#LucasIsTheCanon

[grim-on-the-darkside]

George Lucas on Jedi teachings, Anakin, Love, attachments, The Jedi, the Sith, the Darkside, The Force, selfishness, Greed, selflessness, compassion and the 2 aspects of the Force [Cosmic and Living].

If he’d been trained earlier, he [Anakin] would have been fine.

The problem is not the Jedi’s teachings, the problem is that Anakin refused to take them to heart. The Dark side is objectively bad in the Star Wars universe, you must face it and train yourself away from it, “[The] only way to overcome the Dark side is through discipline. The Dark side is pleasure, biological and temporary and easy to achieve. The Light side is joy,everlasting and difficult to achieve. A great challenge. Must overcome laziness, give up quick pleasures, and overcome fear which leads to hate.“

~ George Lucas, The Clone Wars interview, 2010

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“No human can let go,” Lucas would say of [the Yoda-Anakin scene]. “It’s very hard. Ultimately, we do let go because it’s inevitable; you do die and you do lose your loved ones. But while you’re alive, you can’t be obsessed with holding on. As Yoda says in this one, ‘You must learn to let go of everything you’re afraid to let go of.’ Because holding on is in the same category and the precursor to greed. And that’s what a Sith is. A Sith is somebody that is absolutely obsessed with gaining more and more power - but for what? Nothing, except that it becomes an obsession to get more.”

   “The Jedi are trained to let go. They’re trained from birth,” he continues, “They’re not supposed to form attachments. They can love people- in fact, they should love everybody. They should love their enemies; they should love the Sith. But they can’t form attachments. So what all these movies are about is: greed. Greed is a source of pain and suffering for everybody. And the ultimate state of greed is the desire to cheat death.”

~ George Lucas, The Making of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, page 213

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"The Darkside is always there, it is experienced daily by people. It's like a huge cancer, alive, festering - both a reminder of the moral state and, at the same time symptom and symbol of a very sick society"

~ George Lucas, "The Mythology of Star Wars", Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth DVD, 2001

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"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, 2005

[This is why the Jedi in the Prequels weren’t able to detect Palpatine was the Sithlord. This also why Mace Windu says to Yoda in the Prequels "I think it is time we inform the senate that our ability to use the force has diminished." It should be noted that it was only their perception/detection/vision abilities that were diminished, not all of their powers.]

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"Everyone has the Dark side within, so there's a constant struggle to do the right thing. The good side is compassion and caring about other people, the Dark side is greed and self-centeredness."

~ George Lucas

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"People have a tendency to confuse it — everybody has the Force. Everybody. You have the good side and you have the bad side. And as Yoda says, if you choose the bad side, it’s easy because you don’t have to do anything. Maybe kill a few people, cheat, lie, steal. Lord it over everybody. But the good side is hard because you have to be compassionate. You have to give of yourself. Whereas the dark side is selfish."

~ George Lucas, 2019

https://naboonews.wordpress.com/2019/05/25/george-lucas-says-there-has-never-been-any-war-between-the-jedi-and-the-sith-in-his-canon/

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Asked about his interest in 'Good and Evil 'motiff.

"The universal question, Am I a good person. The Difference is about a compassionate person as opposed to a person consumed with self-interest, or a selfish person.

When you become greedy you do bad things to get stuff from other people. Once you get that stuff you become afraid.Once you become afraid that someone is going to take it from you than you start striking out at people. You get angry at things and you get worried and that puts you into a psychological mindset that turns you ultimately into an evil person, where you are doing horrible things to people, thinking that you're doing the right thing, but your doing it because you are afraid they are going to hurt you before you hurt them.

'The Force is just an amalgam [symbolism] of religions and their basic teachings. Killing people in the name of God is wrong, there's just no question about it.  That's absolutely opposite of what al God and Shamanism and everyone has taught us. God is Love, not God is hate."

~ George Lucas Special Interview with  Bill Bradley, American Voices, 2012

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"The film is ultimately about the Dark side and the Light side, and those sides are designed around compassion and greed. The issue of greed, of getting things and owning things and having things and not being able to let go of things, is the opposite of compassion - of not thinking of yourself all the time. These are the two sides - the good force and the bad force. They're the simplest parts of a complex cosmic construction."

