He has been a damn nice roadblock for everything this site stands for. And he has often taken the time to respond to the fans of his films in the media:
1997
"On your special edition, do you expect any backlash from fans who might resent your tampering with a classic?
"I don't know. It's my classic. On the one hand, I'm doing this, while on the other hand I'm on the Artists Rights Board, a foundation that's trying to protect films from being changed--which I feel very strongly about, because with the technology we have today, anybody can go back and do this kind of thing. I can sort of see the future, and I want to protect films as they are and as they should be. I don't want to see them colorized, I don't want to see their formats changed, I don't want to see them re-edited, and I don't want to see what I'm able to do now, which is add more characters and do all kinds of things that nobody even contemplated before."
"There will only be one. And it won't be what I would call the 'rought cut', it'll be the 'final cut.' The other one will be some sort of interesting artifact that people will look at and say, 'There was an earlier draft of this.' What ends up being important in my mind is what the DVD version is going to look like, because that's what everybody is going to remember. The other versions will disappear. Even the 35 million tapes of Star Wars out there won't last more than 30 or 40 years. A hundred years from now, the only version of the movie that anyone will remember will be the DVD version. I think it's the director's prerogative, not the studio's, to go back and reinvent a movie."
2004
"The special edition, that's the one I wanted out there... the other movie, it's on VHS, if anybody wants it... to me, it doesn't really exist anymore. It's like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I'm sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it. But I want it to be the way I want it to be."
2006
Jim Ward, President of LucasArts and Senior Vice President of Lucasfilm Ltd: "We returned to the Lucasfilm Archives to search exhaustively for source material that could be presented on DVD. This is something that we're very excited to be able to give to fans in response to their continuing enthusiasm for Star Wars."
Lucasfilm's PR Response Regarding the 2006 DVD Box Set:
I wanted you to know how much we appreciate the passion and enthusiasm you have for Star Wars, and thank you for sharing your concerns about our upcoming DVD release.
The DVDs being released in September will contain two versions of Star Wars: Episodes IV, V and VI—the Special Editions (which represent George's vision of the movies) and the first versions, which will be included as bonus material. We hoped that releasing those "original" movies on a bonus disc would be a way to have some additional fun with the debut of the movies as individual DVDs. We certainly did not want it to become a source of concern or frustration for any of our fans.
As you may know, an enormous amount of effort was put into digitally restoring the negatives for the Special Editions. In one scene alone, nearly 1 million pieces of dirt had to be removed, and the Special Editions were created through a frame-by-frame digital restoration. The negatives of the movies were permanently altered for the creation of the Special Editions, and existing prints of the first versions are in poor condition.
So many fans have requested the original movies, we wanted to find a way to bring them to you. But since these movies do not represent George's artistic vision, we could not put the extraordinary time and resources into this project as we did with the Special Editions. The 1993 Laserdisc masters represented the best source for providing the original versions as DVD bonus material. Although these are non-anamorphic versions, they do preserve the original widescreen composition of the movies.
We want you to be aware that we have no plans—now or in the future—to restore the earlier versions.
We hope you will understand our decision and, again, want to let you know how much we appreciate your interest and enthusiasm.
Sincerely,
Lynne Hale
Lucas: "It's just the original versions, as they were. We didn't do anything to it at all. But we're not sure how many people want that... Now we'll find out whether they really wanted the original or whether they wanted the improved versions. It'll all come out in the end."
2010
Mr. Lucas said that to release the original versions of these films on Blu-ray was; "kind of an oxymoron because the quality of the original is not very good. You have to go through and do a whole restoration on it, and you have to do that digitally. It’s a very, very expensive process to do it. So when we did the transfer to digital, we only transferred really the upgraded version."
2012
"Changes are not unusual — I mean, most movies when they release them they make changes. But somehow, when I make the slightest change, everybody thinks it’s the end of the world."
"The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down."
"If you look at Blade Runner, it’s been cut sixteen ways from Sunday and there are all kinds of different versions of it. Star Wars, there’s basically one version — it just keeps getting improved a little bit as we move forward. All art is technology and it improves every year. Whether it’s on the stage or in music or in painting, there are technological answers that happen, and because movies are so technological, the advances become more obvious."
