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Interview with Gary Kurtz (very good - from 2002 at IGN)

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Hi, read this interview a while back, i’m really starting to think lucas just lucked out with star wars. The interview is from Nov 2002 but alot of interesting stuff is said about lucas, its pretty long, the star wars talk starts like on page 2 i think, but good read. yeah I know Kurtz and lucas fell out of favor but nothing seems to come across as malicious or anything. I like what lucas told kurtz about empire strikes back being “too good”, lucas is slime, anyways, like to know what you guys think of the interview. Hope i do this right. Late.

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Mod Edit: a working link to the above article can be found here:-

https://web.archive.org/web/20040822105950/http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/376/376873p1.html?fromint=1

"Drink the Kool-Aid. Wear blinders. Cover your ears. Because that's the only way you can totally enjoy Revenge of the Sith -- the final and most futile attempt from skilled producer, clumsy director and tin-eared writer George Lucas to create a prequel trilogy to match the myth-making spirit of the original Star Wars saga he unleashed twenty-eight years ago. Fan boys, of course, have convinced themselves otherwise. So have several critics, if you go by early reviews."
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2019 Edit: The above link to the interview sadly no longer works. However, the interview can be found in an archived format, via the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine, here:-

http://web.archive.org/web/20040822105950/http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/376/376873p1.html?fromint=1

 

Cheers for the link - that is one interesting interview, not only on SW but film in general.

I was surprised about GL’s change of direction for Jedi after working on the IJ films - would be most intriguing to hear more of the original premise for Jedi.

Some very good points re the 97 Special Editions from someone so close to SW - does make you wonder if Kurtz has told GL what he thinks of certain changes…

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what a great Interview with an amazingly talented man, backs up alot of what most of believe about Lucas's decline.
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The most interesting part was the original concept for Return of the Jedi. It was originally going to be good. What could have been
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Thanks for this. I really enjoyed reading it, especially the part where he comes right out and says he can't stand the Special Editions.
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MTFBWY…A

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The last 3 pages of the interview are especially interesting and insightful. You really get a clear picture of Lucas...
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I pulled some of the Star Wars highlights, good stuff, a good total interview worth reading in an entirity, but...

IGNFF: Well, I know that when talking about the directors and the auteur theory and directors throwing off their shackles in the '70s and what it eventually led to... by the way, a group of friends of mine, we have something that we, ironically enough, call the Kurtz Theory – which directly relates to Lucas. Essentially, it's that when you lose all checks and balances – someone who has the ability to say no to you or to convince you that this might not be the right direction – you get films like Episode I.

KURTZ: Yeah. Well, I think that's true. In the case of Episode I, there's probably something else going on as well, which is it was a merchandise-driven project ... they knew that the money from the merchandising would make a lot more money than the money from the film. It's a tired film, in the sense that there's no passion or energy there, and that comes from that kind of slightly cynical attitude, I think. There's a lot that could have been. In Episode I, there's a tremendous amount of story potential that was wasted.

IGNFF: Well what were the original outlines for the prequels? Since they can be compared and contrasted now that the first one's out there, and the second one's soon to be out there. Were there major differences from what you saw, from the original outlines of prequel ideas?

KURTZ: Well a lot of the prequel ideas were very, very vague. It's really difficult to say. I can't remember much about that at all, except dealing with the Clone Wars and the formation of the Jedi Knights in the first place – that was supposed to be one of the keys of Episode I, was going to be how the Jedi Knights came to be. But all of those notes were abandoned completely. One of the reasons Jedi came out the way it did was because the story outline of how Jedi was going to be seemed to get tossed out, and one of the reasons I was really unhappy was the fact that all of the carefully constructed story structure of characters and things that we did in Empire was going to carry over into Jedi. The resolution of that film was going to be quite bittersweet, with Han Solo being killed, and the princess having to take over as queen of what remained of her people, leaving everybody else. In effect, Luke was left on his own. None of that happened, of course.

IGNFF: So it would have been less of a fairy-tale ending?

KURTZ: Much, much less. It would have been quite sad, and poignant and upbeat at the same time, because they would have won a battle. But the idea of another attack on another Death Star wasn't there at all ... it was a rehash of Star Wars, with better visual effects. And there were no Ewoks ... it was just entirely different. It was much more adult and straightforward, the story. This idea that the roller-coaster ride was all the audience was interested in, and the story doesn't have to be very adult or interesting, seemed to come up because of what happened with Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Indiana Jones films – and the fact that that seemed to make a lot of money and it didn't matter whether there was a really good story or not – that wasn't what this kind of film was about. We had serious differences about a lot of that.

