BTS Lucas Quotes and Interviews about the starwars saga.

That pretty much sounds exactly like the sequel trilogy that I was hoping for.

 

Here's the full transcript of this part.

 

And here's the full context of that screenshot.

Spoiler

THE CHOSEN ONE

George Lucas: When writing the movies, I tried to make sure that aliens and droids got killed, but not people.

Paul Duncan: A lot of stormtroopers died.

George Lucas: That's right, but you didn't know they were people. We did kill three humans and that was unfortunate. I was always bothered by it.

Paul Duncan: When was that?

George Lucas: On the Death Star, when Han and Luke go into the prison with Chewie to rescue Leia, they shoot three Imperial guys. The guards drew their guns and fired first, but it's still a shame.

Paul Duncan: Really?

George Lucas: Yeah, we very consciously didn't kill very many humans in those movies.

Paul Duncan: What about the stormtroopers? They look robotic, but they're not.

George Lucas: How do you know what they are?

Paul Duncan: Did you have a different idea of what they were?

George Lucas: Yeah, they started out as clones. Once all the clones were killed, the Empire picked up recruits, like militia.

They fought, but they weren't very good at what they did.

Paul Duncan: That's why they kept missing.

George Lucas: That's why they kept missing. Then after the Rebels won, there were no more stormtroopers in my version of the third trilogy.

I had planned for the first trilogy to be about the father, the second trilogy to be about the son, and the third trilogy to be about the daughter and the grandchildren.

Episode VII, VIII, and IX would take ideas from what happened after the Iraq War. "Okay, you fought the war, you killed everybody, now what are you going to do?" Rebuilding afterwards is harder than starting a rebellion or fighting the war. When you win the war and you disband the opposing army, what do they do? The stormtroopers would be like Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist fighters that joined ISIS and kept on fighting. The stormtroopers refuse to give up when the Republic win.

They want to be stormtroopers forever, so they go to a far corner of the galaxy, start their own country and their own rebellion.

There's a power vacuum so gangsters, like the Hutts, are taking advantage of the situation, and there is chaos. The key person is Darth Maul, who had been resurrected in The Clone Wars cartoons—he brings all the gangs together.

Paul Duncan: Was Darth Maul the main villain?

George Lucas: Yeah, but he's very old, and we have two versions of him. One is with a set of cybernetic legs like a spider, and then later on he has metal legs and he was a little bit bigger, more of a superhero. We did all this in the animated series, he was in a bunch of episodes.

Darth Maul trained a girl, Darth Talon, who was in the comic books as his apprentice. She was the new Darth Vader, and most of the action was with her. So these were the two main villains of the trilogy. Maul eventually becomes the godfather of crime in the universe because, as the Empire falls, he takes over.

The movies are about how Leia—I mean, who else is going to be the leader?—is trying to build the Republic. They still have the apparatus of the Republic but they have to get it under control from the gangsters. That was the main story.

It starts out a few years after Return of the Jedi and we establish pretty quickly that there's this underworld, there are these offshoot stormtroopers who started their own planets, and that Luke is trying to restart the Jedi. He puts the word out, so out of 100,000 Jedi, maybe 50 or 100 are left. The Jedi have to grow again from scratch, so Luke has to find two- and three-year-olds, and train them. It'll be 20 years before you have a new generation of Jedi.

By the end of the trilogy Luke would have rebuilt much of the Jedi, and we would have the renewal of the New Republic, with Leia, Senator Organa, becoming the Supreme Chancellor in charge of everything. So she ended up being the Chosen One.

 

They should get all of GL's detailed outlines for his Sequel Trilogy versions, and make them all into comics.

 

It's so sad to see people taking the Leia is the chosen one quote out of context. It's clear what Lucas is trying to say, and it has nothing to do with the prophecy.

 

This is what the author of the book had to say about this which is similar to my own reading on it. Of course she's the Chosen One to rebuild the New Republic, she's always been the character who has the bigger picture in mind, not necessarily about the Jedi prophecy but then again who knows what GL would have done if he fully developed the ST farther than in treatments.

Paul Duncan
"At the end of a war everything is broken, and society needs to be put together, and healed so that it can work again. The Chosen One is the person who brings balance by achieving this."

 

Exactly, it has nothing to do with the Chosen One of the Jedi prophecy, which is Anakin (conceived by midi-chlorians, destroyed the Sith, brought balance to the Force). Leia was to be the "Chosen One" that would restore the Republic, and the galaxy, back to normal.

