Is "Empire Strikes Back" really George Lucas' least favorite? — Page 2

Long but definitely worth the read:

IGNFF: Well it's ironic to me ... I was talking to somebody who has a lot of good friends at ILM, especially in the conceptual department, and he said that George has basically a new catch phrase in the development process. His new catch phrase is "It's good enough," and they say he uses it all the time now. When you're talking about that idea of only going to a certain depth because the audience only wants the quick and easy impact, and then move along.... That somehow the audience isn't observant, so why should we be overly detailed... it's just fascinating to compare that with the observations you made.

KURTZ: Well, there is a balance that has to be struck there, because if you want to go to the other extreme, as we were talking about with Stanley Kubrick who was very, very aware and almost paranoid of every detail of his films, it didn't always make any difference in the sense that – as I said – his later films weren't very good, I didn't think. You can go overboard on that and spend too much energy. I think you have to make the film for yourself as the primary audience, and also look at it with a fairly discerning eye – "This works for me, this is good, I like this."

Yes, there are a lot of things that you can get away with ... Roger Corman taught me a lot about things being "good enough." When you've used that phrase, good enough usually means it is working for the audience. If it worked for the audience to throw the model through the frame to have the emotional impact that you need, then you do it that way – because it's the cheapest, simplest option. You're not doing it necessarily because it's the cheapest option, but if it works and it only takes 15 minutes, then you have time to work on other things.

The catch phrase there is "if it works for the audience." It isn't what the cost is. If it doesn't work for the audience, then it doesn't matter how much time and energy you take on it. Look at Pearl Harbor and you get a good example of that. There's a lot of brilliant effects shots in there that don't mean anything. So you have to look at, I think, the emotional response of the audience to the characters as the crucial thing. Visual effects are nothing – they're just a way of helping you tell your story. The fact that they're easier to do now than they ever were before is advantageous to filmmakers, but it doesn't mean you want to use more, or that you want to use them when they're not appropriate.

You still have to use the same judgment that we always used, going way back to D.W. Griffith's time. You do what you think works for the story, and if that's elaborate and expensive with thousands of extras like DeMille did in the Ten Commandments, fine – that's what you do. If it's not, if you've got two people in a room – then that's fine. It's whatever sells the scene. "What is the emotional heart of the scene" is the key question always, and how do you sell that visually. If it does require a lot of action to do that, then you have to explore how best to do that action. But it doesn't always, and sometimes you can do it in a very, very simple way. There definitely is a balance there, because there is no perfect. There's never going to be a perfect way to do a scene... more extras, or more visual effects, or more explosions doesn't necessarily mean that it's better.

IGNFF: When you talk about the development of Star Wars and the transition in tone through Empire and Return of the Jedi and now eventually what happened with Episode I, do you think that George's storytelling became more simplistic, or less mature? How would you characterize the elements that you saw emerging with the difficulties that were happening towards the end of Empire and what eventually led to Return of the Jedi?

KURTZ: I think it became simpler. You don't need complicated interpersonal relationships, you don't need difficult dramatic structures for this kind of story. Empire, in a way, is a typical second act of a three-act play. It's the problem act – everybody has problems, everybody has difficulties that they're trying to get out of, and usually the end of the second act is you're leaving everybody in deep shit. And, in a sense, Empire does that. Luke's hand is cut off, and Han Solo is frozen and he's off somewhere – all of the key elements are left unresolved. It's very rare that you see a feature film that ends that way and is satisfactory.

We were a bit afraid of that whole concept. Knowing that there was going to be a third film obviously helped, but still – that wasn't going to be for another three years, so the idea of presenting this to an audience and having them accept it was a scary proposition. I had never done it before. It seemed to work, though. It seemed to work quite well. The audience was very satisfied, and anticipated the next part. I think part of the reason that they were satisfied was because they were satisfied with the characters themselves. The characters seemed believable in the story.

Star Wars, the first film, is very much a comic book story. It's a very archetypal standard story about a hero coming of age and engaging with the world and trying to right some wrongs – and all of those things worked very, very effectively – but the dialogue is fairly pedestrian as far as movies go, and the adventure is carried along by interesting side bars and some of the individual effects... and the fact that it's kind of a rollercoaster ride in a sense, with very, very archetypal energy, so that you can associate with the key character elements very, very easily.

