of the camera and behind it.

 

Ah, I see.

 

They worked off many of his ideas from the sounds of it. That’s the shocker in this. Lucas envisioned this setup regarding Luke.

 

It would have been cool to see Luke in the prequel-era Jedi Garb like in this concept.

 

This is the first movie instead of the second. Things would have turned out very differently for 8.

 

It's good to know that another narrative element of this sequel trilogy traces back to an idea from Lucas, but we can't get hung up on it. Let the past die.

 

I saw the film for the fourth time today. Before reading this it occurred to me that the end of the Last Jedi feels more like the first part of a trilogy. Not the second act of one. Given that this film starts right when episode 7 ended, TFA and TLJ feel like one single very long chapter in the story.

Which could be a problem for Episode 9. It has to cover a lot of ground in a short time. There is a risk that it's ending is going to seem very abrupt.

 

Great find! However, JJ didn’t throw away GL’s treatments. He cane on board after.

Th following discusses The Art of TFA. Sounds like JJ and LK kept a lot of GL’s ideas. Especially important is Sam and Kira finding the map to Luke toward the end of VII on an island or a lush, green planet. So if we see Luke training Kira, it might just be the start of it. Luke is there because of heavy emotional issues.

I’m glad they did away the Sith ghost. Undermines Anakin and the path to immortality being via compassion that Yoda learns in the last episode of TCW. Interestingly, Yoda encountered what appeared to be the ghost of Darth Bane, voiced by Mark Hamill. But it’s only an illusion created by the dark side that Yoda finds in himself. Lucas has a preliminary cut of Mortis with the ghost of Revan motivating the Son to go full dark and seduce Anakin. A silent ghost of Bane is by Revan’s side. Filoni objected and GL cut the scene.

Imagine if we had a Sith ghost in VII. Plageuis anyone? But if GL had gone against canon, I’d hope it would have been Exar Kun.

https://www.google.co.jp/amp/s/amp....ring_up_some_misconceptions_about_the_art_of/

Perhaps Michael Arndt had given Luke more screen time than GL had wanted. JJ wanted more screen time for the Big 3 as it was their last hurrah before passing the torch. And Lucas had promised Ford Han would die.But Arndt said his biggest problem was every time Luke showed up, he took over the scene. He’s not the main character. That would be Kira/Thea. So when LK decided that because MA’s script had so many beautiful ideas and was incoherent to reboot the script for the new first draft to avoid getting trapped in MA’s problems. So, Luke gets put back at the end as originally planned and Han becomes the mentor.[/quote]

 

Interesting. Do we have GL's address? So angry hysterical fans can write to him & tell him he doesn't understand Luke Skywalker. That he'd never walk away & hide when the galaxy needs him

 

They did stick to his ideas, that's what the article is highlighting.

They just pushed some of those ideas back to TLJ (as JJ always said happened) and reworked others (presumably switching the two good Solo kids to the Jedi Killer).

But we can see now that an exiled Luke haunted by the dark side reassessing his life was something George had in mind.

It seems all Rian did was take out the more obvious dark side element and make it about failure.

So the next time someone goes on a tear about RJ disrespecting Luke (which he actually does the opposite of but never mind) I hope they bear in mind that George was thinking along similar lines.

I like that they avoided having a Sith Ghost, and what's good now is that they get to play the haunting angle from the flip side of that idea, with Luke haunting Kylo. That's got so much potential whilst also retaining the idea that the Jedi understand that power in a way darksiders cannot.

 

JJ wanted more screen time for the big 3? hmm... it's just the nostalgia and fan service in me, but I would rather have Luke appear throughout 7 even if he got the most screen presence if he was going to be killed off at 8. It just feels like these OT characters are one and done in this trilogy. Overall though I am content for the time being. The Luke reveal at the end of 7 was one of the most epic introductions I've witnessed in film, so there's that and I am warming up more and more each viewing to Luke in 8. I think the final piece is no Han and Luke interaction.

