Welp, that totally puts that whole train of speculation to bed.
To be fair, I suppose we do have to acknowledge that Vader-as-father only came in an early ESB script, and Leia-as-sister only existed as an idea for ROTJ, so Star Wars does kind of have this ‘laying the tracks before the train’ approach.
But still, I don’t think that justifies this lack of oversight and planning for what should have been a cohesive trilogy from the start.
EU media will gradually embed Palpatine-as-grandfather in the canon more solidly, but personally I’ll always prefer Rey Nobody, especially knowing how little it mattered to the production team.
All valid points. I very much get where they got the impulse to freewheel it- not wanting to tie themselves down and wanting to recapture some of the ‘free’ atmosphere of the original trilogy, which, like you said, was equally freewheeled original trilogy. It was definitely a mistake.
Major difference was that it was all Lucas freewheelin’ it back in 1980, so there was at least one cohesive goal…whereas it was 3 different directors and writers all mostly ignoring each other for the sequels.
Not really true, Lucas famously hated a lot of the things Irvin Kershner was doing in Empire Strikes Back. And it was often others coming up with those big ideas and changes, most prominently Kasden and Kershner in Empire.
The other influences may be present, sure, but Lucas was still at the helm with his vision guiding things overall.
Not really. While Lucas was distracted with working on Indiana Jones with Spielberg, Irvin Kershner shot Empire in such a way that when George Lucas came back to edit it, he pretty much had no choice but to follow Irvin’s ideas. Very few takes were shot, and among the ones that were shot, there wasn’t a whole lot of variety. While George Lucas wrote the broad strokes of the story, the final product become much more of an Irvin Kershner movie than a George Lucas movie.
Like JakeRyan said, Lucas’s complete lack of control over Empire was a huge influence on RotJ. He took a lot more control over RotJ and hired a much weaker director (Richard Marquand) who wouldn’t pull the kind of stuff Irvin Kershner pulled. This is why I think RotJ feels a lot more Lucas-y than the other two movies. I think this is also why Empire is George Lucas’s least favorite Star Wars movie.
I don’t mean to downplay George Lucas’s contribution to the OT. This isn’t an early 2010s conspiracy theory about how XYZ rando was the REAL creator of Star Wars. But we shouldn’t swing too hard the other direction either. Even ignoring his rocky relationship to Empire, the idea that he was a sole visionary force behind the Original Trilogy is wrong. Most movies are group projects, and hell, Star Wars is the example I usually go to for this, where so many people were putting their ideas for Star Wars, sometimes directly against George Lucas’s wishes, that are now some of the most important aspects of Star Wars. Which is why when the prequels rolled around and George Lucas was in complete control, and all these other creatives were either dead or had had a falling out with Lucas, to most people the movies felt like they were missing something integral to Star Wars.