I remember and love that interview, and the amount of "truth" behind Star Wars is glazed over by Lucas.
It really is a shame, what might have been...
Some interesting comments:
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: 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: 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.
I had a long discussion after that first time I saw it, because I saw it at the opening weekend when I was at a Star Wars Science Fiction Convention in Dallas, Texas – the big one. There were about 8,000 people. The next day, lots of people asked me about it, and I said, "Well, I'm not the one really to ask about it. You either like it or you don't." In talking to smaller groups, and some of the people I was with, it felt to me like the dramatic potential of the story and the way the story went wasn't handled as well as it might have been, and that's always a very subjective thing. There are lots of ways you can do it. Any ten filmmakers would have taken the same script and made it ten different ways. I'm not sure how valid that kind of criticism is. In the end, it's what you like or don't like. As I said before, there's no good or bad or right or wrong, so to say you don't like something is perfectly valid. To say it isn't great, because I would have made it better, is not so valid.
IGNFF: Do you think that he felt he'd outgrown the need for a set of controls... A "no-man"?
KURTZ: I don't know. I don't think we ever talked about it in those terms, but I think that he did chafe a bit under the idea of someone saying "that's not a good idea," some of the time. At the very end of Empire ... we decided at the very last minute – we pretty much locked the picture in the mix and just getting ready to make 70mm prints – and we decided that there had to an extra shot at the very end, to identify this rebel fleet.
If you remember how the end works, it's before you go into the medical department, who are working on Mark's hand. It's the establishing shot of the fleet, and we had a shot already of going into the window and showing Mark inside, and we just decided that it was confusing We didn't know exactly how that was sorted out, so we wanted a long shot at the beginning, and then one at the end that shows the whole fleet when the Falcon flies off. They weren't very difficult to do, and all the ships were there ... just pile up the composites, and they were rushed through, just to get it done. Very last minute. One of them wasn't particularly good, and George said, "Oh well, maybe we should just let it go."
I said, "It's worth at least one more go through. One bad shot can ruin the whole movie, basically." Which I really believe is true, and it just wasn't very good. It was just a compositing problem, had nothing to do with the individual shot elements – I can't even remember what shot it was, now. I think making a movie wears everybody down. You have to be really careful of the decisions you make at the very end, because you can kind of throw a monkey wrench in, very easily.
So basically George Lucas turned to the darkside, falling victim to the "it's good enough", the quicker, flashier, easier, more seductive ways to making a film, and became like the monopolizing executives he hated when starting out to make Star Wars.
The Irony...
