George Lucas turned 80 recently and he is in Cannes where he honoured with a Palme d’Or for his contribution to cinema, But its Star Wars that the audience came to hear him talk about and George Lucas defends his Star Wars films vigorously and he did not hold back on did not hold back.
He first spoke about securing licensing and merchandising rights for the first film, something unheard of at the time. “The studios didn’t have licensing departments…it took longer to design a toy than it did to make a movie,” he recalled, and he got control of the sequel rights, in part because Fox at the time was teetering on bankruptcy. “They didn’t have faith in the movie,” Lucas said. “The studio was going bankrupt anyway, they had a lot of movies already and they were desperate.”
And then of course there were the prequels which he defended arguing that critics have forgotten that Star Wars was never meant to be a grown-up movie. “It was supposed to be a kid’s movie for 12-year-olds that were going through puberty, who don’t know what they’re doing, and are asking all the big questions: What should I be worried about? What’s important in life?,” he said. “And Star Wars has all those things in there.” They’re buried in there but you definitely get it, especially if you’re young.”
The criticism to those prequels, he argued, came from “critics and fans who had been 10 years old when they saw the first one” and didn’t want to watch a children’s film. The public trashing of Jar Jar Binks —one of the first figures to be canceled on the early infancy of the Internet — reminded Lucas of the original response to C3P0. “Everybody said the same thing about 3P0, that he was irritating and we should get rid of him,” said Lucas. “When I did the third one it was the Ewoks: ‘Those are little teddy bears. This is a kid’s movie, we don’t want to see a kids’ movie. I said: ‘It is a kids’ movie. It’s always been a kids’ movie.”
He then went on to defend his decision to go back and “clean up” his original trilogy, using new digital technology to make the film look the way he always wanted it to. “I’m a firm believer that the director, or the writer, or the filmmaker should have a right to have his movie be the way he wants it,” says Lucas. Fans hoping for a 4K restored version of the original 1977 Star Wars shouldn’t hold their breath. “We did release the original one on laserdisc and everybody got really mad, they said ‘It looks terrible.’ And I said ‘Yeah, I know it did,’” said Lucas. “That is what it looked like.”
George Lucas defends his Star Wars films with the sequels having sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012 (for $4.05 billion), he said that the new corporate bosses got a lot wrong.
“I was the one one who really knew what Star Wars was…who actually knew this world, because there’s a lot to it. The force, for example, nobody understood the force,” he said. “When they started other ones after I sold the company, a lot of the ideas that were in [the original] sort of got lost. But that’s the way it is. You give it up, you give it up.”
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source: Hollywood reporter
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