John Knowles? He probably meant John Knoll.
Let’s hope there are no further typos in that quote. Maybe the original quote was something like that:
“On one day, we were in Lucasfilm in San Francisco with Industrial Light & Magic and John Knoll, our supervisor, said that George destroyed a brand new 4K restoration print of a New Hope - it had literally just been burned to ashes. He suggested we sit and mourn to it. Obviously, I was up for that.” 😉