Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  When it came to the second one, people were more panicked. They said, “Everybody hated the first one, and they’re going to hate the second even more because you’re doing a love story. Bring Darth Vader in now!” I said, “Look, it’s a story. For God’s sake, let’s tell the story. We’ll make it to the third one, and then Darth Vader will show up. Everybody will be happy and then the story will be finished. If we don’t make any money on it, fine. I’ve got to make my movies and tell my stories.”

  RICK MCCALLUM

  I say this in the nicest possible way, but Star Wars is a curse and a blessing. George started off as a really small filmmaker. If you track his career, his relationship with Francis Coppola—this incredible, dynamic relationship that the two of them have had—Francis is the one who forced George to go out and write his own movies. And then George wrote and directed something that, not in his wildest dreams, did he think would work or, much less, give him a chance to do six of them. Money is one thing, but that has never been George’s main motivation. The ability to control the destiny of his own life, to be completely independent of the Hollywood machine—and in a way no other filmmaker has ever really been—those are the important things to him. And he has achieved that.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  I’m not sure if my career would have gone in a different way without Star Wars. Star Wars is a very big, consuming thing. I’m a little surprised at how big it got and how much it has dominated my life. I don’t regret it. It has been a very interesting experience and very rewarding. I didn’t go back and do another film. I stopped after Jedi, because I was burned out on it. I didn’t want to do it anymore. It’s a nine-year commitment. And when I went to do this one, I knew I had another nine-year commitment. And that’s a big deal. People say, “Well, why didn’t you do another nine-year commitment?” I just didn’t want to. I said, “This will be fine. This will be fun. And this will be it.”

  * * *

  At the time of the release of The Phantom Menace, Lucas was asked if he planned on doing Episodes VII, VIII, and IX, to which he responded, “I will not do VII, VIII, and IX.” The follow-up was, “You will not? Will they be made by somebody else?” and he replied, “No. They will not. This is it. This is all there is.” Well, as time would show, he was right about one thing: he wouldn’t make them … but there would be more Star Wars adventures. A lot more.

  Part Four

  THE SEQUELS AND BEYOND

  2012–

  13

  FORCE FED: THE FORCE AWAKENS

  “Chewie, we’re home.”

  Back in 1980—at the time The Empire Strikes Back was released—George Lucas gave an interview to Jim Steranko’s late Prevue magazine regarding Star Wars, and acknowledged the fact that he had plans for a total of nine films in the saga. He detailed that what he started with was an “overlong screenplay” for the first film, so he took that script and divided it into three stories, then rewrote the first one. “Then,” he said, “I had the other two films, which were essentially split into three parts each, two trilogies. When the smoke cleared, I said, ‘This is really great. I’ll do another trilogy that takes place after this.’ I had three trilogies of nine films, and then another couple of odd films. It’s a nine-part saga that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It progresses over a period of about fifty or sixty years with about twenty years between trilogies, each trilogy taking about six or seven years.”

  MARK HAMILL

  (actor, “Luke Skywalker”)

  When I first did Star Wars, it was supposed to be four trilogies. Twelve movies! And out on the desert, any time between setups, George was talking about this whole thing. I said, “Why are you starting with IV, V, and VI? It’s crazy.” He said the first trilogy’s “darker, more serious.” And then he said, “How’d you like to be in Episode IX?” This is 1976. “When is that gonna be?” “2011.” I defy anyone to add thirty-six years to their lives and not be stunned. Even an eight-year-old is like, “No, I’ll never be forty-seven.” So, I did the math and figured out how old I’d be. I said, “Well, what do you want me to do in Episode IX?” He said, “You’ll just be a cameo. You’ll be like Obi-Wan handing the lightsaber down to the next new hope.” So, I went, “Sure.” But I thought that he’d just realized he’s going to be doing it the rest of his life and he’d rather not do that.

  * * *

  A few years later, Lucas spoke to Starlog magazine, noting, “It’s a long way from the plot to the script. I’ve just gone through that with Return of the Jedi and what seems like a great idea when it’s described in three sentences, doesn’t hold together when you try to make five or six scenes out of it. So, plots change a lot when they start getting into script form.”

  Many things change as time goes on. For instance, when he completed production of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Lucas made it pretty clear that as far as Star Wars was concerned, he was finished; the story had come to its proper conclusion. Flash forward to 2011. Disney CEO Bob Iger had approached him about selling Lucasfilm to the Walt Disney Corporation. Although Lucas had considered retiring, the timing to do so just didn’t feel right to him. Instead, he asked producer Kathleen Kennedy—at that point working on Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln—to lunch. Cutting to the chase, he asked her if she was interested in joining Lucasfilm as cochair, with leadership being transferred to her the following year. Ultimately Kennedy said yes and she started with Lucasfilm on June 1, 2012, tasked with developing new films and managing existing assets.

  KATHLEEN KENNEDY

  (president, Lucasfilm, Ltd.)

