swlucasverse - Tumblr blog

[swlucasverse]

In [Episode IV: A New Hope] Luke takes on the responsibility of his father; he is given his father's lightsaber. In [Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back] the father destroys that. In [Episode IV] Luke wants to go off on an adventure, but he doesn't really have a purpose. He doesn't have a real cause that he is emotionally connected to. In [Episode V] he gets this cause; he gets emotionally involved and philosophically attached to a particular idea. The new lightsaber that Luke built himself in [Episode VI: Return of the Jedi] symbolizes that he has detached himself completely from his father and now is on his own.

― George Lucas

[swlucasverse]

We set this up this time so you could see the relationship between the Executive Office building and the Senate building, because in the other films, we never really had a good establishing shot that put those two places in proximity to each other.

― George Lucas

[swlucasverse]

It happens when you become particularly evil. They go back to normal when you're sort of in remorse about all the evil that you've done. (...) But if you're really evil, then in an evil moment, when you're really angry and steam is coming out of your ears, your eyes turn yellow.

— George Lucas

[swlucasverse]

We never see the ghost of Qui-Gon; he's not that accomplished. He's able to retain his personality, but he's not able to become a corporeal ghost.

— George Lucas

[swlucasverse]

Vader was going to be extremely powerful, but he ended up losing his arms and legs and became partly a robot. So a lot of his ability to use the Force, a lot of his powers, are curbed at this point because, as a living form, there's not that much of him left. So his ability to be twice as good as the Emperor disappeared, and now he's maybe 20% less than the Emperor. That isn't what the Emperor had in mind. He wanted this super guy, but that got derailed by Obi-Wan.

― George Lucas

[swlucasverse]

As [Luke] goes into the snow, he hallucinates and sees Ben again. It establishes that Ben is still guiding him from the Force and helping him to move forward in his quest to become a Jedi.

― George Lucas

[swlucasverse]

Mos Eisley was one of the scenes that actually prompted this whole adventure of redoing the movie. Because there were some scenes in there with the speeder - that was obviously supposed to float across the landscape - and in the Mos Eisley sequence coming up to the cantina, they never really accomplished that. And all the best they could do was to put some vaseline on the lense to kind of fudge out the wheels under the car, but it didn’t look like it was floating, it was sitting right on the ground and it was this sort of orange blob underneath it that we jokingly called the ‘Force field’. That combined with the fact that I wanted to have Mos Eisley to be more exotic and to be larger, to have spaceships and more creatures running around - more like a real city - is what really prompted a lot of this redo on the film. So, we designed a series of shots which show Mos Eisley in a much grander scale. We pulled back and see the whole city, we see a lot more beasts of burden moving around in the city, more activity and it just gives you a better sense of what Mos Eisley is.

— George Lucas

[swlucasverse]

The concept actually dates back all the way to [Episode IV: A New Hope], which drew inspirations from all sorts of genres, including westerns. When it came time to introduce the idea of a ruthless bounty hunter type for the series, it was a natural fit. He's a classic gunslinger -- mysterious and also merciless. It's been a thematic part of Star Wars since the beginning.

— George Lucas

[swlucasverse]

[The Jedi] are not like cops who catch murderers. They're warrior-monks who keep peace in the universe without resorting to violence. The Trade Federation is in dispute with Naboo, so the Jedi are ambassadors who talk to both sides and convince them to resolve their differences and not go to war.

If they have to use violence, they will, but they are diplomats at the highest level. They've got the power to send the whole force of the Republic, which is 100000 systems, so if you don't behave they can bring you up in front of the Senate. They'll cut you off at the knees, politically.

They're like peace officers.

As the situation develops in the Clone Wars they are recruited into the army, and they become generals. They're not generals. They don't kill people. They don't fight. They're supposed to be ambassadors. There are a lot of Jedi that think that the Jedi sold out, that they should never have been in the army, but it's a though call. It's one of those conundrums, of which there's a bunch of in my movies. You have to think it through. Are they going to stick by their moral rules and all be killed, which makes it irrelevant, or do they help save the Republic? They have good intentions, but they have been manipulated, which was their downfall.

— George Lucas

[swlucasverse]

The Emperor is even more powerful than Vader. He is also an agent of the Force and he's the classic devil character. Hooded, dark figure - you don't even see who he is.

— George Lucas (1977)

[swlucasverse]

We haven't really had a gunfight between Jango's ship, the Slave I, and anything else. So it was fun to use Jango's ship as a vehicle in one of these little action set pieces.

— George Lucas

[swlucasverse]

[The Jedi] is the monk idea. Wether you go to the Christian monks and the Knights Templar, or you go to the Buddhist monks and the kung fu monks, you get the warrior monk.

— George Lucas

[swlucasverse]

Although the relationship between Anakin and Palpatine doesn't really relate to [Episode II] - it's more important to the next movie - I had to set that up because it was important in the overall arc of the story.

― George Lucas

[swlucasverse]

It's only those who are trained in these special ways of the Whills that can move to the Force, give themselves up completely - their physical self up completely - and transcend into a being of the Force with their individuality intact.

— George Lucas

[swlucasverse]

Through The Empire Strikes Back, Luke is learning to be a Jedi, but it's not something that you just pick in 10 minutes. The whole idea is it's very hard to learn to be a Jedi.

A lot of people get confused about the Force. They see it as some special thing that you can find and pick up and put it on your head and suddenly you have the Force. Whereas it's always been designed so that every [living] being has the Force.

The amount of Force, which is like talent or intelligence, is different in every person. Some of it is inherited, but it's no more than a talent. It's not something you can acquire - it's something you can learn to use. I have the power to lift that cup off the table using the Force, but I can't do it unless I have been trained to do it.

— George Lucas

[swlucasverse]

George Lucas on: The Sequel Trilogy

After the Rebels won, there were no more stormtroopers in my version of the third trilogy. (...) 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. (...) 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.

— George Lucas

[swlucasverse]

It's not that they can't see the dark side coming, it's just that the dark side begins to envelop everything. It's like walking into a fog. The Jedi's ability to see lessens as the dark side grows.

— George Lucas