Originally posted by The Nature Boy
Well, he doesn't get credit for the Tech work at Skywalker or ILM in my mind. He gets props for aiming high and setting high standards with those companies, but there are literally probably 1000's doing the nuts and bolts work of the innovation and execution.

Originally posted by resinrats
Not to start the normal war, but if going by this, doesn't this mean a more recent Oscar winner doesn't deserve the credit for most of the awards because others did the work that won the awards?

Originally posted by El-Kabong
The problem is - way back in the mid 1970's, George bucked the system, went against the industry rules (no credits on Star Wars and so on), and basicly gave The Finger to the academy. The academy, being a political pony show (anyone who thinks that an Oscar is given on artistic merit is sadly deluded) has never forgotten this. As such, they snub George at every chance they get.

Originally posted by Jackskeleton
The biggest Indie film maker around.

What turned him away from Hollywood was the way his earlier films were treated in production. It bugged him having to bend to the studios commands in order to get a film out. He felt his story telling was being destroyed.

The fact that the best Star Wars movie by far was not directed by the man who actually gave birth to the story is no coincidence.

Actually he does go against the Hollywood system. He is basically an independant filmaker who makes really expensive independant films.

if Lucas was really this artist just bursting with creativity to tell stories that move people then that's what he would be doing.

i'll give him mad props for all that he has done on the technical side

he has no new themes to explore, no new stories to tell.

Typical! Lucas bashers always want to give him credit for just technical things. They don't ever want to give him anymore credit than that.

Again, definitive statements about a man you've never even met. That's talking out of your butt.

Are the LOTR movie/extended versions all that different? Jackson wanted to go back and make the story more consistent and flesh out some of the characters more to make it flow better film to film. Just because he did it in a span of a couple years vs. 12 doesn't make him much different.

Originally posted by JBurns24
So let's say for example 20 years down the road for whatever reason Jackson decides to alter the LOTR movies, will that change your opinion of him too?
The only reason Lucas doesn't give fans a choice is because he's always said these are the way the movies were supposed to be, if the movies were being made today we'd only have the Special Editions so it nees to be looked at from that perspective.

IGNFF: I've heard different stories. One was that it was never intended to be in the film, that it was just a let's see if we can do this, and replace it later. The other school of thought was, it was always supposed to be there.

KURTZ: Well, the original idea was that it was supposed to be there. It is in the script ... but it was a guy, a human being, this sort of fat guy... looked a bit like Sydney Greenstreet... and the scene is pretty much, I mean dialogue wise, it's exactly what you see in the Special Edition. But it was a person that was there, and we had technical difficulties with that scene. We shot it over three times for camera problems, focus problems, and film stock problem, and then abandoned it because we ran out of time. We just said, "Well, the bulk of the information that comes across in that scene, about Jabba threatening Han Solo and wanting his money and all of that, we could get across in the scene in the Cantina, with Greedo." It's basically the same kind of information. So we just added some bits to the Greedo scene to make it a little bit longer that gets across that information, and then jettisoned that other scene. This all happened while we were shooting. It wasn't done in the cutting room.

IGNFF: So it was made at the time of shooting, that the decision was basically made that that scene would be excised.

KURTZ: Yes, because of the focus problems, and it was slightly redundant anyway because some of the information was already in the Greedo scene – so why not make all the information in the Greedo scene and eliminate the Jabba scene altogether? That's what happened.

IGNFF: Now, also the story has arisen that George had always intended prequels, but had never intended sequels to that initial three films.

KURTZ: After this idea of more films came up, he did several interviews where he said he had story material to do nine films – three prequels and three sequels. That was the accepted story, basically, and there was quite a bit of material both before and after the Star Wars lump. So there was no decision to do either one... it was kind of a red herring in a way, because there was no immediate thought to make any other films right away. In a sense, through a business point of view, it probably would have been better to do so, like they did with Star Trek, rather than wait all this time, because the audience interest dissipated somewhat. I mean, it didn't seem to affect the box office on Phantom Menace too much, but ...

IGNFF: It didn't exactly leave a good taste in people's mouths, either.

KURTZ: Well, regardless of the value of the film as a film, artistically, there is a kind of energy around some things where if it had come out say three, four years later after Jedi, and then another one three or four years later after that, that kind of cycle would have probably been better for the audience and for the merchandising than what happened. But that's hindsight. At that time, he always said that he had enough material for three earlier films and three later films, to make a total of nine, and there were outlined materials certainly for a later three that culminated with this big clash with the Emperor in Episode IX. So, we'll never see any of those, based on what he's said now.

