New Lucas interview - the originals "look terrible"

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/george-lucas-cannes-honor-star-wars-films-1235907998/

Lucas also defended his decision to go back and “clean up” his original trilogy, using new digital technology to make the film look the way he always wanted it to.

“I’m a firm believer that the director, or the writer, or the filmmaker should have a right to have his movie be the way he wants it,” says Lucas. Fans hoping for a 4K restored version of the original 1977 Star Wars shouldn’t hold their breath.

“We did release the original one on laserdisc and everybody got really mad, they said ‘It looks terrible.’ And I said ‘Yeah, I know it did,'” said Lucas. “That is what it looked like.”

I can’t roll my eyes hard enough.

I’ll just take your word for it since they’ve 404 the article its gone. Lucas said in 2011 it was an oxymoron to release the original.

JadedSkywalker said:

I’ll just take your word for it since they’ve 404 the article its gone. Lucas said in 2011 it was an oxymoron to release the original.

fixed

Yeah the laserdisc did look bad as a bonus disk in 2006 on the DVD, and people were rightly mad. I don’t remember anyone hating the laserdiscs when they were released except for how expensive definitive collection was. Friends of mine, schoolmates all wanted to be able to afford a laserdisc player or the movies. Most of us had to settle for VHS. I didn’t get a player til 2005.

I still to this day wonder why George thinks people will throw rocks at him for the originals.

My favorite part of the article is Lucas passing shot at Disney and how they don’t understand the Force, lol. Same old George.

Caston said:

Nobody gaslights Original Trilogy fans like George Lucas does.

Or spouts bullshit like George does.

Unfortunately nobody will call George out on his claims either, and they’ll soon become taken as fact.

What a walking talking dumpster fire of a man.

I wanna say he was referring to the 2006 DVDs which used the Laserdisc transfers for their source but you never know with this man. It’s sad yet unsurprising that he uses everyone’s disappointment of the actual TRANSFERS as justification that the original versions of the movies were in fact inferior/incomplete films.

If those LD masters had been upgraded to 16:9 with a bit of upscaling I guarantee 60%-70% of the complaints people had with those DVDs wouldn’t have happened. Sure the 1993 masters weren’t perfect. Coloring was off at times, some poor DNR applied but with some minor enhancements and upgrading to modern video proportions they could’ve been acceptable in 2006.

It’s just sad that he’s so convinced the SE’s were better because people were upset with those 2006 DVDs (again I’m assuming that’s what he meant) when it was the transfers people were upset with not the films! He clearly feels “if they aren’t happy with those versions in a older outdated video master that isn’t even upscaled for modern viewing than it’s clear the films were bad”. (Sighs)

Haarspalter said:

That interview confirms one more time that the GOUT 2006 DVD was Lucas’ deliberate middlefinger in the face of the OT fans. And his stupid argument that it looked bad and that is why his numerous Special Edition iterations are better … what a terrible & dumb justification.

Also worth noting as he mentions ‘the director, or the writer or the filmmaker’ … he basically justifys his ‘clean-ups’ on EMPIRE and JEDI since he was not the director. As i remember in earlier interviews he always referred to the directors right.

Very much this. He promised Kersh final cut, the same thing he promised to Steven on Raiders as well. Okay Lucas directed the first film in 1977, but he didn’t direct Empire, or Jedi.

To be honest this entire i interview irks me, I’d argue the EU writers knew Star Wars better since he claims to be the only one who gets Star Wars. And of course he is shitting on Disney again despite having sold the company and recently backing Iger saying making magic is not for amateurs.

Haarspalter said:

The complete Cannes interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHXLsHOdPiw

Fast forward to timecode 53:08 … the interviewer asks Lucas a question from a fan, if he will release the original versions in the future. Lucas drops the “it looks terrible” quote a few seconds later.

It bothers me that they put just anyone as an interviewer, if it were someone really informed I would have asked questions like, “If LucasFilm still has the original compositing pieces, why don’t they digitally recompose the original effects?” Since George talks about the restoration process done for the first SE of ANH, and says that the film was discolored and the negative pieces were scratched (Which is a fact), they currently have a restored negative although with scenes altered by CGI, they could easily scan the 1997 SE, (something that Disney already did since they have a 4K scan of that edition) along with the composition pieces and remake the unaltered version recomposing the original scenes, and if there are people who want to keep the garbage matte optical composition then they could also scan interpositives from that time whose biggest problem is color fading but not analog degradation, or even the CRI negatives of those scenes that in the 90s restoration were cut from the negative due to degradation, being replaced by higher quality recomposed negative versions or by CGI versions of course, they have no excuse, and if they complain about the laserdisc it is nonsense since at the time it was the highest quality home video, George makes up those lies to avoid releasing the unaltered version. It’s not because they can’t do it, IT’S BECAUSE THEY DON’T WANT TO.

Apparently, Mark Vaz book Into the Digital Realm says they used the O-neg for the live action photography, they used Interpositve and YCM separation masters and they printed the cgi segments back out to film it had high resolution it didn’t say how many whether 2k or higher. They located the original Optical effects pieces that didn’t include the 86 lost shots on CRI stock and they redid those, and those are the recomposites the original pieces.

So unless you consider recomposites to not be original if you didn’t cut in those new cgi redoes you basically have the original except for having to redo those 86 shots.

Its more and more clear to me it would have been possible in the 1990s and certainly would be now. We were lied to.

The question is whether the creator of an work of art is always the best judge of it.
Tolkien in his later years tried to revise The Hobbit yet again and also the, as yet unpublished, Silmarillion. As time went on, it be came clear the early versions of these works were better.