There's a lot of undercurrent in Star Wars that, if you take it on the surface, a four-year-old can really enjoy it – but there's a lot else going on, under there. In that sense it's multi-layered, and Empire is as well. That's the thing that bothered me a bit about Jedi and certainly about Episode I, is that those layers, those subtexts – they're all gone. They're not there. You accept what's there on the screen – it either works for you as a surface adventure, or it doesn't. But that's all there is. There's nothing to ponder.

IGNFF: No depth.

KURTZ: There's no depth in it. And that's where I think the mistake is. And I'm sorry that it happened that way, because the potential for a lot of that is great – it could have had a lot of depth, without damaging the surface story. The sign of a good movie is one that can work on very, very many levels and, depending on your mood when you go to see it, you can see those, or not, as you want. But it doesn't interfere with your entertainment of it.

IGNFF: How did you observe that change in George, because obviously he was the one who guided it towards that lack of depth...

KURTZ: Well, I think that he felt Empire was an ordeal for him – using his own money, it went over budget and over schedule a bit. Kershner was slow, we had some problems with Mark Hamill who had an injury – typical movie stuff, really. But even though it did cost a little more than was budgeted, there was no way it was ever going to lose money. He really didn't have to worry too much about it – the combination of the merchandising and the distribution would never be a problem.

IGNFF: It was never George's intention to direct Empire?

KURTZ: No, no. After Star Wars, he didn't really want to direct the others. I think he was unhappy that I – I'm the one that recommended Kershner, and had worked with him before. I think he was a good choice for Empire, I think he worked really well, but he wasn't the kind of director... George, I think, had in the back of his mind that the director was a sort of stand-in – that he could phone him up every night and tell him what to do and kind of direct vicariously over the telephone. That never happened. Kershner's not that kind of director, and even when George showed up a couple of times on the set, he found that it wasn't easy to maneuver Kershner into doing what he would have done.

So, on Jedi, he was determined to find a director who was easy to control, basically, and he did. And that was the result, basically – the film was sort of one that George might have directed if he had directed it himself... but maybe not, because it goes through so many interim bits, that if he had directed it probably would have been quite different.

IGNFF: For better or worse?

KURTZ: I think probably for better. But, I don't know, because as I said, he had gotten into this mode of saying that the audience is interested in the rollercoaster ride and that he could make just as much money, and it doesn't have to be complicated, doesn't have to have as difficult a story. There are a lot of other people who do that all the time – that's they're kind of movie making philosophy, the sort of Jerry Bruckheimer approach to movies. A lot of Hollywood movies have been based on the idea that the story is the subtext of the action, so that's certainly nothing new. But it's not very satisfying, I don't think, personally. But, you can make a lot of money, and if that's what you want to do, then you do it that way.

IGNFF: How did the arguments between you and George escalate during Empire?

KURTZ: It was just a matter of trying to get done and he, I suppose, wasn't very good at delegating. Sometimes he would want to control everything, and then other times he would go away and you wouldn't hear from him for a long time. It was difficult to fathom kind of how he approached all that, and he comes out of school doing everything himself – the documentary school where he wrote and directed and shot and edited all by himself, and there's certain feature films you can make that way, and others you can't. He had a good eye, and he's a very good editor, and the films that he directed for the most part have a good visual sense.

With story material, some of the characters were complicated, and the scripts work well. He seemed to work best as a collaborative writer, where other writers came in and had some say in adding certain things so you'd get a variety of point of view, like Willard and Gloria Huyck on American Graffiti. The Huycks also did a polished last draft on Star Wars to add some humor and some edginess to some certain bits, and I think it helped a lot.

IGNFF: Would you say that George tends to be a cold writer, as far as emotional warmth or character depth – we were talking about this as far as American Graffiti, that everything tended to be somewhat sterile as far as George's original drafts of that film.

KURTZ: I think that's probably the case. The other writers tended to add extra elements, especially emotional elements. George tends to write about the facts, in effect.

IGNFF: Very documentarian.

KURTZ: Yes, because that's his background.

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