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Mr. Fantasy: George Lucas on his controversial edits to ''Star Wars''

The director of the classic ''Trilogy'' -- available for the first time on DVD -- talks about the franchise's past and future by Mark Harris

As the whole moviegoing world knows by now, George Lucas grew up on cliff-hanger movie serials, so it's especially momentous that the 60-year-old writer-director-technological innovator is at last about to wrap up all of the plot threads and close the book on a three-decade phase of his career that he still, surprisingly, refers to as a ''detour.'' This week brings the long-awaited arrival of the revised (he prefers ''completed'') editions of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and </i>Return of the Jedi</i> on DVD, with retoolings that will delight many fans and frustrate some film preservationists.

At the same time, a double-disc edition of Lucas' first film, 1971's dark, dystopian THX 1138, in which Lucas directed a young Robert Duvall, offers buffs a chance to see a considerably grimmer vision of a George Lucas future world and get a taste of the semi-abstract experimental filmmaking that he once expected would define his career. And next May 19 will bring the release of Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith, the movie that finally reveals just how and why Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader, and is likely to push the Star Wars franchise's worldwide grosses close to the $4 billion mark.

On a recent visit to New York City during which Lucas, his early boss Francis Ford Coppola, and his THX 1138 coscreenwriter-sound designer Walter Murch reunited to celebrate THX's rerelease, Lucas sat down with EW to talk about Star Wars' past, present, and future.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What's the line between restoring a film and altering it? Obviously, the versions of the Star Wars Trilogy and THX 1138 on DVD go far beyond what we saw in theaters.
GEORGE LUCAS Film is so expensive, and it's run by corporations. They just take it away from you, and it's frozen in time at the point where it got yanked out of your hands. I've been lucky enough to be able to go back and say ''No, I'm going to finish this the way it was meant to be finished.'' When Star Wars came out, I said it didn't turn out the way I wanted -- it's 25 percent of what I wanted it to be. It was very painful for me. So the choice came down to, do I please myself and [finally] make the movie that I wanted, or do I allow the audience to see the half-finished version that they fell in love with?

If you really look at it, there's hardly any changes at all. The thing that really caused the trouble on Star Wars is the whole question of whether Han Solo or Greedo shoots first. The way it got cobbled together at the time, it came off that [Han] fired first. He didn't fire first.

So you consider this a correction?
It's a correction. [When I made Star Wars] I said, ''Well, I don't have that shot, so I'll just, you know, fudge it editorially.'' In my mind [Greedo] shot first or at the same time. We like to think of [Han Solo] as a murderer because that's hip -- I don't think that's a good thing for people. I mean, I don't see how you could redeem somebody who kills people in cold blood. Every [other change] is, you know, I wanted to have a good matte painting here.

Nobody seems to mind the [idea of a] ''director's cut.'' But to go the next step and say, had they given me another week's shooting, or another $50,000 to finish these matte paintings, this is what the film would look like -- well, it's not a matter of changing your mind. Star Wars was not meant, in the end, to be seen more than once in a movie theater. It was designed to be a large theatrical experience that, if you saw it once on a giant screen, would blow you away. But this was before there was such a thing as DVD. If you went down and sort of analyzed it and looked at it frame by frame, you can see the tricks that are going on. There's a lot of stuff that's very thin, as in any old movie.

Can you envision a future in which a filmmaker who didn't get the actor he wanted the first time can drop in a new performance to ''perfect'' the movie?
It has to do with the creative predilections of the director -- what he wants and how strongly he feels about it. But you could do that. The real issue is, who has the right to do that? I fall 100 percent on the side of the right of the artist to alter it.

You've said that in Star Wars, you were trying to capture something for young viewers that would connect with the fun that you had at Saturday-afternoon serials. But the saga is actually pretty sad. If you take it as the story of the guy who became Darth Vader, isn't it a six-movie series about someone losing his humanity?
But being resurrected by his children. We all have to make up for our fathers, you know. Believe me, our kids are really going to have a job making up for the sins that are going on right now. That's a classic theme, you know -- if one generation succumbs, it's up to the next generation to redeem that generation.

