zombie84 said:
1990osu said:
^^People who say that the less Lucas was involved, the better the movies were. The idea that Gary Kurtz was this genius and he and Marcia Lucas saved SW from being a flop, and Irvin Kirshner and Kurtz were the only reason ESB was good.
Part of that is true, but Lucas was also part of the team and that's where he worked best. When he went off on his own, the supports he relied upon weren't there and the films sucked. Plus, I think Lucas' skills diminished naturally with old age. But I don't think people argued that he was always talentless, just that his collaborations hid or offset the flaws he had. The only reason he collaborated was because he set that environment up in the first place, so it was a deliberate part of his method.
This is about how I feel on the issue.
Personally, I respect Lucas as a filmmaker a lot, but I do feel that a lot of the charm of Star Wars and Empire was due to the collaboration of a bunch of different minds (checks and balances, not just for Lucas, but for anyone involved with a bad idea), and the "MacGuyvered" nature they had, out of necessity due to the time and budget constraints on those first two films.
Once Jedi, and certainly the prequels, rolled around, Lucas had infinitely more monetary resources, more technology to call on, fewer people to answer to, and more final say, and because of that, he was able to make the films he, and he alone, wanted to make without other people meddling in your domain and without regard to compromises you made out of necessity before (which is entirely understandable as an artist), but, unfortunately, in the process he lost a lot of what had unintentionally made those movies feel so "real" and what made them have such an impact on cinematic and cultural history.
I feel that, if Lucas had started the Star Wars saga in 1999 with the same budget and freedom of control he had with the prequels, the series would not have been as highly regarded as it is, even if it was the pioneering film for the effects used.
I believe that Lucas has an incredible amount of talent and skill as a filmmaker and storyteller, but I think that he works better with a collaborative team behind him, and the same is really true for anyone in any line of work; being able to pull such a huge project off perfectly, alone, with no input or help from anybody else is an exceedingly rare gift, I certainly don't possess it, and I don't know anybody else who does, so it's not like it's a Lucas-specific thing; very few great films were the work of a single person.