It would be liking taking that "Jedi are the light side" quote out of context and say that the Jedi = light side of the Force.

 

The problem with those quotes is that they lack context: Lucas is (I'm assuming) talking about the ST ideas he developed in 2011-2012. Those ideas were not around when the PT was made (back then, it was "the story is over, there are no more movies"), much less when the OT was made (there were other ideas for a possible ST).

Another thing to keep in mind is that there's always a long way from early ideas to the final product. If you read about early story ideas for SW or Empire or Jedi (or Raiders, or any other film), there are many elements that evolve and change. As Lucas often says, movies take their own life. Therefore, we shouldn't assume those ideas would remain unchanged in a finished product by Lucas himself.


Anyway, I have to say, I don't like many of the story elements that Lucas talks about. But the thing I like least is how that new story would change SW from a "happy-ending fairy tale" to a more realistic and cynical kind of story of "what happens after the war", which is more similar to stuff like Game of Thrones. For me, Star Wars was, is and will always be a positive and optimistic story about good and evil with a happy ending, a moral fairy tale that makes you feel good about life.

On the other hand, it's interesting to see Lucas' personal evolution, from the optimistic OT, to a more dramatic and negative PT, and then to a more cynical and realistic ST.

 

I'm not sure how that's a problem. Nobody said all of these ideas were around when he was making the PT or the OT. They don't contradict either, which is expected. I do believe the mythological reality of his cosmology didn't change though. And if there's something he left unfinished, it's that. Not a story post-ROTJ.

Wether they would change, and by how much, only Lucas can tell. But that's irrelevant. What we should assume is that these are as close to his vision for what happened after ROTJ than anything else that's been done or will be done. Outside of him making the movies (which unfortunately is impossible), this is the true continuation of his world and story.

And from the looks of it, that's still what we were going to get. The trilogy would have an happy, positive and optimistic ending.

I don't get any Game of Thrones-esque vibes from Lucas' description of what happened. I do get some his Underworld series mirrors.

 

Another excerpt from the news Star Wars Archives book.

 

So how do fans feel about GL's ideas on the Whills? I'm fascinated by it in a good way though I'm sure it would have been be very controversial.

 

Lucas has always been rather vague about the Whills so it's hard to have a strong opinion on them. In the early drafts they seemed to be little more than story tellers, probably inspired by the choruses of ancient Greek theatre. The idea never really seemed all that necessary and it's not clear how this would have been implemented. The iconic opening crawl was all that was needed anyways.

As for Lucas' ST idea of making the Whills be microscopic beings who feed off the force and control the universe... ya that sounds pretty iffy without some more elaboration. My gut instinct is that it would be unnecessarily convoluted and strange. I also don't like the idea of beings that control the universe. I always preferred the force as something passive and neutral.

 

If we go into the origins of Jedi and Jedi temple could we pretty cool could someone in depth explain to me the whillis so they created and control the universe?

 

Yes. George Lucas can:

 

Right. Unless I am mistaken, the many elements 2nd trilogy Lucas spoke of in the early 80's was eventually folded into ROTJ. This Darth Maul crime lord plot seems to be things Lucas developed post TCW era.

Agreed. If you look at Lucas's early descriptions of (what would become) the prequels, Initially, Lucas described the them as a young Obi-Wan and Darth Vader....which is what we got in Episode 3.

Eventually, Lucas took this premise, and evolved it into: How does a good 10 year old boy become the most famous villain in film history? Part of the reason I kind of/sort of expected the Prequel trilogy to be more like Episode 3 is because this is what Lucas described it as for years.

I think you hit the nail right on the head. Undoing ROTJ's ultra happy and ultra fitting ending was always going to be a tough needle to thread, and get a mixed at best fan reaction, no matter who did it....George Lucas included.

 

I think during rather than post. He brought Maul back approximately when (or shortly after) he first started working on the ST, so I think he brought Maul back specifically to set him up as the ST villain.

 

The decision to bring back Darth Maul for TCW was made as early as 2009. Lucas only developed the story for the ST back in 2012.

 

I don't agree with this bit (even though it's a popular belief), but everything else on your post is spot on.

 

A stupid decision anyway, in my opinion (although I admit I haven't watched TCW at all)
And even more stupid to bring him back as a ST villain. Almost as stupid as bringing back Palpatine.