~ George Lucas, Time interview (Bill Moyers) 03/05/99

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"The act of living generates a force field,an energy. That energy surrounds us; when we die, that energy joins with all the other energy. There is a giant mass of energy in the universe that has a good side and a bad side. We are part of the Force because we generate the power that makes the Force live. When we die, we become part of that Force, so we never really die; we continue as part of the Force."

~ George Lucas during a production meeting for The Empire Strikes Back

[It should be noted that when Darksiders die, they do not become part of the Force as they are the cause of imbalancing the Force. Balance in the Force is not a ratio of Dark to Light. People using the Darkside is what causes imbalance. [More on that in the future].

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"I wanted to have this mythological footing because I was basing the films on the idea that the Force has two sides, the good side, the evil side, and they both need to be there. Most religions are built on that, whether it's called yin and yang, God and the devil—everything is built on the push-pull tension created by two sides of the equation. Right from the very beginning, that was the key issue in 'Star Wars.'"

~ George Lucas, Times Magazine, 2002

[But not in the same person. Balance in the Force isn’t a ratio of Dark to Light, or about the about the Cosmic Force, only the Living Force. It’s about what’s in the hearts of men. You can’t destroy the Darkside, but you can destroy Darksiders. Darksiders are what cause imbalance. Lightsiders are incapable of causing imbalance they don’t try and defy the natural order of things [like living forever]. It’s not about a balance on a scale, it’s about the natural order of things. Lucas points this out directly in the following quote and video].

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[This is from a staff meeting on TCWs when they were working on the Mortis Arc]

"The core of the Force....you've got the Lightside and the Darkside, one is selfless, one is selfish, and you want to keep them in balance. What happens when you go to the Darkside, It goes out of balance."

"..What happens when you go to the dark side is it goes out of balance and you get really selfish and you forget about everybody ... because when you get selfish you get stuff, or you want stuff, and when you want stuff and you get stuff then you are afraid somebody is going to take it away from you ... once you become afraid that somebody's going to take it away from you or you're gonna lose it, then you start to become angry, especially if you're losing it, and that anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering."

~ George Lucas, 2010 video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiImoO5QkcA - [50 second mark]

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"The Force has two sides - [Light and Dark]. It is not an inherently malevolent or a benevolent thing. It has a bad side to it, involving hate and fear, and it has a good side, involving love, charity, fairness and hope."

~ George Lucas

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DR: The final Star Wars film is called Revenge of the Sith. Now most people know what a Jedi is, but won't have a clue what a Sith is. What is it? GL: The Sith are people who are very self-centred and selfish. There used to be many Sith, but because they were corrupted by power and ambition, they killed each other off, so now there are only two - a master and an apprentice. Sith rely on their passion to get things done. They use their raw emotion, their hatred, their anger, their bitterness - which is the dark side of the Force. The Force is what binds the galaxy together, and it has a good side and a bad side.

The Sith learned how to manipulate both sides of the Force, and then they fell into the trap of being corrupted by the dark side.

[This is why there has never been ‘Grey Jedi’ idiots in canon. It’s an impossible state of being. You can’t be good and evil, selfish and selfless, compassionate and greedy at the same time.]

The Jedi Knights are like marshals in the Wild West. It's their job to make sure everyone is protected, to bring peace. They are the enemy of the Sith, because the Sith want to dominate the galaxy, to control everything, and for a thousand years they have had a plot against the Jedi. So, in this movie, it is time for them to seek revenge against the Jedi for perceived injustices and to carry out that plot. "

~ George Lucas, Sci-Fi Online interview, 2005ish

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"One of the themes throughout the films is that the Sith Lords, when they started out thousands of years ago, embraced the Dark Side. They were greedy and self-centered and they all wanted to take over, so they killed each other."

