Would Star Wars Episode VII have been anywhere near as good with George Lucas at the helm? Probably not. However, the man credited with ruining many a childhood seems to think so, and it turns out that he’s not a massive fan of the direction of the new trilogy.
As you may already know, when Disney bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion, they also acquired Lucas’ treatments for the Star Wars sequels, but the studio ditched those fairly early on.
Does that bother him? “They looked at the stories, and they said, ‘We want to make something for the fans’. They decided they didn’t want to use those stories, they decided they were going to do their own thing. They weren’t that keen to have me involved anyway — but if I get in there, I’m just going to cause trouble, because they’re not going to do what I want them to do. And I don’t have the control to do that anymore, and all I would do is muck everything up. And so I said, ‘Okay, I will go my way, and I’ll let them go their way.’ ”
It’s kind of crazy that Lucas seems so against the idea of making a Star Wars movies for the fans, but what exactly did he want them to do if not that? “They wanted to do a retro movie. I don’t like that,” he said of The Force Awakens. “Every movie I work very hard to make them completely different, with different planets, with different spaceships, make it new.”
While that’s an understandable point, it’s clear that his Star Wars sequels would have been very much like the prequels in the sense that he would have crammed them with as many ideas as possible, and based on past experience, not many of those would have worked!
Here’s where things get really bad though. After acknowledging that the Star Wars movies are for kids, he said: “I sold them to the white slavers that takes these things, and [laughs]…” Thankfully, Lucas went no further than that. Stay retired George. Please.
