I'm going to post this, I typed it from the original article.
Cinefex March 1996, pg 66 said:
LUCAS:
One of the main impetuses in going ahead with the Star Wars stories at this point - aside from getting past the frustration of having four, five and six out there and not having one, two and three - is that now we’ve reached the point, technologically, where I can do so many things I could never do before. Suddenly, its like having a whole new paint set - and that’s fun.
And I’m going back and doing a special edition of Star Wars for the same reason. I’m having more fun doing that than almost anything - because its like getting a second chance. I was very frustrated with the way a lot of things in the film came out. I was embarrassed by some of the things in Star Wars - and I was embarrassed at the time I did it. I just didn’t have a way of doing it better. Being able to go back now and fix it, I can say: “Well, that was all a mistake. I didn’t mean for it to be like that. That’s the way it came out in one take. With one more take, I can really make it great.”
We have a new Jabba the Hutt that’s so much better than the old one I had to work with. I mean, that one wouldn’t act! It was just a big old rubber thing. But now I’ve got one that’s very articulate. It’s speech is fantastic - the lip-sync is great. The tongue is great, the eye movement - everything! And he walks, too. So it’s like this great thing. Suddenly, all of the constraints are lifted. It’s like you’ve been plowing fields in hundred-degree sun, with a seventy-pound backpack and lead balls chained to your ankles, and someone comes along and puts you in an air-conditioned tractor, and says, “Look, it goes real fast and you can do everything with it.” And you say: “This is great! This is fun!” You want to plow fields all day long, it’s so much fun. That’s basically what’s going on now. We’re doing the new films, and its like: “Gosh, I can have Yoda walk. I could never have Yoda walk before. And you know, I don’t have to stage scenes around R2 and 3PO anymore. I can actually make them more facile. And other characters - I can create characters that don’t have to be people in suits.” That’s where the real thrill of it all comes. That’s what’s bringing me back to doing it, in a way - just the fun of it.
On your special edition, do you expect any backlash from fan 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 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 reedited, 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.
What I’m doing, I think, is what a lot of painters do, and some writers do - which is to go back and repaint or rewrite. Go into any artist’s studio and you’ll find lots of paintings on the wall that look completely finished and completely fine. And the artist will say, “Well, I’m leaving them there because I’m not happy with them.” If I had been an artist and a painter, and I had done Star Wars, I would have probably left it on the wall, because I wasn’t happy with it, even at the time. Everybody else was saying: “This is great! Didn’t it turn out great?” And I would say: “No, I had to compromise. It didn’t turn out the way I wanted. It fell short of what I wanted it to be.” And they would say: “What are you talking about? You must be nuts!”
Well, now they’re going to find out what I was talking about. Finally they’re going to see what it was that bugged me so much - because now I can have it be exactly the way I wanted it to be. Well, maybe not a hundred percent. But it went from being what, in my mind, was maybe sixty or seventy percent of what I wanted, up to now being about ninety-three or ninety-four percent of what I wanted it to be.
In another ten years, you can go back and get that last six percent.
Yeah, I can redo the whole thing all over again. But truly, there’s something very satisfying about having a thing not be right and always wanting to fix it, and then finally getting the chance to do it.
Now that you’ve done this with Star Wars, are you going to be able to resist the temptation to fix the other two?
I am fixing the other two. I’m doing all three of them.