~ George Lucas

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"George Lucas says there has never been any war between the Jedi and the Sith in his Star Wars Canon" - An excerpt from StarWars.com‘s oral history of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace:

Everybody said, “Oh, well, there was a war between the Jedi and the Sith.”  Well, that never happened. That’s just made up by fans or somebody. What  really happened is, the Sith ruled the universe for a while, 2000 years ago.  Each Sith has an apprentice, but the problem was, each Sith Lord got to be  powerful. And the Sith Lords would try to kill each other because they all  wanted to be the most powerful. So in the end they killed each other off, and  there wasn’t anything left.

"But anyway, there’s a whole matrix of backstory that has never really come  out. It’s really just history that I gathered up along the way. It’s all based on backstories that I’d written setting up what the Jedi were, setting up what the Sith were, setting up what the Empire was, setting up what the Republic was, and how it all fit together I never really got a chance to explain the Whills part."

‘George Lucas’ vision of the galaxy’s ancient times is clearly different from the Expanded Universe. Many wars between Jedi and Sith in the Old Republic era were told in games, books and comics. The current Lucasfilm’s canon didn’t explore this era yet.'

https://naboonews.wordpress.com/2019/05/25/george-lucas-says-there-has-never-been-any-war-between-the-jedi-and-the-sith-in-his-canon/

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George Lucas on Revenge of the Sith

‘Just before the title reveal in San Diego, starwars.com had a chance to talk to George Lucas about the title and pose the question on the minds of many not in the know: just who are the Sith?’

“The Sith are the arch-enemies of the Jedi, George Lucas explained, and for a long time, they ruled the universe until the Jedi came a long and got rid of them. The Sith characters in the previous Star Wars films were Darth Vader and the other apprentices Darth Maul from Episode 1 and Count Dooku or Darth Tyrannus, from Episode 2, and the soon to-be released Episode 3. The evil master Sith in all of the films is Darth Sidious, who becomes Emperor of the Universe.”

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George Lucas on the bottom line of Star Wars.

"The secret, ultimately, which is the bottom line in Star Wars and the other movies us there are two kinds of people in the world, compassionate people and selfish people. The selfish people live on the Darkside. The compassionate people live on the Lightside.

"If you go to the side of the Light you will be happy because of compassion, helping other people, not thinking about yourself, thinking about others, that gives you a joy that you can't get any other way.

Being selfish, following your pleasures, always entertaining yourself with pleasure, and buying stuff and doing stuff, you're always going to be unhappy. You'll never get to the point. You'll get this little shot of pleasure but it goes away and than you're stuck where you were before and the more you do it, the worse it gets. You finally get everything you want and you're miserable because there's nothing at the end of that road.

Whereas if you are compassionate and you get to the end of the road you've helped so many people."

https://youtu.be/RElw0dhBsOI

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"This is obviously a very pivotal scene for Anakin because this is reuniting with his mother and his youth and at the same time dealing with his inability to let go of his emotions and allow himself to accept the inevitable. The fact that everything must change and that things come and go through his life and that he can't hold onto things which is a basic Jedi philosophy that he isn't willing to accept emotionally and the reason that is because he was raised by his mother rather than the Jedi. If he'd have been taken in his first year and started to study to be a Jedi, he wouldn't have this particular connection as strong as it is and he'd have been trained to love people but not to become attached to them. But he has become attached to his mother and he will become attached to Padme and these things are, for a Jedi, who needs to have a clear mind and not be influenced by threats to their attachments, a dangerous situation. And it feeds into fear of losing things, which feeds into greed, wanting to keep things, wanting to keep his possessions and things that he should be letting go of. His fear of losing her turns to anger at losing her, which ultimately turns to revenge in wiping out the village. The scene with the Tusken Raiders is the first scene that ultimately takes him on the road to the Dark Side. I mean he's been prepping for this, but that's the one where he's sort of doing something that is completely inappropriate."

~ George Lucas, DVD extras, 2005[?]