Say that it's 2010, and I'm a 10-year-old coming to Star Wars movies for the first time. Should I start with Episode IV (Star Wars) or Episode I (Phantom Menace)?
[Your order should be] I, II, III, IV, V, VI. Part of the fun for me is that one generation will have seen it backwards. For the next generation that sees it from I to VI, there are a lot of things in IV [Star Wars] that were just fantastic [in 1977] -- you know, the cantina -- which aren't going to work. In those days, you didn't put monsters in a bar. A monster was a thing that came from a spaceship and ate everybody. Now every [sci-fi] bar you walk into has got aliens.

[But] what's really important is the story, and the development of the characters. Now, once you get to IV, you know Darth Vader's the main character because you saw him [in previous movies]. So when Darth Vader walks in, you say, oh, my God. Now, when you come across Princess Leia, you know that's his daughter right away, and you think, does he know? No, he doesn't know. Or does he know? And when you cut down to the planet and see Luke, you go, oh, my God, that's Darth Vader's son, and Ben Kenobi has been waiting all this time to send him on his adventure. You're waiting for them to realize who everybody is. So it is a completely different movie.

You tend not to be very optimistic about whether your movies will be hits. You had grave doubts about both American Graffiti and Star Wars. Has that persisted with the second trilogy?
I said, well, [Phantom Menace] is not going to work because I'm making it about a 10-year-old boy, and nobody is going to want to go see this. It's like one of these Disney movies or Benji movies. People don't want that -- they want to see Darth Vader, and I'm not giving them Darth Vader, so don't expect this thing to be a hit. And then [Attack of the Clones] is a love story. It's old-fashioned like in the '40s, you know, it's not a modern, hip, happening romantic comedy with the Olsen twins. It's kind of corny and it's using an aesthetic that is out of use now. I'm not sure whether young people are going to take to it. So at least Darth Vader is in [Episode III]. Only for two minutes, but he's in it. If you take them all together it's a fascinating saga.

Watching THX -- which deals with a totalitarian culture and the consequences of rampant consumerism -- alongside the Star Wars movies suggests that you're a surprisingly political filmmaker.
I'm very interested in politics, and I try to deal with political themes. The thing is, I make my movies my way, and they have sort of been taken as light entertainment. But I put in a lot of my own feelings and views.

Would the Empire have referred to the Rebel Alliance as terrorists, rhetorically?
That's a very politically charged word. I'm not sure terrorists have defined themselves as terrorists -- they have defined themselves as rebels. And that's what we were, you know, we're the rebels. We are a nation of terror, we came out of terrorism -- well, I mean, for God's sake, we are rebels, but the British wouldn't have described us that way. If you were to look at [Star Wars] for what it actually is -- get rid of all that cool stuff -- one of its major issues is how you get from a democracy into a dictatorship without a coup. How did the Senate turn it over to Caesar? How did France turn over their republic to Napoléon? And how did Germany hand their country over to Hitler?

That's embedded in the three films that are coming out now. When the third one is put in, you'll say, ''Oh, I see how that all works.'' The controversy is going to be that people expect some horrible, horrific thing to happen to [Anakin] that caused him to [become Darth Vader]. It's much subtler. It's something that everybody faces -- when you're looking at yourself, you can see your good and your bad, and say, ''Is this a selfish choice or is this a compassionate choice? And once I get something, what would I do to keep from losing it? Would I make a pact with the devil to keep it?''

You're pretty definitive about not making the once-rumored third Star Wars trilogy -- episodes VII, VIII, and IX.
I'm not going to do it. I'm too old. I've got other movies I want to do. And I don't want anybody else to do it, so I've locked it up so nobody can ever do it. There may be TV offshoots from people, but the saga itself, the story of the Skywalker family, is over.

(This is an AOL-only excerpt from Entertainment Weekly's Sept. 24, 2004, issue.)