IGNFF: And, overall, your opinion on Episode I would be?

KURTZ: Well, I don't know that I'm a very impartial observer. As I said, I knew what some of the history was about and what it could have been in terms of way back when we were talking about it, so in that sense just going to see the film and seeing the way it turned out was a disappointment because of my built-in connection to all of that past. That's not fair for the film, because the film isn't that film, or it isn't one of the ones that we talked about – it's a different film, with a different script. But I think I'm objective enough to say that even given that parameter and given the script that they ended up with, I felt it was very, very weak. It isn't very dramatic and I was very bored in watching it. There were no surprises ... nothing that was unexpected, and there wasn't anything that I was looking forward to. I was quite disappointed, actually.

IGNFF: Oh, I don't know – in Episode I, the CGI still calls attention to itself.

KURTZ: Well, it does, yes, that's true. Even though there's lots of it and most of the shots have some kind of CGI – but it's less annoying, I think, and stands out less than it does in the Special Editions.

If you remember the scene when the robots go down to Tatooine, to the desert, and then later you cut back to the Stormtroopers looking for them, there's a scene where Stormtroopers are sitting up on the hill in the background riding what looks like a giant lizard. In the original, that's a mock-up that we borrowed, rendered from a prop house, and carried all the way out there and stuck it there in the sand. It didn't do anything. There was just a Stormtrooper sitting on a giant lizard, a model. It doesn't do anything – it's just in the background and the Stormtrooper in the foreground stands up with a piece of the robot and says, "They've been here." That's all the scene is supposed to be for. As it is in the Special Edition, that Stormtrooper on the dinosaur in the background moves – it's all CGI.

IGNFF: And it adds nothing whatsoever to the story.

KURTZ: I know, and that's what I mean with the proliferation. Just because you can do it, doesn't make it better. But those animals moving actually distract from the principal purpose of the scene. If they had been horses, if it had been a Western and those were horses, chances are the horses would have just been sitting there, because horses do that a lot. They don't move much. If they're not running or trotting or something, sometimes they just sit there – and maybe flick their ears a bit – for long periods of time.

IGNFF: But they don't do a song and dance number.

KURTZ: No, they don't move around at all. They just stand there. If they had made it that subtle, if they had had that creature in the background move its head an inch to the right or something, a blink – that would have been all that you need to do. But it's not necessary at all, because the way it was in the beginning, in the first place, it was that way because that's all we could afford and it worked fine. I'm just not a great believer in messing with what is done. It may not be perfect, and as I said a long time ago, there's nothing that is. No movie is perfect, and every filmmaker is going to sit and watch a movie that he made 10 years ago, or 30 years ago, or 50 years ago, and say, "Oh, I wish I could have done that better."

IGNFF: You're the person to ask about this – when you're talking about these kind of special editions and changes and are they due to an original vision or changing sensibilities – I have to ask you about your thoughts regarding the infamous redo of the scene with Greedo in the cantina.... the whole shooting first thing.

KURTZ: Yeah, I really was livid about that one. I think it was a total – it ruins the scene, basically. The scene was never intended that way. Han Solo realized that Greedo was out to get him and he had to blast him first or he would lose his life. It shows you how much of a mercenary he is. That's what the point of the scene was. And so the way they've changed it around, it loses the whole impact of that whole aspect of it.

IGNFF: Do you think that's due to George's changing sensibilities as opposed to his argument that, "No, that was my original intention"?

KURTZ: Well, he can say that was his original intention, but we could have shot it that way very easily. There was no reason that it couldn't have been shot that way. It was shot and edited the way it was because that's the way the script was. That's what he wanted at the time.

IG
16 years I wait and this is what I get???
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Really this interview explains better why Return of the Jedi sucks in comparison with Empire Strikes Back. That move had so many good ideas. They way it was all just thrown away and turned into the medicore mess it is today is truely sad. At least that horrendous ewok song is gone forever. People complain about the Jedi rocks song. This is very bad but Return of the Jedi is filled with crap like that. If a music number like that was added into The Empire Strikes Back I would have been pissed. He also refermes the idea that Greedo was not always meant to shoot first. Good interview.
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Didn't Kurtz say that Luca$ did not originally plan to make any SW sequels/prequels? Maybe its time we started listening to him!
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Now that was a great interview. Boy, you really get into who Lucas is and was. Glad to see that Kurtz hates the special editions. I totaly agree with his views. I also liked that he mentioned that the DVDs should contain both version of the films and not just the Special Editions. Great, great interview. Thanks for posting this.
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