After selling Lucasfilm to Disney and entering semi-retirement in October 2012, George Lucas stepped back from the public eye to focus on the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum, which celebrates popular art of the last 150 years. But when Empire readers voted The Empire Strikes Back as The Greatest Movie Of All Time back in 2014, Lucas was delighted to take a rare step back into the limelight to talk exclusively to Empire about all things Episode V. “It’s a privilege to be honoured by your magazine,” he begins. “We’ve grown up together.”
When you think about The Empire Strikes Back as a movie, what do you think of?
I think it’s soulful, but in a different way from Episode IV. It’s a little bit more adult. As a director, I’m more of a goofy director. If you take American Graffiti and Star Wars, you’ll see what people used to call “effervescent giddiness”, which is just the way I am. Star Wars skews slightly younger than you’d expect. It was a film for 12-year-olds. I expected it would play for everybody. Empire’s like that but a bit of the goofiness has been shaved off it. (Director Irvin) Kershner was much more of a serious person. He loved the whole religious aspect of it, Luke learning the Force. A lot of that has to do with Buddhism, and Kersh was a Buddhist. We were able to keep some of the goofiness but not as much as if I were doing it by myself.
Why do you think it is so beloved?
Well, it’s relative. All the films are beloved by somebody. The fans like The Empire Strikes Back the best, partly because it is so dark. It’s an overall story and as it happens in the second act, things get dark. I never really planned it to be three separate films but when it became three separate films, it had an interesting effect of each film having its own personality, caused by the plot.
Did you have concerns about how dark it was going to get?
I wasn’t too worried. I found it interesting to do it. The part I had the most difficulty with was the father cutting off his son’s hand and then leaving it that way without resolving it. It’s symbolic but it’s very real. In mythology, it’s a key psychological motif between the father and the son: the son feeling that the father has got a bigger dick. I was worried if that would have any effect on people. I took it to a number of psychologists and they all agreed it wouldn’t have any effect. If kids were bothered by it — particularly boys’ relationships to their father — they would just think Vader was lying and would resolve it themselves. As it turned out, that’s what happened.
Can you imagine trying to keep the Vader/Luke reveal secret today?
No. It was pretty remarkable we pulled it off then. It was without the internet but it was still extremely intense in terms of the fans. Literally, I didn’t tell anybody. Even the producer didn’t know. It wasn’t until James Earl Jones came on during the finishing of the movie that it was revealed what he was actually saying there. We expected it to leak then but it didn’t. It made it through the sound mix where the group widened. Then, everybody came out of the first screening and said, “HE’S HIS FATHER!” Personally, I think it was one of the last real reveals. Now you can’t do it.
In mythology, it’s a key psychological motif between the father and the son: the son feeling that the father has got a bigger dick!
You also left Han Solo, debatably the most popular character, in limbo...
Harrison kept yelling through the whole thing, “Kill me! Kill me! Kill me!” I said, “Harrison I can’t kill you, I need you at the end of the next movie. There’s this love story thing going on. But I’ll do the next best thing. I’ll put you in a slab of concrete and ship you off to Mars.”
Empire****’s narrative shape is unusual in that its battle occurs early. Did that worry you?
That was a big deal. I was playing with the norm and I was hoping I could get away with it. I just decided I could deal with it emotionally. There’s a big swordfight at the end. That’s a sort of big action scene. It just doesn’t compare with the Death Star. So I said, “I’m going for an emotional battle that is more personal and that will be the climax of the movie.” Now, everybody does a big action scene, they don’t even think about it anymore. I was telling a story, I wasn’t just making an action movie. That’s the way the story went and that’s the way I let it go.
The other big risk you took was to put a Muppet at the centre of the movie...
The tradition in fairy tales and mythology is that there is always a little mystical creature that the hero comes across who is actually a great wizard and very powerful. I liked the idea of it being somebody you would never guess to be a Jedi. I wanted to do a really small character but I wanted him to look like he could actually be a real creature. Nobody had really done that before. That whole area of technology hadn’t advanced. Jim Henson had done most of it and had the real talent available to make that into a character. It’s really the actors who do it, it’s not really the puppet. Between Stuart Freeborn, Frank Oz and Jim, we were able to kludge that thing together. I said, “If this doesn’t work, the movie is going to fail. It’s that simple.”
