I’m continuing on my quest to find interviews with Lucas so I can chew on what the creator of Star Wars has said about his universe, and boy there are so many interesting gems that I never see fandom talk about. These are from a 1999 interview with Bill Moyers:
BILL MOYERS: Are you going to be prepared for that
moment when your daughter says-~your older daughter is about to go off
already and — and say, ‘This is the way I want to go, Dad.’GEORGE LUCAS: I think there is a point where, even
though you love your children a great deal, you must let go, which is
actually what “The Phantom Menace” is about.BILL MOYERS: “The Phantom Menace” is about letting go?
GEORGE LUCAS: It’s about letting go.
BILL MOYERS: In what sense?
GEORGE LUCAS: In the sense that you have this young
boy, who’s 10 years old, who has to leave his mother and go off on his
own and the mother has to let him go because otherwise he would be a
slave the rest of his life.This is FASCINATING to me because fandom likes to squabble over Anakin and Qui-Gon, and fandom especially likes to get mad over Shmi “getting left behind”, but this scene was actually about Shmi letting go of Anakin. It’s about Shmi letting go of Anakin so that he can live a better life. A parent letting go of their child. Her staying behind is crucial to the message Lucas was trying to send.
GEORGE LUCAS: I make these films for myself more than I make them for anybody else.
I mean, I’m lucky that the things I believe in, and the things that I
enjoy and the things that entertain me entertain a large population.
Sometimes they don’t. I mean, I’ve made a bunch of movies that nobody’s
liked so that doesn’t always hold true. But I certainly wasn’t out to
become successful, it — it happened.BILL MOYERS: You are financing your own movies.
GEORGE LUCAS: I’m financing my own movies and it
allows me the freedom to have my own — my own vision be accurately
portrayed on the screen, and I will, you know, be successful or
unsuccessful based on how people relate to that vision. But I don’t have
a lot of other people coming and telling me really what to do.(bold added by me)
This is one of the reasons I personally like the first 6 movies better than the rest of the content floating around. They tell the story that Lucas wanted to tell. Anything made by other folks is going to have different intentions and different biases and different worldviews that aren’t necessarily going to line up with Lucas.’
There are more gems in here, but I’ll leave this at just the two for now xD