 

Really? Explain more. ROTJ is my favorite movie and I've heard/thought this was true for awhile.

 

The popular believe that the original ideas for the ST were folded into ROTJ comes basically from two assumptions:
-Gary Kurtz's claim that the Emperor would not appear until Episode IX
-And the assumption (again supported by Kurtz) that "the other" was going to be the main character of the ST.
Both ideas are basically unsupported (the Emperor not appearing until ep.IX seems to contradict every other evidence ). On the contrary, when Lucas spoke about the ST in the early 80s, he said that it would be about "moral issues" and "rebuilding the Republic" and it would be set 30-40 years in the future. And he was very clear that the OT was going to wrap the story of Luke, Vader, the Empire....

Anyway, if we look at ROTJ (and how it was made), it's clear that there are essentially three storylines, each of them having a very clear origin:
-The Ewoks helping the Rebels against the Empire: this comes from the climax of the first draft of Star Wars, which was a very important element for Lucas, as an alegory of the Vietnam war, which was "always" meant to be the ending of the story.
-The Emperor, Luke and Vader: this is the obvious resolution of the story that was set up in Empire.
-Jabba: Lucas claims in the DVD commentary that this section was added to the story because, basically, there wasn't much left from the "original screenplay". I believe that is, more or less, the truth. This section is just a fun mini-episode which doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the film. It's there just to fill the running time (and obviously, because Han had to be rescued somehow).
This actually proves that ROTJ doesn't have that much story in it: it's definitely not "four films in one" !

Each of these storylines takes up about a third of the film. Two of them (ewoks and the Emperor) were "always" going to be in the third film of the trilogy (at least from the moment when Lucas decided that he was making a trilogy). The third one (Jabba) was just filler.
I don't see anything that could be a possible plot/story idea from a future film.

(And ROTJ is one of my favourite movies as well!!)

 

The OT as envisioned around the time of ESB would have wrapped up the story of Luke and Vader, but probably not that of the Empire. Even Gary Kurtz stated that Vader's storyline would always have concluded in the third film. Lucas in the ROTJ story conferences also said he was dissatisfied with how ESB had shown the Emperor's face in the hologram in that film, basically because it was revealing him too quickly.

Plus, Lucas himself said in Bantha Tracks in 1980 that the ST would be "about the character who survives Star Wars III and his adventures" - presumably meaning Luke Skywalker, who would survive and meet up with his lost sister in the ST, while Han and Leia apparently would be killed off! That also chimes with recent statements from Lucasfilm publicist Craig Miller, who has said that Boba Fett was supposed to be much more of a villain in the third film, but was killed off early on in ROTJ once Lucas decided to wrap up the series after three movies. Perhaps Boba Fett would have disintegrated Princess Leia, reducing her to dust similar to how Alderaan was destroyed?

And Luke's lost sister being someone other than Leia is something that appears in the Leigh Brackett ESB script draft, where she's given the name Nellith Skywalker. So that was definitely a plot element being considered at some point. (The Brackett draft also features Luke's father as a Force ghost, so he's a separate character from Darth Vader, unlike in the film. However, the lost sister character probably wasn't merged into Leia until ROTJ.)

 

It's possible, but I don't believe that. What's the point of a 30-40 year gap between trilogies if the Empire is still around?

And yet, in the story conferences for Empire, Lucas clearly wants to introduce the Emperor: "the introduction of the Emperor is a major plot development (...) we have to begin to deal with him on a more concrete level this time (...) do we show the Emperor this time or wait until the next one where we finally confront him?" .

I don't believe that Han and Leia were going to be killed off for a second. And again, the 30-40year gap doesn't make sense with this either.
And again, Luke meeting up with his lost sister in the ST doesn't come from any reliable source! (other than Leith Brackett's draft)
I'm not saying it's definitely not true, I'm just saying we don't really know that.

It's really difficult to know exactly how the story developed, because it's pretty clear that there was nothing set in stone. It's very possible that when Lucas started making Empire in 1977 he had one idea in mind (no definitive number of episodes, no separate trilogies, different directors for each film...) and that he changed his mind by the time the film entered production.

 

No offense, but are you sure of that? I can't find a source for this.

 

The episodes took three years to be fully produced. And you can find concept art of the episode Brothers dated in 2009.