IGNFF: Well what were the original outlines for the prequels? Since they can be compared and contrasted now that the first one's out there, and the second one's soon to be out there. Were there major differences from what you saw, from the original outlines of prequel ideas?

KURTZ: Well a lot of the prequel ideas were very, very vague. It's really difficult to say. I can't remember much about that at all, except dealing with the Clone Wars and the formation of the Jedi Knights in the first place – that was supposed to be one of the keys of Episode I, was going to be how the Jedi Knights came to be. But all of those notes were abandoned completely. One of the reasons Jedi came out the way it did was because the story outline of how Jedi was going to be seemed to get tossed out, and one of the reasons I was really unhappy was the fact that all of the carefully constructed story structure of characters and things that we did in Empire was going to carry over into Jedi. The resolution of that film was going to be quite bittersweet, with Han Solo being killed, and the princess having to take over as queen of what remained of her people, leaving everybody else. In effect, Luke was left on his own. None of that happened, of course.

IGNFF: So it would have been less of a fairy-tale ending?

KURTZ: Much, much less. It would have been quite sad, and poignant and upbeat at the same time, because they would have won a battle. But the idea of another attack on another Death Star wasn't there at all ... it was a rehash of Star Wars, with better visual effects. And there were no Ewoks ... it was just entirely different. It was much more adult and straightforward, the story. This idea that the roller-coaster ride was all the audience was interested in, and the story doesn't have to be very adult or interesting, seemed to come up because of what happened with Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Indiana Jones films – and the fact that that seemed to make a lot of money and it didn't matter whether there was a really good story or not – that wasn't what this kind of film was about. We had serious differences about a lot of that.

IGNFF: When you talk about the development of Star Wars and the transition in tone through Empire and Return of the Jedi and now eventually what happened with Episode I, do you think that George's storytelling became more simplistic, or less mature? How would you characterize the elements that you saw emerging with the difficulties that were happening towards the end of Empire and what eventually led to Return of the Jedi?

KURTZ: I think it became simpler. You don't need complicated interpersonal relationships, you don't need difficult dramatic structures for this kind of story. Empire, in a way, is a typical second act of a three-act play. It's the problem act – everybody has problems, everybody has difficulties that they're trying to get out of, and usually the end of the second act is you're leaving everybody in deep shit. And, in a sense, Empire does that. Luke's hand is cut off, and Han Solo is frozen and he's off somewhere – all of the key elements are left unresolved. It's very rare that you see a feature film that ends that way and is satisfactory.

We were a bit afraid of that whole concept. Knowing that there was going to be a third film obviously helped, but still – that wasn't going to be for another three years, so the idea of presenting this to an audience and having them accept it was a scary proposition. I had never done it before. It seemed to work, though. It seemed to work quite well. The audience was very satisfied, and anticipated the next part. I think part of the reason that they were satisfied was because they were satisfied with the characters themselves. The characters seemed believable in the story.

Star Wars, the first film, is very much a comic book story. It's a very archetypal standard story about a hero coming of age and engaging with the world and trying to right some wrongs – and all of those things worked very, very effectively – but the dialogue is fairly pedestrian as far as movies go, and the adventure is carried along by interesting side bars and some of the individual effects... and the fact that it's kind of a rollercoaster ride in a sense, with very, very archetypal energy, so that you can associate with the key character elements very, very easily.

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.

IGNFF: How did you observe that change in George, because obviously he was the one who guided it towards that lack of depth...

KURTZ: Well, I think that he felt Empire was an ordeal for him – using his own money, it went over budget and over schedule a bit. Kershner was slow, we had some problems with Mark Hamill who had an injury – typical movie stuff, really. But even though it did cost a little more than was budgeted, there was no way it was ever going to lose money. He really didn't have to worry too much about it – the combination of the merchandising and the distribution would never be a problem.

IGNFF: It was never George's intention to direct Empire?

KURTZ: No, no. After Star Wars, he didn't really want to direct the others. I think he was unhappy that I – I'm the one that recommended Kershner, and had worked with him before. I think he was a good choice for Empire, I think he worked really well, but he wasn't the kind of director... George, I think, had in the back of his mind that the director was a sort of stand-in – that he could phone him up every night and tell him what to do and kind of direct vicariously over the telephone. That never happened. Kershner's not that kind of director, and even when George showed up a couple of times on the set, he found that it wasn't easy to maneuver Kershner into doing what he would have done.