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"The scene in the garage here, we begin to see that what he's [Anakin] really upset about is the fact that he's not powerful enough. That if he had more power, he could've kept his mother. He could've saved her and she could've been in his life. That relationship could've stayed there if he'd have been just powerful enough. He's greedy in that he wants to keep his mother around, he's greedy in that he wants to become more powerful in order to control things in order to keep the things around that he wants. There's a lot of connections here with the beginning of him sliding into the Dark Side. And it also shows his jealousy and anger at Obi-Wan and blaming everyone else for his inability to be as powerful as he wants to be, which he hears that he will be, so here he sort of lays out his ambition and you'll see later on his ambition and his dialogue here is the same as Dooku's. He says "I will become more powerful than every Jedi." And you'll hear later on Dooku will say "I have become more powerful than any Jedi." So you're going start to see everybody saying the same thing. And Dooku is kind of the fallen Jedi who was converted to the Dark Side because the other Sith Lord didn't have time to start from scratch, and so we can see that that's where this is going to lead which is that it is possible for a Jedi to be converted. It is possible for a Jedi to want to become more powerful, and control things. Because of that, and because he was unwilling to let go of his mother, because he was so attached to her, he committed this terrible revenge on the Tusken Raiders."

-- George Lucas, DVD extras, 2005[?]

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"He turns into Darth Vader because he gets attached to things. He can't let goof his mother, he can't let go of his girlfriend. He can't let go of things.It makes him greedy. And when you are greedy, you are on the path to the Darkside, because you fear you're going to lose things, that you're not going to have the power you need."

~ George Lucas, Time Magazine, 2002

[To all those ‘Jedi are Bad’/Anakin fell to the Darkside because of the Jedi Council were so mean to him and not understanding him or letting him have a relationship idiots out there....]

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"It's fear of losing somebody he [Anakin] loves, which is the flipside of of greed. Greed, in terms of the Emperor, it is the greed for power, absolute power, over everything. With Anakin, really it's the power to save the one he loves, but is basically going against the Fates and what is natural."

~ George Lucas, Revenge of the Sith commentary.

You tell em George!

=]

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"Anakin is the Chosen One, and even when Anakin becomes Darth Vader he is still the Chosen one. The Prophecy is that Anakin will bring balance to the force and destroy the Sith. He becomes Darth Vader. Darth Vader does become the hero. Darth Vader does destroy the Sith, meaning himself and the Emperor. He does it, because he is redeemed by his son.”

So the prophecy is true and by doing that he redeems himself and goes from being Darth Vader back to Anakin Skywalker.

Everybody thought of Darth Vader as this big evil guy, that he had no heart, that he was just evil. But in the end it's not that at all. Here's a guy who's lost everything."

George Lucas, The Making Of Revenge Of The Sith; 2005

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"It took a very long time, but Anakin finally fulfills the prophecy that he will destroy the Sith and brought balance to the Force." ~ George Lucas interview

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"Fathered by the force Anakin was the most powerful Jedi/Sith to ever live,his greatest weakness had always been his emotions to which Palpatine took advantage of." Anakin never reached his Light/Dark side potential, he was called the "Force Messiah"

~ George Lucas, 2010

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CHUNG: Well, what about the message there? What are you telling us?

"The message is you can't possess things. You can't hold on to them. You have to accept change. You have to accept the fact that things transition. And so, as you try to hold on to things or you become afraid of -- that you're going to lose things, then you begin to crave the power to control those things. And then, you start to become greedy and then you turn into a bad person."

~ George Lucas Interview, 1997

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"...Knowing that the film was made for a young audience, I was trying to say, in a simple way, that there is a God and that there is both a good side and a bad side. You have a choice between them, but the world works better if you're on the good side."

~ George Lucas

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“Friendships, honestly, trust, doing the right thing, living on the right side and avoiding the Dark side,” Lucas said. “Those are the things it was meant to do.” ~ Lucas on Star Wars and what its about, 2017 https://www.polygon.com/2017/4/13/15288998/george-lucas-star-wars-celebration

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"The Force itself is split into two sides: the living Force and a greater, cosmic Force. The living Force makes you sensitive to other living things,makes you intuitive, and allows you to read other people's minds, et cetera.But the greater Force has to do with destiny. In working with the Force, you can find your destiny and you can choose to either follow it, or not."

~ George Lucas

[Another example of the Expanded Universe never having been canon. It went against his vision of Star Wars. There were only two aspects of the Force, not four. ]

”The novels and comic books are other authors' interpretations of my creation. Sometimes, I tell them what they can and cant do, but I just don't have the time to read them. They're not my vision of what Star Wars is."