  When George asked me to have lunch with him and he said, “I’m retiring and I’m thinking about moving on. I’d like somebody to come in and carry on this legacy,” I thought he was going to ask me recommendations on who might do that. I said, “Who are you thinking about?” He said, “Well, I was thinking about you.”

  GEORGE LUCAS

  (creator, Star Wars)

  I’ve spent my life building Lucasfilm, and as I shifted my focus into other directions, I wanted to make sure it was in the hands of someone equipped to carry my vision into the future. It was important that my successor not only be someone with great creative passion and proven leadership abilities, but also someone who loves movies.

  KATHLEEN KENNEDY

  George and I talked about the opportunities that lie ahead for the company, and as George was moving toward retirement, I was honored that he trusted me with taking care of the beloved film franchises. I feel fortunate to have had George working by my side as I took on this role—it’s nice to have Yoda by your side.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  When Kathy came on, we started talking about starting up the whole franchise again. I was pulling away and I said, “I’ve got to build this company up so it functions without me, and we need to do something to make it attractive.” So I said, “Well, let’s just do these movies [the Star Wars sequels].”

  RAY MORTON

  (senior editor, Script magazine)

  In the early 2010s, George Lucas began writing the outlines for a new trilogy of Star Wars films that would serve as a sequel to the original trilogy. In interviews, he has stated that his stories focused on the grandchildren of Anakin Skywalker—a girl and a boy sometimes described as being teenagers and sometimes as being in their twenties. The girl was strong with the Force and definite Jedi material. Luke, Han, and Leia would also appear in the movies.

  PETER HOLMSTROM

  (cohost, The Rebel & the Rogue podcast)

  Like the prequel trilogy before, Lucas had the idea to rerelease the previous films, this time all six of them being in 3D, and use the box office earnings to fund the new trilogy. Again, he’s an independent filmmaker, and didn’t want to be beholden to studios holding the purse strings. Episode I came out in 3D in 2012 and didn’t do well. I don’t know if that was the nail in the coffin that convinced him to sell Lucasfilm, but it probably didn’t help.

  It’s important to remember—2012 was a drastically
different time in our pop culture. Today, you see every cheerleader and jock wearing a Star Wars or Marvel T-shirt, but in 2012, being a nerd was still kind of a bad thing. This had been slowly changing, but it really wasn’t until the spectacle films of Marvel and DC dominated the box office schedules, post-Avengers, that that really occurred. But also, the public consciousness in 2012 was darker. People wanted The Dark Knight, they wanted the dark, gritty tale of murder and revenge. Breaking Bad, Mad Men, anti-heroes, and villainous villains. Where does Star Wars fit into that? That soon changed, but it’s easy to see why George’s projects weren’t as successful at the time.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  The original saga was about the father, the children, and the grandchildren.

  * * *

  The initial concept for the new trilogy reportedly would have focused on Anakin Skywalker’s grandchildren, to be about twenty years old. Offers the website Polygon.com: “In the book The Art of The Force Awakens, one of the characters, a Jedi named Kira, is described as a ‘loner, hothead, gear-headed badass.’ The other teen was most often referred to as Sam, and mostly appears depicted with a blaster, which seems to indicate that he didn’t have Force powers himself. Kira and Sam eventually morphed into Rey and some of Finn, which makes sense … Another major character who appears to have gotten a similar arc to their original version is Luke Skywalker.”

  In the pages of the art books for both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, author Phil Szostak says of the Luke character, “The late-2012 idea of a Luke Skywalker haunted by the betrayal of one of his students, in self-imposed exile and spiritually in a ‘dark place,’ not only precedes Rian Johnson’s involvement in Star Wars, but J.J. Abrams’ as well.”

  Later, concept artist Christian Alzmann posted an image of Luke that he created on Instagram, of which he said, “[In] January of 2013, Luke was being described as a Colonel Kurtz type hiding from the world in a cave.” Again, it was Lucas embracing themes of Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now.

  KATHLEEN KENNEDY

  I’ve known George a long time and I’ve worked with him, so it’s not as though we were sitting down and having a conversation for the first time. Everything George has done with Star Wars, right from the beginning, has been very personal, and I could clearly see that what was really important to him—and certainly important to me—was story. It really required getting inside his head and talking a lot about it. And we are very fortunate to have a lot of incredibly great people still within [Lucasfilm] that have spent a lot of years working with George and have had these kinds of conversations over the years. They greatly respect the stories and respect the franchise, and they’re still extremely involved in the decisions we make creatively. That’s probably the best way to describe how we began; it was over a period of time and many conversations.

  * * *

  George Lucas confided in James Cameron for his Story of Science Fiction documentary on AMC that “[the next three Star Wars films] were going to get into a microbiotic world. But there’s this world of creatures that operate differently than we do. I call them the Whills. And the Whills are the ones who actually control the universe. They feed off the Force. Back in the day, I used to say ultimately what this means is we were just cars, vehicles for the Whills to travel around in … We’re vessels for them. And the conduit is the midi-chlorians. The midi-chlorians are the ones that communicate with the Whills. The Whills, in a general sense, they are the Force.”

