StarWars hit theaters 43 years ago today. Look back at our 1977 interview with George Lucas
Yeah, but there aren’t any. There’s nothing but cop movies, and a few films likeRay Harryhausen films, but there isn’t anything that you can really dig your teeth into. I realized a more destructive element in the culture would be a whole generation of kids growing up without that thing, because I had also done a study on, I don’t know what you call it, I call it the fairy tale or the myth.
I got rid of some people here and there but it is a very frustrating and an unhappy experience doing that. I realized why directors are such horrible people – in a way – because you want things to be right, and people will just not listen to you and there is no time to be nice to people, no time to be delicate.
Well, for one thing, by the time we got back to California I wasn’t happy with the lighting on the picture. I’m a cameraman, and I like a slightly more extreme, eccentric style than I got in the movie. It was all right, it was a very difficult movie, there were big sets to light, it was a very big problem. The robots never worked. We faked the whole thing and a lot of it was done editorially.
That’s in the earlier scripts. I had actually written four different plots and different stories with different characters, and they involved different environments. In one of the scripts there is a Wookiee planet. It’s a jungle planet and there was a whole sequence where the Empire had a little outpost on the Wookiee planet and Luke [Sky-walker] gets involved with the Wookies and he fights the head Wookiee.
Well, the droids were there to serve. Obviously droids are servants of man. They do as they are commanded and all that kind of stuff but at the same time I love droids, they’re my favorite people. I didn’t want them to be cold robots. Even the robots inI really wanted to get into the robots and their problems in life; a little equal time for robots, who have taken a lot of shit over the years and have never really had a chance to prove themselves.Right.
I was quite happy to see Vader spinning off into deep space at the end, but not dying. The only thing missing was a title on the screen saying, “To be continued soon at a theater near you”.THX Which takes us back to this period of the last few months before release. The editorial thing that you were mentioning earlier, pulling things together by sleight of hand. What was it like leading up to the actual opening night? I heard that you were looping and cutting up to the last minute.
I expected to get trounced on everything. Especially in the end when it came down to the score, which was romantic and dramatic. Not only a slightly corny dialogue here and a very simplistic, sort of corny plot…There is some very strong stuff in there. In the end, when you know better, it sort of takes a lot of guts to do it because it’s the same thing with the whole movie – doing a children’s film. I didn’t want to play it down and make it a camp movie, I wanted to make it a very good movie.
Yes, it was one of the original ideas of doing a sequel that if I put enough people in it and it was designed carefully enough I could make a sequel aboutOr if any of the actors gave me a lot of trouble or didn’t want to do it, or didn’t want to be in the sequel, I could always make a sequel without one.Yes. All the actors except Alec Guinness. We may use his voice as The Force – I don’t know. One of the sequels we are thinking of is the young days of Ben Kenobi.
The Dia-noga was originally supposed to be a giant, sort of filmy, clear, transparent jellyfish kind of thing that came shooting out of the water, with all these jellylike tentacles with little veins running through them. So first the special-effects people came up with this giant 8-foot-high, 12-foot-wide brown turd that was bigger than the set, and that just didn’t work. We finally got it down to where it was just one tentacle. That was all they could really accomplish.
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