~ George Lucas 2004

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Speaking on the Jedi

"You're allowed to love people, you are not allowed to possess them."

~ George Lucas, 2010 -  2:45 mark

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiImoO5QkcA

[Jedi are not emotionless or vulcans. You can’t be compassionate without empathy and emotions.]

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"Jedi Knights aren't celibate - the thing that is forbidden is attachments -and possessive relationships."

~ George Lucas, BBC News,  May 15, 2002

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[grim-on-the-darkside]

The Latest Information on Lucas’s Sequel Trilogy he wrote in 2011. Also some information from  Star Wars Archives: Episodes I-III: 1999–2005, author Paul Duncan interviewed George Lucas his ideas of a Sequel Trilogy.

Firstly, some of the things Pablo Hidalgo has stated about Lucas’s sequel trilogy that he has access to and spoke to Lucas directly about.

We know Lucas never considered the EU canon or a part of his Star Wars universe so it is not surprising his Sequel Trilogy was of his own creation.

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"Fast forward to 2012, when we hear George is looking to make SW movies again, I though I thought 'I wonder what next Mon Calamari's gonna be. And it turns out, the Mon Calamari this time was huge swaths of the EU. There was no Jacen, no Jaina. No new Jedi Order. Chewie lived. Not surprising, but there it was."

~ Pablo Hidalgo, 2016               

https://ibb.co/nmjWcBM

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[Regarding Lucas Sequel Trilogy Treatments he wrote in 2011 and sold to Disney]

Comment - "What are you talking about? J.J. threw out His story treatments and he [George Lucas] has no imput at all anymore."

Pablo Hidalgo Response - "Not entirely true. But the treatments as they were pretty much disregarded the EU, which was to be expected.”

~ 2018

https://ibb.co/Dz7qhTB

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Commentor - 'Thank You for the clarification, might I ask if you ever recieved any direction that George Lucas with the number of children the Solos had as depicted in the EU?'

Pablo Hidalgo - "All I meant is his starting point for this Trilogy didn't have Jacen, Jaina, and/or Anakin."

Commentor - 'Was there Ben Skywalker?'

Pablo Hidalgo - "There was not."

https://ibb.co/JH2Y8tg

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Question -  "My question is, *what did George's treatments for 7 look like? I would love to see if they fit the EU."

Answer [Pablo Hidalgo]- "They did not. For instance, there was no Jaina, Jacen, or Anakin."  ~ 2017                                                                       

https://ibb.co/N7HKCsF

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Pablo Hidalgo - "Jacen and Jaina never existed in George's storytelling, even in treatment form."

Comment Response - "And about Mara Jade?"

Pablo Hidalgo - "No. George never thought of Mara as being part of his universe either."

~ 2016 https://ibb.co/YLHk6Ft

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From Star Wars Insider

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"There was no Ben Skywalker in George's Universe. He came from the NJO team." ~ Pablo Hidalgo 2016

https://ibb.co/HDtXh6D

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"Question from Today, but I thought this was pretty well known. George Lucas never considered Jacen, Jaina, or Mara Jade as part of his universe."

~ Pablo Hidalgo May 2016 https://ibb.co/VDX2qvY

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"But anyway Luke in exile predates TLJ by a long time and came from someone who can very happily and rightly supersede anyone's feedback :)"

~ Pablo Hidalgo https://ibb.co/sKZnWKk

[Luke was in something of a self imposed exile on an Island in Lucas Sequel Trilogy which is something that Disney ripped off from Lucas’s Sequel Trilogy. Pablo is referring to Lucas in this quote.]

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"Luke was training a new generation of Jedi, it all went wrong because of 1 boy, and he's the 'Jedi killer' - that's the source.”

~ Pablo Hidalgo, 2016 https://ibb.co/JjYtGtf

[The source being George Lucas sequel trilogy treatments he made in 2011 and ended up selling to Disney later. Something else Disney ripped off from Lucas’s Sequel trilogy.] ..

Pablo Hidalgo -   "George's starting point for 7 had no Jaina, Jacen, Anakin and Chewie never died. So yeah."