  George Lucas elaborated more recently on his plans for his abandoned sequel trilogy to journalist Paul Duncan. “I had planned for the first trilogy to be about the father, the second trilogy to be about the son, and the third trilogy to be about the daughter and the grandchildren. Episodes VII, VIII, and IX would take ideas from what happened after the Iraq War,” he revealed. “Rebuilding afterwards is harder than starting a rebellion or fighting the war. When you win the war and you disband the opposing army, what do they do? The stormtroopers would be like Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist fighters that joined ISIS and kept on fighting. The stormtroopers refuse to give up when the Republic wins.”

  Filling the power vacuum left by the demise of the Empire would be a familiar villain: Darth Maul. “There’s a power vacuum so gangsters, like the Hutts, are taking advantage of the situation, and there is chaos.” Taking advantage of that chaos would be Darth Maul, whose resurrection was chronicled in The Clone Wars and the Rebels TV series. The character was also reintroduced in live action in a brief cameo in Solo as the head of the Crimson Dawn crime syndicate, which would have explored similar territory had the movie succeeded and led to sequels.

  JOHN KENNETH MUIR

  (author, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of the 1970s)

  I have read about it a lot, and it sounds weird and strange and unconventional. Those are all qualities that might have moved Star Wars into a new and genuinely thrilling chapter, and allowed it to continue innovating in the cinema. Everyone would go to see those new movies, so Lucas could have made the most expensive, daring, experimental film ever and introduced it to a vast audience. I champion Lucas for wanting to take his conceived third trilogy in a new direction, rather than rehash and give us another Death Star. I would rather have something weird and different, having seen the mish-mash, generic-blockbuster films of the Disney trilogy, frankly.

  PETER HOLMSTROM

  Information about George’s notion for the sequel trilogy is a bit vague—but what we’ve been able to glean throughout the years is as follows. Luke was missing. The Republic and the Empire still exist, but aren’t at war. However, they both had splinter groups which were hell-bent on keeping the war alive through acts of terrorism. Again, reflecting the world we live in, if the original trilogy was George’s sci-fi take on Vietnam, and the prequels was his take on the rise of a Donald Trump–like dictator, then the sequels would be his take on the war on terror. Both sides had superweapons, and our heroes are in the middle, advocating for a middle path. Again—balance. Peace.

  Thea (who would eventually be called Rey) lived on a junk planet, but was always a princess in hiding. Hidden Fortress–style. Luke is in hiding, not because he’s ashamed of some mistake or whatever, but instead knows the universe would be better off without the exploration of the Force. He knows Force-users are potential weapons of mass destruction, and wants to snuff it out. The enemies of the trilogy are not remakes of Vader and the Emperor, but are instead corporations—scientists—who have devised a way to artificially manipulate the midi-chlorians within life-forms to create their own supersoldiers. Artificial Jedi/Sith, if you will. Thea (who we’re pretty sure was always Han and Leia’s kid) arrives to convince Luke to rejoin the fight. The metaphorical battle between spiritualism and those who would co-opt spiritualism for selfish purposes would follow. Also, the notion of spiritual morality and intellectual morality. No one was to die until Luke becomes one with the Force at the end of Episode IX, after completing Leia’s training.

  Those are interesting ideas to chew on. Reflective of our current world, and expanding on what Star Wars means. Anakin was the Chosen One, Luke fulfilled what it meant to bring balance to the Force, and the new generation would have to learn to live and carry on with that.

  RAY MORTON

  Lucas intended to develop the midi-chlorian concept more than he had in the prequel trilogy, introducing an ancient life-form called the Whills that use the midi-chlorians to control the actions of Force-sensitive individuals and thus rule the galaxy. Then, in 2012, Lucas hired Academy Award–winning screenwriter Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine, Toy Story 3) to develop his outlines into full treatments. He also approached Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher about appearing in the new films and they agreed to participate. Lucas intended to direct at least the first film in the new trio.

  DALE POLLOCK

  (author, Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas)

  And, who knows, if Disney hadn’t come along and offered him $4 billion, he might’ve directed thes
e last three films himself. He was certainly starting to prepare them and he had no intention of hiring another director. Now would those films have been better had they been directed by George Lucas? Who knows. In the last one, he may have been able to pull up a certain emotional component, because it was all so personal to him. It might’ve worked, but on the whole, based on the prequels, I think they would have been worse.

  RAY MORTON

  That was around the same time he hired producer Kathleen Kennedy, with whom he had worked on the Indiana Jones movies, to become Lucasfilm Ltd.’s cochairman. Lucas wanted Kennedy to help him make the sequels and then take over the company after Lucas retired, which he planned to do at the conclusion of the new trilogy.