Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  GLEN OLIVER

  The argument someone probably made, somewhere along the line, was that investors, or audiences or whomever, didn’t want to do a Star Wars that was actually about much of anything. The safest, least challenging path equals asset protection. In all likelihood, Duel was probably scuttled because the Powers That Be made a safe choice. Economically, Disney and Lucasfilm probably feel it was the right choice. Artistically, and creatively, there’s plenty of arguments to the contrary.

  DAN MADSEN

  Personally, I preferred the pre-Disney days. The sense that Star Wars was not likely to be oversaturated—the sense of wonder that was evoked every time a Star Wars movie comes about. The little franchise that really could. In the Disney era, we know there will be more Star Wars. It’s a little less thrilling to have a movie drop onto screens, a little less unique to see a new series hitting the air. When it’s predictable, it’s … just not as special. And this may be one of the realities Disney should consider in the coming years. “The Star Wars Generation” was used to having to wait, and work for it, and wonder if more would come. All of which engaged passion and imagination far more fully than predictable patterns. The reality for fans has now been rewritten, and in doing so, a part of their very DNA as a fan has been indelibly impacted.

  GLEN OLIVER

  I preferred the more mercurial approach to Star Wars management, although I do think Lucas should’ve rallied his troops and beaten the canon situation far sooner than it actually happened. The situation felt a little scrappier, a little more home-grown, somehow a little truer and more genuine. Star Wars under Disney is just another cog in an incomprehensibly gargantuan corporate machine. Back in the day, by virtue of its very existence and its continued success, Star Wars was a reminder that anything can happen. We need more Little Engine stories these days; it saddens me that Star Wars has been diminished a bit.

  * * *

  One truth can’t be denied: four decades on, George Lucas’s Star Wars remains a remarkable motion picture—as fun and as entertaining and inspiring today as the day it was released. The film is still a monumental technical achievement and its profound influence on the craft and the business of filmmaking is still being felt. The trilogy created by Star Wars and its first two sequels, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, remains a unique and landmark cinematic event. And everything else that original trilogy spawned—the prequels, sequels, TV series, books, comics, toys, games, and all the rest—constitute a unique and ongoing pop culture phenomenon that has brought joy and wonder to millions of people the world over. May the Force be with it—always.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  (author, George Lucas: A Life)

  Overall, Lucasfilm is in fine hands. Disney is the biggest company in the world. They own everything now. They can market, they can merchandise, they can promote, they can distribute. It’s your one-stop shop for everything you want to do. It’s like James Bond or Woody Allen. Actors used to talk about how their agents would ask them if they wanted to do the next Woody Allen movie, and they would say yes. The agent would say, “Do you want to know what it’s about?” and the actor would say, “I don’t care…” Star Wars is that way. You know, it’s like, “Do you want to be in the next Star Wars?” “Absolutely.” Somebody like Laura Dern said about The Last Jedi, “I was so excited to be there.” That’s what’s going to happen with stars. People want to be a part of that iconic galaxy. Again, I think Star Wars is in good hands and it’s going to be around a long time.

  LIAM NEESON

  (actor, “Qui-Gon Jinn”)

  Star Wars provides escapism from newspaper headlines. During the Second World War, all these slushy old Hollywood films were made and people couldn’t get enough of them as an escape. I’m not saying that Star Wars is slushy entertainment. People are, I think, all feeling like three-legged stools. They’re totally confused and kind of don’t know, subconsciously, which way to turn. So seeing something like Star Wars makes a world that size become comfortable and understandable. It’s very appealing. It’s like a giant kid’s pacifier. They help to define a very confusing, complex world and made it palatable and understandable.

  J.J. ABRAMS

  The idea of good versus evil, light versus dark, is certainly the core of Star Wars. There’s the temptation of power and greed—the dark side—and the sacrifice and nobility of fighting for justice, which is the light. These are the tenets of the Star Wars universe, and all the props and gizmos and spaceships are incredibly cool, but the core and heart of the story is family and which path you’re going to take. The beauty of working on this movie was getting to play in this incredible sandbox that George Lucas created. Everyone who worked on The Rise of Skywalker approached it from a place of reverence, but everyone was also determined to do it proud and to tell that story of good versus evil. And, like the main characters of the film, we worked hard to make sure that the dark side gets its ass kicked!

  JEANINE BASINGER

  (film historian, founder and curator of the Cinema Archives of Wesleyan University)

  Star Wars shows the strength of visual storytelling. I think it shows how much these things matter to us. The people who saw Casablanca, the people who saw Stagecoach, the people who saw Best Years of Our Lives, It’s a Wonderful Life, Easy Rider, Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music—you see a movie and it stays with you. The model of the new Hollywood was such that Star Wars could stay with us in a very strong moneymaking, product-driven way. It’s also something that can regenerate itself by showing it to children over and over so that you create a whole new generation of people who will keep on with it. It’s a testament to the power of the story to how much we love stories. Look, people are still reading the book Little Women written in the 1800s, and we’re still making movies out of it, too. So, a great story with great characters in a setting that connects in any format will stay alive. Shakespeare’s plays are still being put on. So, it’s a testament to the power of the story that Star Wars told the tale of characters that we embraced and responded to and utilized incredibly intelligent technology that got that film up and moving and just sweeping viewers along.

