By When people think of Star Wars, they think of George Lucas. He brought the film series to life in the late 70s and, for better and for worse, he was the driving force behind the prequel trilogy.
But these new Star Wars movies are someone else’s baby now, with Lucasfilm now run by Kathleen Kennedy and Disney.
/Film notes that while Lucas had a script and ideas of where the new Star Wars movies should go, Disney decided they’d go a different direction.
“They weren’t that keen to have me involved anyway,” Lucas explained. “But at the same time, I said if I get in there I’m just going to cause trouble. Because they’re not going to do what I want them to do. And I don’t have the control to do that anymore. All I would do is muck everything up. So I said, ‘Okay, I will go my way, and I’ll let them go their way.'”
This split may be for the best–Lucas even likened his departure from Star Wars to a break-up. “When you break up with somebody, the first rule is no phone calls,” he explained. “The second rule, you don’t go over to their house and drive by to see what they’re doing. The third one is you don’t show up at their coffee shop and say you are going to burn it… You just say, ‘Nope, gone, history, I’m moving forward.'”
While Lucas gave life to Star Wars, the series now belongs to a new generation of fans. On top of that, his impulses as a storyteller proved more than a little shaky with the prequels, which felt like a clumsy step backwards in terms of the series’ narrative and the actual filmmaking.
Lucas has also expressed his long desire to return to experimental films, something he hasn’t done since THX-1138 in 1971. (Though why he mucked up the dystopian austerity of THX-1138 with that chintzy, unnecessary CG in the re-release is anyone’s guess.)
Star Wars: The Force Awakens comes out December 18th, and we’ll find out how Star Wars does without Lucas then.
[Vanity Fair via /Film]