[Reply] - "Could we please send this to every EU purist we know?"

[Other replyer] "They wont care."

[First Replyer] "They will after what Hidalgo just said after this."

[Pablo Hidalgo] - "No, they won't. You can't correct the internet.The info's out there. They've made up their minds."

https://ibb.co/mXGX0Qn

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Pablo Hidalgo - "But there was no sequel trilogy at that time."

Commenter 1 -

'Also, Lucas' Treatment of EP VII did not have the twins born in the Thrawn Trilogy'.

Pablo Hidalgo - "It didn't have twins."

Commenter 2 -

'You're referring to the treatment Lucas sold Disney in 2012. I guess plans changed.'

Pablo Hidalgo - "Or were defined. Jacen and Jaina were never part of George's story. They were Tim's [Zahn] invention."

~ Pablo Hidalgo Q&A

https://ibb.co/VQ5Zrr0

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Here’s what George said about them during an interview with James Cameron for his The Story of Science Fiction project.

“Back in the day, I used to say ultimately what this means is we’re just cars, vehicles, for the Whills to travel around in…. We’re vessels for them. And the conduit is the midi-chlorians. The midi-chlorians are the ones that communicate with the Whills. The Whills, in a general sense, they are the Force.

All the way back to — with the Jedi and the Force and everything — the whole concept of how things happen was laid out completely from [the beginning] to the end. But I never got to finish. I never got to tell people about it.

If I’d held onto the company I could have done it, and then it would have been done. Of course, a lot of the fans would have hated it, just like they did Phantom Menace and everything, but at least the whole story from beginning to end would be told.”

~ George Lucas

https://www.indiewire.com/2018/06/george-lucas-episode-vii-episode-ix-1201974276/

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As part of the book Star Wars Archives: Episodes I-III: 1999–2005, author Paul Duncan interviewed George Lucas. During this interview, George talked more about his plans for the sequel trilogy.

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. [There was only one, Ben Solo, another Disney rip off.]

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 [The only thing from the EU in Lucas’s Trilogy, but it wasn’t even really her, just had the same look and name, completely different background. She wasn’t even born yet at that time frame in the comics]., 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.”

George also expanded on Midi-chlorians:

“This is the cosmology. The Force is the energy, the fuel, and without it everything would fall apart. The Force is a metaphor for God, and God is essentially unknowable. But behind it is another metaphor, which fits so well into the movie that I couldn’t resist it.

Midi-chlorians are the equivalent of mitochondria in living organisms and photosynthesis in plants — I simply combined them for easier consumption by the viewer. Mitochondria create the chemical energy that turns one cell into two cells.

I like to think that there is a unified reality to life and that it exists everywhere in the universe and that it controls things, but you can also control it. That’s why I split it into the Personal Force and the Cosmic Force. The Personal Force is the energy field created by our cells interacting and doing things while we are alive. When we die, we lose our persona and our energy is assimilated into the Cosmic Force.

If we have enough Midi-chlorians in our body, we can have a certain amount of control over our Personal Force and learn how to use it, like the Buddhist practive of being able to walk on hot coals.”

And the Whills:

“The Whills are a microscopic, single-celled lifeform like amoeba, fungi, and bacteria. There’s something like 100,000 times more Whills than there are Midi-chlorians, and there are about 10,000 times more Midi-chlorians than there are human cells.

The only microscopic entities that can go into the human cells are the Midi-chlorians. They are born in the cells. The Midi-chlorians provide the energy for human cells to split and create life. The Whills are single-celled animals that feed on the Force. The more of the Force there is, the better off they are. So they have a very intense symbiotic relationship with the Midi-chlorians and the Midi-chlorians effectively work for the Whills.

It is estimated that we have 100 trillion microbes in our body and we are made up of about 90% bacteria and 10% human cells. So who is in service to whom? I know this is the kind of thing that fans just go berserk over because they say, “We want it to be mysterious and magical”, and “You’re just doing science.” Well, this isn’t science.

This is just as mythological as anything else in Star Wars. It sounds more scientific, but it’s a fiction.