So, on Jedi, he was determined to find a director who was easy to control, basically, and he did. And that was the result, basically – the film was sort of one that George might have directed if he had directed it himself... but maybe not, because it goes through so many interim bits, that if he had directed it probably would have been quite different.

the problem with the Special Edition of the Star Wars films is that fixing a few matte lines and adding a couple of spaceships into shots is fine. I don't think anybody would notice that. But actually adding scenes that don't make any difference – they actually don't have any effect whatsoever on the film... and all of those digitally enhanced shots of robots floating around and creatures walking through the frame... call attention to themselves. Are much worse, actually, I think. Primarily because CGI work – and that CGI work was done by ILM, which is the best there is – the CGI stuff does not fit in with the mechanical style of the original film. If the whole film would have been made today, then the CGI work would fit in much more, because that's the way all the visual effects would have been done.

IGNFF: Oh, I don't know – in Episode I, the CGI still calls attention to itself.

KURTZ: Well, it does, yes, that's true. Even though there's lots of it and most of the shots have some kind of CGI – but it's less annoying, I think, and stands out less than it does in the Special Editions.

If you remember the scene when the robots go down to Tatooine, to the desert, and then later you cut back to the Stormtroopers looking for them, there's a scene where Stormtroopers are sitting up on the hill in the background riding what looks like a giant lizard. In the original, that's a mock-up that we borrowed, rendered from a prop house, and carried all the way out there and stuck it there in the sand. It didn't do anything. There was just a Stormtrooper sitting on a giant lizard, a model. It doesn't do anything – it's just in the background and the Stormtrooper in the foreground stands up with a piece of the robot and says, "They've been here." That's all the scene is supposed to be for. As it is in the Special Edition, that Stormtrooper on the dinosaur in the background moves – it's all CGI.

IGNFF: And it adds nothing whatsoever to the story.

KURTZ: I know, and that's what I mean with the proliferation. Just because you can do it, doesn't make it better. But those animals moving actually distract from the principal purpose of the scene. If they had been horses, if it had been a Western and those were horses, chances are the horses would have just been sitting there, because horses do that a lot. They don't move much. If they're not running or trotting or something, sometimes they just sit there – and maybe flick their ears a bit – for long periods of time.

IGNFF: But they don't do a song and dance number.

KURTZ: No, they don't move around at all. They just stand there. If they had made it that subtle, if they had had that creature in the background move its head an inch to the right or something, a blink – that would have been all that you need to do. But it's not necessary at all, because the way it was in the beginning, in the first place, it was that way because that's all we could afford and it worked fine. I'm just not a great believer in messing with what is done. It may not be perfect, and as I said a long time ago, there's nothing that is. No movie is perfect, and every filmmaker is going to sit and watch a movie that he made 10 years ago, or 30 years ago, or 50 years ago, and say, "Oh, I wish I could have done that better."

IGNFF: You're the person to ask about this – when you're talking about these kind of special editions and changes and are they due to an original vision or changing sensibilities – I have to ask you about your thoughts regarding the infamous redo of the scene with Greedo in the cantina.... the whole shooting first thing.

KURTZ: Yeah, I really was livid about that one. I think it was a total – it ruins the scene, basically. The scene was never intended that way. Han Solo realized that Greedo was out to get him and he had to blast him first or he would lose his life. It shows you how much of a mercenary he is. That's what the point of the scene was. And so the way they've changed it around, it loses the whole impact of that whole aspect of it.

IGNFF: Do you think that's due to George's changing sensibilities as opposed to his argument that, "No, that was my original intention"?

KURTZ: Well, he can say that was his original intention, but we could have shot it that way very easily. There was no reason that it couldn't have been shot that way. It was shot and edited the way it was because that's the way the script was. That's what he wanted at the time.

IGNFF: What is your opinion of why he would try and rationalize it, when he could very well just say, "You know, I just thought nowadays, it's better if he shoots first."

KURTZ: Maybe he just didn't want to say that. Maybe he felt it was a stronger argument to say, "That's what I really wanted to do and I just didn't have time or inclination at the time." You listen to all these directors, they all say that. That's the stock argument ... somehow if they say that, you can't argue with them.

Originally posted by JBurns24
Let's say 7 or 8 years down the road Peter Jackson does direct The Hobbit, if he then goes back to the LOTR trilogy and alter some things to make it fit together better than that will there be as many critics as Lucas has gotten?