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Nice interview with Gary Kurtz to re-visit! (IGN interview in 2002)

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Gary Kurtz Producer of the first two SW films. Nice read about the films and creative decisions. The interview is long and it talks about his other works, but I believe the SW stuff is from page 2 on, those of you who want to learn more about “lucas’ vision” read on, no Kool-Aid here!!

May the Force be too good?

 

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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Hmm, read that long time ago, and the issues brought up do still pertain to today's issues.
"I don't mind if you don't like my manners. I don't like them myself. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings."
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Do I have to hold your hands too? Ah well, here are some interesting snippetts:

IGNFF: From your personal experience, how would you compare the George you worked with on American Graffiti to the George you worked with towards the end of The Empire Strikes Back?

KURTZ: It was quite different, actually. He was very different. I think the most unfortunate thing that happened was the fact that Indiana Jones came along, and Raiders of the Lost Ark had come out in between. George and I had many, many discussions about that, but it boiled down to the fact that he became convinced that all the audience was interested in was the roller-coaster ride, and so the story and the script didn't matter anymore.

Now Raiders is not a bad film, but the script actually was much better than the finished film. There were a lot more nuances in the character, and there was less action. It would've been a better picture if that script had been made. But, as it is, it's an interesting and entertaining film – it's just that this idea that somehow the energy doesn't have to be put into getting really good story elements together. One of the arguments that I had with George about Empire was the fact that he felt in the end, he said, we could have made just as much money if the film hadn't been quite so good, and you hadn't spent so much time. And I said, "But it was worth it!"


IGNFF: In what context were their arguments?

KURTZ: There were several times when George had run-ins with the art department as well, because he was used to working on low budget films where he had to come up with all the solutions – so instead of saying, "What I'd really like to see here is something really interesting," and then the art department would go off and do it, he would say things like, "Put a new kind of antennae on that building and a funnel on this one." And John Barry, after a while he'd say, "Just tell me what you'd like to see, and let me deal with the details. That's what you're paying me for."

IGNFF: So it was delegation problems?

KURTZ: Yes, it was that. With the camera, it was the same thing. In a couple of scenes in the corridors, rather than saying, "It looks a bit over lit, can you fix that?", he'd say, "turn off this light, and turn off that light." And Gil would say, "No, I won't do that, I've lit it the way I think it should be – tell me what's the effect that you want, and I'll make a judgment about what to do with my lights."

IGNFF: Which seems pretty reasonable.

KURTZ: Yes, it does, but George had never worked with a crew like that before, and he also didn't like being here in England at all – he didn't like the food ... and he found that he wasn't the kind of director that chatted with the crew. He very rarely talked to anybody, except directly for instructions, and even then there wasn't a lot. Both the actors on American Graffiti and Star Wars complained that he didn't say enough to give them any feedback. That wasn't completely true, but it happened a lot where he would just say, "Let's try it again a little bit faster." That was about the only instruction he'd give anybody. A lot of actors don't mind – they don't care, they just get on with it. But some actors really need a lot of pampering and a lot of feedback, and if they don't get it, they get paranoid that they might not be doing a good job.

IGNFF: Is that kind of lack of communication just inherent in George's character?

KURTZ: Partially, I think it's the fact that George came out of a documentary film background. His style was to shoot a lot of footage and sit in the editing room and put it all together. He wasn't gregarious, he's very much a loner and very shy, so he didn't like large groups of people, he didn't like working with a large crew, he didn't like working with a lot of actors.

IGNFF: Ironic he would choose science fiction, which normally requires a lot of all of that.

KURTZ: The things that he liked the best were working in writing, which was pretty solitary, and working in the editing room, which was also solitary. It was fine... It was just that the crew expected a little more gregariousness from the director, and they kind of resented it, that it wasn't that way. They complained a lot. It was very nit-picky ...


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

KURTZ: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
"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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"Do I have to hold your hands too? Ah well, here are some interesting snippetts:"
"And theres more, just gotta read!"

Apparently, you didn't read TheSessler's post:

Quote
"read that long time ago"


Just gotta read...

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: Sadly, I believe the prequels are beyond repair.
<span class=“Bold”>JediRandy: They’re certainly beyond any repair you’re capable of making.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: You aren’t one of us.
<span class=“Bold”>Go-Mer-Tonic: I can’t say I find that very disappointing.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>JediRandy: I won’t suck as much as a fan edit.</span>

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Best quote -

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.
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This is the Kurtz interview I've been dying to read. All the right questions are asked and now we get a better sense about Lucas that explains why the PT has gone the way it did.

Here's what I get from the interview:

Lucas is a quiet, shy, introvert documentary filmmaker who is used to doing everything himself, therefore if things don't turn out exactly the way he wants them to, then he thinks something is wrong. Compromise is what a film is all about, Kurtz says so himself.

When SW came out, it was the right movie at the right time under the right circumstances. It became more successful than anyone could possibly have imagined. The success blindsided him, but he is lucky to have more control than most filmmakers do.

With the success and money that SW brought.....not to mention the stress (see Empire Of Dreams), Lucas decided that he was gonna hire people to do it his way while at the same time, set up and reorganize Lucasfilm and ILM to accomodate.

ESB turned out waaaaaaaaay better than Lucas had thought and he WAS NOT responsible for it. It was Kirshner, Jim Henson and those 3 writers who made ESB as good as it was. I think this scared Lucas.....other people doing it better than him would make him scared and defensive cuz his control of the whole thing was threatened.

After ESB, Raiders comes out and Lucas somehow becomes convinced that audiences just want a cheap thrill. So he's determined to make Jedi that way. Kutz disagrees and takes off. Also at the same time, Hollywood was coming down on Lucas (see Empire Of Dreams again) and I believe that this is jealousy over Lucas' success. And also, his personal life seems to be falling apart (Empire Of Dreams again)....so I think he just wanted to be done with it. He did a quick and easy job on Jedi...hired all the people who he could control and just did it to be done with it.

And that attitude has carried over to the prequels.....he's doing these just to be done with the whole thing....and it shows in the story.

Bottom line....success killed Lucas. He got the fame, the glory, the money and he just let the quality go. It's happened to so many that it's really not that surprising either.