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Wood

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28-Nov-2005
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25-Feb-2013
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#158832
Topic
Why the saga has suffered because ESB was so good (IMO)
Time
There's a great (and long!) interview with Gary Kurtz, producer of Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back, that gives insight into how the creative process was different on the first two Star Wars movies and the last four:

http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/376/376873p1.html

KURTZ: 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.

...

KURTZ: 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!"

EDIT: URL'ized the URL