G&G-Fan said:
How do you recut the prequels to introduce Tatooine in a similar way to ANH? You mentioned this in your ANH Boarding Action and Pair of Droids Lost videos but you haven’t followed it up yet, as I imagine you are quite busy.
Hey! I am indeed quite busy, I got promoted to director at the place I work, so it’s taking me a while to get everything sorted for that new position. Once things calm down a bit, I’m gonna do my best to get back to the editing breakdowns. In the meantime I’ve been plugging away at polishing my recut of AotC.
To briefly answer your question, the main changes I make revolve around focus/timing.
The problem with the Vanilla version of the Prequels is that they are constructed around questions of “who” Anakin is, rather than “what” is going on. STARS WARS tends to work better if the “who” is uncovered by the “what”. In ANH, we find out that Luke likes to run from his problems and into danger to escape facing who he is, but that isn’t explicitly stated until tESB, when Yoda and Vader confront him directly about this problem. The “who” question is paid off at the end of RotJ when Luke throws down his lightsaber and refuses to fight Vader. - He’s done running/fighter, and he knows exactly who he is - “A Jedi like his Father before him”. Luke’s character was revealed through events and decisions that he made (what), not Shakespearean monologues.
I’ll give you a quick example. In Vanilla Attack of the Clones, Anikan and Padme arrive on Tatooine, interogate Watto, visit the Lars Homestead, where Anakin finds out what happened to his mother. Anakin then sets out to search for his mom, finds her, slaughters a bunch of Tusken Raiders, before returning the Lars Homestead and giving a Shakespearean-style confession to Padme. The sequence ends with Shmi’s funeral and Obi-Wan’s Hologram that sends the gang to Geonosis.
If you remove the Shakespearean confession to Padme, and make a few little micro edits, the sequence suddenly feels directly in line with the OT tone/flow-wise. The audience knows that Anakin’s solution to the Tusken problem is problematic, but Padme doesn’t, which makes their relationship more tragic (she doesn’t know he’s a baddie). The audience now should wonder if that action was a one-off revenge killing, or is this part of Anakin’s character (The same question Luke has to wrestle with in the Cave of Evil). The funeral scene where Anakin promises not to fail again, now takes on more focus, because the confession has been removed (He’s now just confessing to his mom), and the promise he makes her sets up the tragic decision he makes in RotS to join Palpatine to save Padme. - It’s like poetry it rhymes.
Hopefully that sort of answers your question, until I have time to make a video about it. . . which won’t be anytime soon, haha!