It’s magical on film. Was it magical on set?
Uh, no. There was nothing magical on the set, especially on those movies.
Do you understand the cult around Boba Fett?
Yeah. He’s cool. The fun of it is, you find those little incidental characters and then if people are really attracted to them, they can take off. It’s basically what Marvel does. Let’s face it: Boba Fett is sort of the same character as Iron Man. It’s just that he doesn’t have such an articulate suit. We didn’t go into the kind of detail that Iron Man goes into because we didn’t have to.
Many Empire alumni call it the toughest shoot of their careers. How do you view it?
In the beginning, I said, “Okay, I’ll let them make the movie and I’m not going to be there pressuring them.” I knew if I were on the set, it would be a whole different thing. I let them go, but unfortunately Norway (doubling for Hoth) was supposed to be a ten-day shoot and went way over budget, way over schedule. When they came back to England, I sort of moved in with them and realised I had to be there every day. Kershner was very nervous and worried about the whole thing. I kept trying to say, “It’s okay, don’t worry, just focus on the day-to-day reality.” Kershner fortunately bought into what the story was, what was going on. He was very good about collaborating. So I took over the burden of the special effects and let him worry about the actors and the story.
Let’s face it: Boba Fett is sort of the same character as Iron Man. It’s just that he doesn’t have such an articulate suit.
And you famously financed the movie yourself.
The reality of it was that it was going way over schedule, way over budget. I was in hock up to my ears to pay for it. Then the bank cancelled the loan and I was stuck halfway through the movie. I didn’t have any money and I had run out of everything. Fortunately we were able to get another loan from another bank but it was under extreme duress. We were getting to the point where we were going to have to skip the weekly pay for the crew and say, “We’re going to have to give it to you next week.” We just barely got this second loan in place. And then they went over budget again.
How did that feel?
It was pretty bleak (laughs). There was no guarantee it was going to work. I had just done More American Graffiti, which tanked. Empire’s cameraman was a brilliant cameraman but he took a long time to light it. The first Star Wars was a really low-budget movie — $13 million — and we shot it practically overnight. The second one cost three times that much and took a lot longer to shoot. I thought it would still be low-budget but it didn’t turn out that way. Fortunately it was successful and I got my money back.
Empire had the fewest changes for the Special Editions. Did it hold up the best?
Empire had the less obvious things. In the early ones, we could never get a matte in the snow. It was technically impossible. Because [now] we were doing it digitally, we were able to make it without matte lines. There are those who say, “I like the matte lines.” It took us 24 hours a day for years to get rid of those matte lines. There was more work done on Empire than on Episode IV.
The Episode IV Special Edition famously features Greedo shooting first...
If I’d known what a big crazy thing it would be, I would have just left it alone. The people who like to think of Han as a cold- blooded murderer, they have their version. The idea was this guy is not a cold-blooded murderer, he is a scoundrel — that’s different from being a murderer. I still don’t think many people now can tell the difference. They don’t know who shot first.
Why did it become such a big thing?
Because the fans have a modern morality which is, killing people is okay. The film is kind of old-fashioned. It’s from the ’30s and ’40s, where the good guys don’t kill people in cold blood. It was basically the same problem with Indiana Jones and the sword fight. When I saw it I thought, “This is great,” but it makes him an immoral jerk. Why would you shoot someone if you’ve got a gun and they’ve got a sword? But that’s my morality getting in the middle of it all. The films are for young children. I think about things like that.
How do you feel about the Star Wars saga now you have handed it on?
I love the Star Wars films. I’m glad I made them. They were designed to inspire kids to think outside the box. They did make a difference, which I see every day. I see it in everything from astronauts to filmmakers. When we were doing those films, everybody told me, “You can’t do a lightsaber because the laser light would go on forever.” Now a couple of kids spent a couple of years at MIT and they built a lightsaber where the laser stops. I’m not sure what use it is, but it was a major breakthrough in physics. It’s interesting the films are still being talked about. I expect they will go through the next few films and go, “Let’s go back to those old films that our grandfathers talked about.”
Want More?Read our complete behind-the-scenes story covering the making of The Empire Strikes Back.