George Lucas Interview With Leonard Molten
PART 1 - STAR WARS
HELLO, I'M LEONARD MOLTEN.
STAR WARS MAY HAVE STARTED OUT AS A MERE MOVIE BUT IT BECAME A
PHENOMENA. IT CHANGED THE WAY THE MOVIES WERE MADE, PERCEIVED, AND
MARKETED. IT USHERED IN A NEW ERA OF SCIENCE-FICTION AND FANTASY AND
DEVELOPED A WHOLE NEW VOCABULARY OF VISUAL SPECIAL EFFECTS AND THE
MAN WHO CREATED THE FILM, WHO IMAGINED IT AND THEN REALISED IT IS HERE
WITH US TODAY TO SHARE SOME OF HIS MEMORIES - GEORGE LUCAS.
GEORGE, IF I ASKED YOU TO SUM UP YOUR FEELING TODAY LOOKING BACK AT
THE WHOLE STAR WARS EXPERIENCE, IF I ASKED YOU TO SUM THAT UP IN ONE
WORD, WHAT WORD FIRST COMES TO MIND?
If there is anything the star wars experience has been for me, it's unpredictable. Not
only in the making of the movies and in creating the stories in the first place, which is the fun
of it, because you don't know where it is going to go and the making of them where the huge
adventure, but the success and all the stuff that have come after it and everything is just, you
have no idea what's going to happen next.
LET'S GO ALL THE WAY BACK TO THE BEGINNING, WHAT WAS THE BEGINNING?
I would say the original impetus for the whole thing was I used to watch a serial on
television called "Adventurer Theatre" and they had "Flash Gorden conquers the universe"
on it, and I used to love that. So I went off and wrote my own space opera, and developed
the story and took it to United Artists, who had the first rights to it and they said "No they
didn't want it" and then I took it to Universal because I had just finished American Graffiti and
they said "No they didn't want it", and finally I took it to 20th Century Fox and Alni Junior
said "I'm interested, I don't understand it, but I loved American Graffiti and anything you do is
OK with me". Because otherwise I don't think it would have ever gotten done. Because it
was crazy, you know space ships and Wookies and robots and it was just different from
anything that had ever been seen before.
TELL ME ABOUT THAT FIRST SCRIPT. NOW DID YOU TRY TO TELL THE WHOLE
STORY IN ONE SCRIPT?
Well, at that point it wasn't the whole story. I wrote a script and the script was very
ambitious, it told a very large story, and when I finished it I realised that it was way too big to
make into a movie, so I took the first part of it, sort of the first act, and I said I'll make the
movie about this. And I had to expand on it and move it about, play with it a bit, but I
basically focused on that as being the film. And I said some day if I ever had the chance
maybe I'll make these other things, the rest of it, the other two third into a movie but right
now that's just going to have to go on the shelf, and I'll leave it there. So that's really how the
first project came to pass. The other part of it is, is in order to write that first script I had to
write a back story about where Darth Vader came from, how the kids evolved, his wife, how
Ben related to all that, how the Emperor came to power and that ended up being the basis for
the projects that I am working on now.
YOU HAD A GO-AHEAD ON THE SCRIPT, YOU'RE REVISING IT AS YOU'RE
PREPARING, NOW TO SHOOT THE MOVIE. HOW DO YOU BEGIN TO PREPARE TO
SHOOT THIS MOVIE?
It went around and there were no departments of the studios, no-one to do this so I
had to build up from scratch my own special effects company in the process of starting this
whole thing.
HOW DO YOU FIND PEOPLE, HOW DO YOU FIND THE RIGHT PEOPLE TO DO THAT
KIND OF THING, TO INVENT THINGS WHICH IS WHAT THEY HAD TO DO?
There was a small group of people, that had done special effects, some guys had
worked in commercials doing the "Pilsbury Doboy" and there was maybe a few dozen people
in Hollywood that had actually some experience. They were mostly college students. They
were mostly very young. I think the average age was about 24. That's the average age, so
there were a lot of kids who were 19, 20 years old
TELL ME ABOUT SOME OF THE CASTING DECISIONS.
What I would do is, I would take the various contenders for the various roles and I
would mix them around and have them work ensemble because what I was trying to do was
see how they all looked together and worked together as a group not as individuals. I think
that was a very important part about the casting. I cast a group, I didn't cast one person, one
person, one person, I saw how they all worked together and choose it that way.
WHAT WAS THE MOST SEREDIPOUS BIT OF CASTING?
Probably Harrison, Fred Rooster was helping with my casting was a good friend of
Harrisons and so he had had him, he was a carpenter and he sort of had him, he'd been an
actor and been contracting and been working as a carpenter fixing their offices up and as I
was casting, we said well let's start doing these tests and I said we're short one Han Solo, I
have only found four and we need five because I have five of everything else and Seyer said
well Harrison do you want to do this, do you want to read some parts against some other
parts so we can get through this thing. And he said "yer" and he started reading and he read
them better than anyone else did.
WHAT WAS THE TOUGHEST PART OF MAKING STAR WARS?
Well, there was a lot of drama through the whole thing, it was a very tough film to
make, it was fairly low budget film, it was ten million dollar movie at a time when most
movies, the big-time movies were $20-30 million.
HOW MUCH OF THAT WENT TO EFFECTS?
About $2 million went to effects. There weren't very many effects and I think the
toughest was when I had finished shooting, I came back to the United States, I had no editor,
I had to reassemble the entire movie which had been cut, start from scratch. I went down to
ILM and they'd spent a million out of the two million. We were about five months away from
release of the movie and they didn't have any shots done and I was, panic, I had nothing, I
had no movie, no effects, I had a big mess on my hands.
WHEN DID YOU KNOW IT WAS WORKING, THAT IT WAS TURNING INTO A
PHENOMENA WITH THE PUBLIC?
It was, It wasn't really until it came out and started in the theatres. Even the day it
came out Laddy called me and said "It's a hit, It's a hit. The first three performances have
sold out and it's going giant" and I said look, all science fiction films do well in the first week,
wait until the third week and then let's see what happens. I was always the pessimist.
I'M SURE YOU KNOW HOW MUCH STAR WARS MEANS TO SO MANY MANY PEOPLE
AROUND THE WORLD. WE ALL APPRECIATE YOU SHARING YOUR MEMORIES WITH
US TODAY GEORGE.