It’s saying there is a big symbiotic relationship to create life, and to create the Force, but if you look at all the life-forms in the universe, most of them are one-celled organisms. I think of one-celled organisms as an advanced form of life because they’ve been able to travel through the universe. They have their own spaceships — those meteorites that we get every once in a while. They’ve been living on those things for thousands of years, they’ve been frozen, unfrozen, and can survive almost anything.

The one-celled organisms have to have a balance. You have to have good ones and bad ones otherwise it would extinguish life. And if they go out of balance, the dark side takes over.”

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Obviously there is the older information that’s already been out there, I just wanted to share some of the newer information that has come to light. I’m sure in time we will learn more.

[grim-on-the-darkside]

Why Anakin Skywalker fell to the Darkside. ~ George Lucas interview, 2021

“Alot of it [Star Wars] has to do with overcoming fear. Also, the movies, the thing with Anakin, he started out a great kid, he was very compassionate, and so the issue was how did he turn bad. How did he go to the Darkside? He went to the Darkside, Jedi aren't suppose to have attachments.They can love people, they can do that, but they can't attach, that's the problem in the world of fear. Once you are attached to something than you become afraid of losing it. And when you become afraid of losing it, than you turn to the Darkside, and you want to hold onto it, and that was Anakin's issue ultimately, that he wanted to hold onto his wife who he knew, he had a premonition that she was going to die, he didn't know how to stop it, so he went to the Darkside to find, in mythology you do to hades,and you talk to the devil, and the devil says 'this is what you do' and basically you sell your soul to the devil. When you do that, and you're afraid and you're on the Darkside and you fall off the golden path of compassion because you are greedy, you want to hold on to something that you love and he didn't do the right thing and as a result he turned bad."

~ George Lucas Interview with wife Mellody Hobson - Virtual Speaker series, 2021

[grim-on-the-darkside]

Dave Filoni on the Sith, The Darkside and George Lucas's decision to bring back Darth Maul after being cut in half in The Phantom Menace in The Clone Wars series and how it plays into central themes created by Lucas in Star Wars.

“What you have to understand about the Sith, ultimately,” Filoni said, “[is] they thrive on hatred, they thrive on fear, they thrive on anger. They don’t see an existence in life beyond death. There is nothing for them [after death]. Their power is bound to the physical; they live in the now. They think if they die, that’s it, they’re over, and they’re right, because they’ve given everything to evil. They’re not selfless. If you’re selfless, and you lead a good life, then you can go beyond and become apart of the Force…Ultimately, Darth Maul, by holding onto his anger, he tortures himself into something unnatural—and that’s what Palpatine talks about to Anakin in Revenge of the Sith. So it’s an unnatural thing for him to have kept himself alive, and he’s a twisted thing and he’s a tortured thing.” Filoni went further, showing the connections Maul’s survival has with the overall themes of the Star Wars saga. “That’s the difference between good and evil. It’s selfishness versus selflessness. Hold onto that, and pretty much everything in Star Wars makes sense. Luke can’t kill Darth Vader; he has to be selfless and love his father, above all things, and throw away his weapon. If he does that, then and only then, will he defeat the Emperor. If he tries to kill the Emperor, then he’s just the Emperor himself.”

Ultimately, Filoni sees the return of Maul as one of the hallmarks of The Clone Wars and Star Wars in general, as it was George Lucas himself who made the decision to bring the Sith Lord back. “George has a great sensibility for where we need to go with the story, and he’s always challenging us to do new things,” he said. “And that’s something that I think is good to challenge you guys with, anytime [we] tell a story: try to do new things and things that haven’t been done. And frankly, a guy that’s been cut in half, thrown down an exhaust port shaft…never seen [someone killed that way] come back to life before. So we did it.”

Secrets Revealed at Special Fan Screening of The Clone Wars September, 2012 https://www.starwars.com/news/secrets-revealed-at-special-fan-screening-of-the-clone-wars

...

"The core of the Force....you've got the Lightside and the Darkside, one is selfless, one is selfish, and you want to keep them in balance. What happens when you go to the Darkside, It goes out of balance."

~ George Lucas, Staff meeting of The Clone Wars series about the Mortis Arc, 2010 video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiImoO5QkcA