 

Michael Arndt: “In my early drafts, my thinking was we had to bridge the end of Return of the Jedi to what happens in this movie, and we didn’t want everybody to start off all together. We wanted them to be spread all throughout the galaxy.” “We came up with a backstory that Luke had a pupil who turned against him and fought him, and killed all the other pupils, and that was a thing that exploded the family and destroyed Han and Leia’s relationship.” “I had thought Han’s story and Leia’s story was just about them coming back together. At the end of the movie they would have reconciled and gotten over their differences. And you would have said, ‘Okay, bad stuff happened, but at least they’re back together again.'” “J.J. rightly asked, ‘What is Han doing in this movie?’ If we’re not going to have something important and irreversible happen to him, then he kind of feels like luggage. He feels like this great, sexy piece of luggage you have in your movie. But he’s not really evolving. He’s not really pushing the story forward.” (December 21, 2015)

Michael Arndt: “I’ll just say very quickly that very early on I tried writing versions of the movie where the girl is at home, her home gets destroyed, she goes on the road, she meets Luke, and then she goes and she kicks the bad guy’s ass. It just never worked. I struggled with this. This was back in 2012. It just felt like every time Luke came in and entered the movie, he just took it over. Suddenly, you didn’t care about your main character anymore because like, ‘Oh ****, Luke Skywalker’s here. I want to see what he’s going to do.’ This was like a huge thing. I feel so bad for J.J. because it was like, ‘The good news is you get to make a Star Wars movie, but the bad news is…’ We had long conversations about this, and J.J. so much wanted to have Luke Skywalker in his movie. But to finally say, again, any time Luke showed up, it suddenly became his movie. So you had to push it to the very end.” (December 22, 2015)

 

This just reinforces the idea that they weren't characterizing Luke here, but that Lucas came up with this awful idea by writing about himself. Luke isn't treated as a real character but as an allegory for GL, and as a plot device for Rey. I expected the latter, but never expected that Luke would be blamed so much for everything. But this is how Lucas felt after the prequels. I hate this approach though because Luke shouldn't be treated as a stand in for the writer when he already has his own distinct personality.

 

Or maybe Lucas, JJ and RJ and the story group (and many fans!) just have a a different idea of Luke than you do. This has absolutely nothing to do with George Lucas being blamed for the Prequels. This thinking is everything ( or some of the thing) that the film is saying we need to let go. The film is not about this kind of obsessive overthinking. It's about far more universal human themes - failure, weakness, acceptance, forgiveness and hope. So many fans are flat out missing the wood for the trees. There is valid criticism for sure, and I get if people don't like certain choices, but a lot of the criticism is just flat out objectively wrong in terms of understanding what the story is saying.

It seems to me like Luke would have had a broadly similar arc under George's ideas to the one he gets in TLJ, only it would have taken place in 7, not 8. And given George's predilection for rhymes, and his previously stated intent to make the ST more about the challenges of passing on what you have learned, the difficulty in telling right from wrong and the possibilities of a more ethereal ST with Luke passing onto a higher plane, I think there's every chance he would have died in 7 with George as well.

 

Nobody has ever said Lucas can't come up with terrible ideas.

That said, I actually quite liked the way Luke's "reveal" was left to the end of VII. As far as VIII is concerned Luke training Rey is also fine with most people I'd have thought.

Killing Luke off at the end of VIII is something Lucas wouldn't have done in a million years though. He'd either have killed Luke off in VII (like Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon) or he'd have saved it for the climax of IX (like Anakin)

I tend to think IX is when he'd have done it.

Killing Luke off in the "middle movie" is just bizarre from a storytelling perspective... But it did make for an incredible climax to The Last Jedi.

 

Yes, that's what I said. This idea came from Lucas and it was a bad idea because he was writing about himself, not Luke. I think the overthinking has to do with people who think that Episode 8 is a standalone movie. It's not. It's part of a previous story with established characters who have already overcome problems like being afraid of failure. The extra thinking has to do with ignoring all of these things so people can imagine that the filmmakers can do whatever they like with the characters based off the standalone story they want to tell. It takes a lot of overthinking to see things this way, IMHO.