  ANTHONY DANIELS

  Do I get sick of Star Wars? If I talk about it too much, I do. But generally, the fans and interviewers I talk to are so interested that they revive the interest in me. When people are intrigued, I should be glad of that and I am glad. And the fact that I wish I had gotten to play Hamlet, that’s private. I should be immensely grateful. People always ask me, “What would you be doing now if it wasn’t for Star Wars?” I generally reply that I would probably be working in a show shop. Who knows? But I’ve had this mighty piece of film in my life, this mighty character, and it’s neat to be that person. I genuinely believe that it’s in the eye of the beholder.

  KATHLEEN KENNEDY

  (president, Lucasfilm, Ltd.)

  It is funny how you end up saying things and then think, “That kind of sounds like the Force.” It continually reminds you that what George was creating was something that does have meaning. It comes back in different ways—in the way people establish their values and their idea of how to lead a good life. That’s inherent in Star Wars. And that is, I think, what we always have in mind. Yes, we’re exploring drama and telling a story about good and evil, and yes, it takes place in outer space, but it’s grounded in human values and compassion and generosity, and those are the ideas that were so important to George. And I think that has a lot to do with why it’s lasted.

  J.J. ABRAMS

  Since I was eleven years old, when I saw Star Wars for the first time, what it had at its core was a sense of possibility, optimism, and hope. It was the first movie that blew my mind. It didn’t matter how they did any of it, because it was all so overwhelmingly and entirely great. It was funny and romantic and scary and compelling and the visual effects just served it, so the approach had to be in that spirit, in an authentic and not in a Pollyanna-ish way. From the very beginning, this was about embracing a s
pirit that we love so desperately.

  KATHLEEN KENNEDY

  We’ve always recognized that it’s the Skywalkers, it’s a family and it’s a family drama. And the resolution around that is what was important in what we’re doing with this episode. So that was certainly the focus. But it’s also a huge opportunity for Star Wars now to take a pause and create the next saga, the next decade of movies, the next several generations of movies. That’s what I’m incredibly excited about. I think at the same time that we find resolution in this, that the fans get to experience all these beloved characters and that story coming to an end, it’s also launching a new beginning.

  16

  THIS IS THE WAY: STAR WARS ON TELEVISION

  “I will help you. I have spoken.”

  For all its success on the big screen over the past forty-plus years, it took quite some time for Star Wars to have any modicum of success on the small screen. Even beyond the infamous 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, in the mid-1980s there were the live-action TV movies Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure and Ewoks: Battle for Endor, as well as the animated series Ewoks and Star Wars: Droids. However, none of those made any mark on popular culture with the exception of the Holiday Special’s dubious distinction of being one of the worst holiday specials cum variety shows of all time.

  But Star Wars’ fortunes on television began to change in 2003 with the arrival of the traditionally animated series Star Wars: Clone Wars, airing in the form of twenty “micro-episodes” on Cartoon Network over its three seasons, the first two running three to five minutes each, and the third, twelve minutes each. It was set between the events of Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Developing the series was Russian-born Genndy Tartakovsky, creator of Samurai Jack, The Powerpuff Girls, and Dexter’s Laboratory. The series immediately caught the interest of fans with its distinctive animation style and unique take on the Star Wars mythos.

  GENNDY TARTAKOVSKY

  (director/executive producer, Star Wars: Clone Wars, 2003 to 2005 series)

  I was finishing up working on Samurai Jack and I was having dinner with two of my bosses. After dinner they were talking secretively and one of them said, “Let’s go ahead and tell him. We might be able to do an animated Star Wars, but they would only be one-minute episodes.” I said, “I don’t really want to do that, because they’re basically commercials if they’re one minute long.” I didn’t want to do it, but when they asked me if I had any interest at all, I said yes if there was more time for the episodes. They told George they had me and the team from Samurai Jack. George Lucas said, “Oh, I love Samurai Jack. They can have three minutes per episode.” So we were three minutes’ worth of Star Wars beyond what the initial idea was. I think they wanted to keep the episodes so short, because they were really afraid of somebody kind of ruining it, making it bad. I think the way George was thinking, if you do a minute, you really can’t do anything that bad, you can’t progress a story, you can’t really set up any characters or anything. I think he kind of got burned on some other things before, so he went into it very skeptically.

  * * *

  It was a genuine challenge to create a series that could capture the essence of Star Wars in what can best be described as bite-sized morsels, though each installment would have to have a beginning, a middle, and a cliffhanger.

  GENNDY TARTAKOVSKY

  Besides working on Star Wars, which is a huge pressure to begin with, we also had to ask ourselves what we could do in three minutes. The first thing I did was cut together three-minute episodes of Samurai Jack, just to see how long three minutes really is. And I realized that you could put a lot of stuff in. Of course, the more dialogue you put in, the less stuff you can do, because dialogue just eats up time. So, we planned it that way and thought that if we were telling one story, it would seem longer, and eventually someone will cut it together and it will be a movie.

