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 aboutShmi 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
George Lucas on Anakin’s deal with Palpatine: “Anakin got sold a bill of goods because he wanted it so bad that he’d believe anything anybody would sell him”
GEORGE LUCAS: Anakin wants to have a family. He wants to be married to Padmé and have children. When he sees in his dreams that Padmé is going to die, he doesn’t know how, but it’s preordained. He’s in love with her. He doesn’t want her to die. He wants to possess her, to control that. He keeps getting himself deeper and deeper into this pickle. He wants a family but at the same time he knows he can’t have one. Now the greed has taken over and the fear of losing his wife and baby. The whole point is you can’t possess somebody because they are their own person. You can’t dominate and make them do everything you want them to do.
PAUL DUNCAN: He had dreams about his mother as well, and he could not save her.
GEORGE LUCAS: Right. He’s walking into a death trap. And there’s no way out.
PAUL DUNCAN: Palpatine has been grooming him by saying how powerful he is.
GEORGE LUCAS: And also saying that ‘My mentor told me that there was a way that could stop death.’ Which was a lie. They can’t. Anakin got sold a bill of goods because he wanted it so bad that he’d believe anything anybody would sell him.
PAUL DUNCAN: Palpatine’s a snake oil salesman.
GEORGE LUCAS: It’s a scam. Anakin’s made a pact with the Devil: “I want the power to save somebody from death. I want to be able to stop them from going to the river Says, and I need to go to a god for that, but the gods won’t do it, so I’m going to go down to Hades and get the dark lord to allow me to have this power that will allow me to save the person I want to hang on to.” Ultimately, it’s about power. He traded his soul for power. It’s Faust. The more power he wants, the more power he gets, the more he loses. The Devil says, “You can become more powerful but you mustt pass this first test. The first test is you must kill your mother. The second test: you have to kill your wife. And the third test: you have to kill your best friend.” In the end you have all this power but you have nobody to share with, expect some wizened old man who’s even more evil than you are. If you’re going to sell your soul to save somebody you love, that’s, as we say in the film, unnatural. You have to accept the natural course of life. Death is obviously the biggest of them all. Not only death for yourself but death for the things you care about.
“This mission isn’t for Luke to go out and kill his father and get rid of him. The issue is, if he confronts his father again, he may, in defending himself, have to kill him, because his father will try to kill him.” –George Lucas
TO FURTHER CLARIFY: The reason I’m dying is because George Lucas is actually one of the first people to admit that his dialogue isn’t great. He totally pokes fun at himself about it, he totally is upfront with how he’s not an actor’s director, he says his dialogue is difficult, but that’s the kind of story he’s telling. And that he’s also upfront about how the acting style is a throwback to ‘30s and ‘40s style, which is out of step with modern audiences.
And that’s part of what I like about him, that he’s honest about what kind of story he wanted to tell. A lot of people wanted little demon child!Anakin or they wanted Young Vader, but that’s not what the story was. It was a story about a good boy who became corrupted by the strength of his power and that he loved too much in a possessive way. It’s a story about a whiny, petulant teenager. It’s a story about a character who has too many uncontrolled feelings, whose love is real but also toxic.
THAT’S IT, THAT’S THE STORY GEORGE LUCAS WAS TELLING, DIFFICULT DIALOGUE AND STYLE AND ALL.
I FOUND THE *COMPOSITE* QUOTE I FOUND IT i’ve only been searching for it for… months. idek anymore
Alan Arnold: When did you begin to write Star Wars?
George Lucas: It is difficult to pinpoint the moment when thinking about it evolved into actually putting it down on paper, but it was about 1973.
Alan Arnold: How did the characters evolve?
George Lucas: They all came out of one composite – Luke was the composite, which is another way of saying they came out of me.
Alan Arnold: You were the composite, your subconscious?
George Lucas: I was dealing with two opposites, and these are the two opposites in myself – a naive, innocent idealism and a view of the world that is cynical, more pessimistic. My starting point was the idea of an innocent who becomes cynical. Should Luke be a brash young kid, or an intellectual? Should he be a she? At one point, I was going to have a girl at the center. Luke Skywalker might never have been; he might have been an heroine. Leia came out of Luke, so to speak, just as Han did, as the opposite of Luke. Han Solo evolved from my wanting to have a cynical foil for the more innocent Luke. A lot of the characters came out of Luke because Luke had many aspects. So I took certain aspects of the composite Luke and put them into other characters.
George Lucas interview, August 23rd, 1978, in Once Upon A Galaxy: A Journal of the Making of The Empire Strikes Back, Alan Arnold (p. 222-223)
(from an interview with George Lucas re: The Phantom Menace)
I really love this interview and this moment in particular because Star Wars is the story of Anakin Skywalker, the PT is the run up to Vader and the OT is the fallout from Vader, that his story revolves around internal balance of good vs evil, obligation to fellow people, and the choices you make about your own destiny.
I keep thinking of how current canon is really underscoring that last part in particular, that Anakin’s choice to turn to the Dark Side is very much on his own shoulders.
Anakin became a Jedi Knight,“ Obi-Wan interjects, a thread of steel in his voice. “He served valiantly in the Clone Wars. His fall to darkness was more his choice than anyone else’s failure. Yes, I bear some responsibility–and perhaps you do, too–but Anakin had the training and the wisdom to choose a better path. He did not. (From a Certain Point of View – “Master and Apprentice”)
are two recent examples just off the top of my head! Anakin had a choice of many paths, he had the wisdom to choose a better one, he was specifically shown a better one by the kyber crystal, and still decided to go with the Dark Side.
But also this interview is about the obligation to your fellow man and those around you, which is why this line is such an important one from The Phantom Menace:
The problem with the GFFA is that nobody did anything to help others, that’s the central theme of the moral decay, that nobody would risk themselves to help others. Certainly, we see main characters that are helping others–TPM is all about Anakin helping the Jedi, TCW is all about the Jedi helping the entire Republic during the war, it’s about Padme trying to help fight against the decline of the Republic, even ROTS has Bail Organa trying to help the Jedi when they’re being murdered and then he and Mon Mothma founding the Rebellion to help the galaxy.
But the state of the galaxy that they’re working with, the greater atmosphere of the story (and I also touch briefly on it in this post about the propaganda book, though, that was more about the Jedi than about the corruption and moral decay of the Republic, which is what I’m talking about here) is that nobody helps each other. This is absolutely central to Anakin’s character.
The themes are about destiny, about how you might not be as satisfied if you don’t listen to what your feelings are actually telling you instead of letting your fear and selfishness consume you (quote: the entirety of Revenge of the Sith), it’s even about the role of machinery and droids in relation to being human, which no one embodies more thoroughly in those movies than Anakin Skywalker.
tl;dr: STAR WARS THEMES ARE ANAKIN SKYWALKER THEMES. STAR WARS IS THE STORY OF ANAKIN SKYWALKER.
I REALLY LOVE GEORGE A LOT. It’s interesting that the merchandising =/= the messages of the movie itself, which is something I wondered about when trying to find any references to “the Light Side of the Force” in the actual canon, rather than just in merchandising and couldn’t.
But more importantly was his answer about how he liked the toys sparking kids’ imaginations. One thing that George really does seem okay with, for all that most of us have heard that he freaked out about fanfiction back in the ‘80s or what have you, other people telling stories in his universe, that they’re separate from his story, but that they have their place. And I think a lot of that probably comes down to that he intended these movies for children and I like to think that maybe it took him awhile to come around on adjusting his thinking that a more adult world has its place just as much.