 

Most of the complaints I see is about Luke considering killing his own nephew in his sleep (I had the same complaint at first until I saw the last flashback, which I think is the most reliable version of the truth and it seems to me like most of the complaints focus more on the second flashback which was from Kylo's POV). The designs are amazing as always, I loved the tree and the mosaic of the Prime Jedi but Jedi and Sith temples are some of my favorite designs and it I could definitively see this in an episode of TCW. Pablo also said Luke being pushed at the end of the movie was not Lucas's idea but came out of single film's structural need and Arndt worked WITH Lucas throughout 2012 when Luke had a bigger role so saying he gave him more screentime than GL wanted doesn't make lot of sense. The big difference between the two versions is that there would be no Rey/Kylo skyping and Luke probably would have died in 7 instead of 8. It seems like GL's version would have been more like the traditional master/apprentice relationship and since Luke's arc was supposed to happen in 7, it means episode 8 and 9 would have been vastly different than what we got. I'm so excited to read his treatment and I liked TLJ but I love to behind the scenes stuff.

The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Rick Carter bought in a stack of random stills from Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa — who directed films such as Rashomon and The Hidden Fortress, huge influences on George Lucas as a filmmaker generally and on Star Wars specifically – to the first Visualist meeting on January 9th, 2013. As a creative exercise, Carter handed that stack to Kiri Hart and asked her to select several that told the story of The Force Awakens in whatever way she thought best. The five chosen images were eventually printed by the concept artists to depict Kira’s/Rey’s journey through her training with Luke Skywalker.

BTW, here are some of the Kurosawa stills that inspired them.

 

I don't think that's correct though. I don't think Lucas was reflecting on his own bad decisions within the saga. I think the film is commenting on the saga and our relationship with it, but I don't think it's commenting on George's "blame" nor do I think Lucas was.

If you look back to some of the earliest comments George made about the ST, I think we can get an idea about what kind of thing he once envisioned, at least very early on. And I think looking at those images, and seeing the issues TLJ digs into, other than the stuff about restoring the republic to its former glory (which I think probably dropped away storywise due to some of the reaction towards the politics in the PT, and also the fact that after 30 years, maybe it was felt the Republic would have been restored. Yes, you can argue that about the Jedi, but we also see them wiped out - I think because they wanted to show Luke struggling to pass on what he learned on screen.

Anyway, here are some of the comments, taken form the Secret History of SW (written in 2007). I've underlined the bits I think stand out.

The series at this point was no longer about Luke, as evident by the fact that the first and last thirds of the saga would not center on him—which may be one reason why Lucas stopped referring to the series as The Adventures of Luke Skywalker in 1979, when this three-trilogy plan was revealed.

It was three separate trilogies which told a chronological story when viewed together but followed different characters and had different styles and tones, although connected in various ways.


The first trilogy was about Obi Wan. The second trilogy was about Luke. The third trilogy, then, may have followed this “Other.” - my note - obviously the time lag between trilogies meant the Other became Rey. I don't even think Luke intended her to be related.

Contrary to popular belief, there is no indication that an elderly Luke and company would be the protagonists of the sequels— that story point would be created much later.

However, audiences would probably be wondering what happened to them and so Luke would likely appear in a role as a mentor character (and played by someone other than Mark Hamill), similar to Obi Wan in the middle trilogy—the protagonist of the previous trilogy would step aside for the next one and make a cameo appearance; this is what connects the trilogies.

Obi Wan is the protagonist of trilogy one; Obi Wan’s student Luke is the protagonist of trilogy two, with Obi Wan as a cameo character as Luke’s mentor; Luke’s student the Other is the protagonist of trilogy three, with Luke as a cameo character as the Other’s mentor. Just as Obi Wan passes on the Jedi legacy to Luke, Luke could pass on the Jedi legacy to this Other.

“The sequel is about Jedi knighthood, justice, confrontation, and passing on what you have learned,” Lucas says. in 1983 [he] stated that thematically it would be about “the necessity for moral choices and the wisdom needed to distinguish right from wrong,” implying perhaps a more introspective tone, which is consistent with Lucas’ implications that the three sets of films would all be stylistically different.

The first trilogy is to be more Machiavellian and melodramatic, like a costume drama, as Lucas revealed in 1981, while the second is more action-packed and light-hearted, perhaps leaving the third to be more philosophical, addressing issues of ethical responsibility and moral ambiguity. “The third [trilogy will] deal with moral and philosophical problems,” Lucas once said. “In Star Wars, there is a very clear line drawn between good and evil.

Eventually you have to face the fact that good and evil aren’t that clear-cut and the real issue is trying to understand the difference.”

 

I like those designs a lot and would have made it better. Regarding Luke in exile, this is not the main problem and fine to do. The main problem is is the explanation presented and has Luke out of character.