  It was a challenge. The nice thing is that George very much became a fan of what we were doing. We had lunch once and he said, “It’s great to be able to jump around the universe and have fun and not be tied down to such a hard story structure.” That’s exactly what we did: we had fun and let loose. And his son was a really big fan of it, too, so that helped a lot. Actually, as soon as they started seeing them, they started talking about different avenues and different things we could do.

  * * *

  Tartakovsky’s short-form experiment didn’t live long, but it did inspire Lucas to take a deeper dive into animated Star Wars himself, but in a CG-animated format instead. The Clone Wars debuted as a 2008 theatrical film, which, like its predecessor, was set between Clones and Sith, and featured several already-produced segments for the weekly series and a new story as well. Ultimately, there would be a total of seven seasons and 133 episodes produced, and it would soon become one of the most acclaimed and beloved pieces of Star Wars storytelling, which in the mind of some fans even redeemed the prequels. The series would follow the adventures and evolution of Anakin Skywalker (voiced by Matt Lanter); Obi-Wan Kenobi (James Arnold Taylor); Anakin’s Padawan, Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein); Yoda (Tom Kane); a resurrected Darth Maul (Sam Witwer); and various clone troopers (Dee Bradley Baker).

  JOHN KENNETH MUIR

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

  I think the series is incredibly significant in filling in the period between films. The Clone Wars makes Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith actually play better. I am not a prequel hater, but the movies work even better if one has watched Clone Wars, which is quite an accomplishment.

  * * *

  Running the show was supervising director Dave Filoni, who had initially presumed that if he saw George Lucas once or twice a year during the process of making the series, that would be a lot. But as it turned out, Lucas began having a very active role in crafting the stories, guiding the visual direction, and honing the show into what it would become.

  DAVE FILONI

  (supervising director/executive producer, Star Wars: The Clone Wars)

  When I was working early on with [writer/producer] Henry Gilroy, we were trying to figure out what the character makeup of the show would be, and how we could produce a TV series based on the time period of the Clone Wars. Because the Clone Wars is so vast, it would literally take thousands of clones battling thousands of battle droids—so we were bouncing around more of an original-trilogy idea of a crew. We were coming up with the character makeup. Frankly, that character makeup is close to what we ended up with in Rebels. So it just goes to show you that those ideas don’t really die. When we took this idea in to George, he looked at it and went, “Hmmm. So, Anakin Skywalker is going to be doing this, and Obi-Wan is going to be doing this.” We had never assumed that we’d be working with those characters. My opinion was, “Who am I to write Anakin Skywalker?” But George was like, “I’m going to teach you all about this,” and he did. So we wound up with the show we did, under his direction.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  (creator/executive producer, Star Wars: The Clone Wars)

  It was exciting. We were experimenting to try to move the medium forward, and we succeeded beyond our wildest imagination. As a result, I felt, “Wow, this is worth putting on the big screen, because I think the fans would like to see it in theaters rather than only on television.” Animation and digital effects are quite different from each other. I’m not a big fan of realistic animation. I think that animation is an art form unto itself, and the whole artistic part of animation is the design graphics and style. To try to make something look like live-action is simply replication and it doesn’t make any sense to me. Special effects, on the other hand, truly are photo-real, and the whole point is that you can put them into a live-action film and people won’t know that they aren’t real. So they’re two different things.

  JOEL ARON

  (director of cinematography lighting, Star Wars: The Clone Wars)

  We don’t light it like ordinary animation.
Dave said to me in the beginning, “We need to think Frank Miller, get it very graphic, make it look very different.” And then one day George came in and had us push it even further, which was really good for the look. So because of that, we’ve tried to push it even more-so, cinematically. With influences from, obviously the feature films that are out there, but also the live-action movies that are out there. Drive, I’ll see the movie Drive and instantly I have to have that look. That scene reminds me of this scene, and we try to push it further cinematically. It just helps with, especially with what [the actors] are doing. I can’t just have them delivering lines to each other, you really have to feel it.

  HENRY GILROY

  (story editor, Star Wars: The Clone Wars)

  Even the subtitles in animation are so much different than in live-action. If you’re on a close-up of an actor’s face, and he says a big block of dialogue, you’ll be compelled to watch that dialogue, because the actor is putting so much really subtle bits of acting and emotions into that. You’re never going to get that same connection with a CG puppet face. Or you can, but usually not on a television budget. It’s a different kind of storytelling. You just have to be aware of it. I think the great thing about animation is you can do cinematic storytelling—larger scope—bigger things shooting at each other, whatever they are. Which brings more spectacle. But it takes extra work to bring those more intimate moments. We definitely tried to do that in The Clone Wars, by just trying to find the emotional reality of the scene. What’s the better form for that than war? Telling war stories—and George had the guts to say, “Oh yeah, you want to take out that battalion of clones for the story, go for it.” Nobody would want to do that in children’s television before Star Wars.