What started as this, a modestly budgeted tale of a young farmhand
leaving home to discover his destiny as a Jedi knight,
is today on the cusp of a new awakening.
With excitement surrounding the latest film, The Force Awakens,
at fever pitch, 38 years on one man's space fantasy
has mushroomed into a multi-billion pound phenomenon.
It was like nothing we'd seen before.
It's the fairy tale of our time.
Choom-choom! Oh, come on!
There has been an awakening.
With an estimated budget of $200 million,
Episode VII - The Force Awakens is almost upon us.
The trailer alone has been viewed over 100 million times.
Have you felt it?
But how did the Star Wars story begin?
We'll be meeting those people who were behind the camera
and helped shape this universe back in the mid-'70s.
We were not allowed the luxury of any thought of
we're not going to be able to do this.
The money was really tight. C-3PO was constantly falling to bits.
Fox was considering replacing George.
It was a psychodrama.
We go back in time to tell a definitive history of Star Wars.
(TRILLING)
But how did this once-modest space fantasy
mushroom into the global phenomenon it is today?
The Star Wars story starts here in 1950s Modesto, northern California,
birthplace of its director George Lucas.
Famously, of course, Luke Skywalker says in Star Wars
of Tatooine in his home planet, if there is a bright centre to the universe,
this is the place furthest from it.
You can almost feel the sense of Lucas's hometown
in the way Luke Skywalker feels about his home planet.
If there's a bright centre to the universe you're on the planet it's farthest from.
George could very well have said that of Modesto.
He was not very social, he was very much a loner.
If you'd looked at him you would never imagine
he would become the mogul, the opinion-maker that he became.
Like most kids who grew up in the 1950s,
he was glued to his black-and-white television.
He was also an omniscient devourer of comic books,
and I think the comic-book mentality
is really a lot of what ended up in Star Wars.
You can almost see scenes from the film as panels in a comic book,
with the zap, pow, bam that comes along with the Star Wars legend.
I think also the superhero, comic Superman and Supergirl, Batman,
the League Of Justice, I think he was very taken with all those,
and again we see this in the formation of the Empire.
You can see the comic-book effect in scenes like this from Star Wars,
where Luke and Princess Leia are placed in a classic comic book 'How will we get out of this' ending?
Later on he was to say that Star Wars was really the story
of his childhood, that Luke Skywalker was him, George Lucas,
and Darth Vader was Death Father, who was George senior.
Like many boys in 1950s America, the teenage Lucas was obsessed with cars
and all things fast.
He did watch a lot of World War Two movies,
and was very taken, particularly, by the aerial battles
he saw in some of those.
But Lucas's obsession with speed would lead to a major incident
that would define not only the rest of his life but the future of cinema.
And the event that changed his life was a near-fatal car crash
in his senior year in high school.
He made an illegal left turn.
Another car hit him from behind...
and just propelled his car into a tree.
The fact that he survived that to him was a message that he needed
to do something more significant with his life.
His love of cinema earned him a place at film school
where he made a number of shorts.
By the age of just 28 he'd secured a major film deal
to make his first commercial movie.
American Graffiti is the foundation of George's fortune, George's career.
It's a picture of Modesto, it's like a documentary.
With American Graffiti an unexpected box-office hit,
the young Lucas suddenly found himself
with time and money on his hands.
It was now time to turn inwards and think about all those earlier childhood influences.
He had to go into his imaginative past
and pull out all these pop culture and visual references
that he had accumulated in the first 23 years of his life
and begin to try and translate that into a space fantasy film.
Westerns, TV serials, comic books,
World War Two dog-fights and fast cars,
were all swirling around Lucas's imagination.
But there was one major influence standing head and shoulders above the rest.
Obviously, the number one source for Star Wars was Flash Gordon.
He's circling to come back. Quick, get under cover.
The conversation that both George Lucas and Gary Kurtz,
the producer of Star Wars had, you know, one night in 1971 -
there was nothing on at the cinema that they wanted to see,
they wished there was a big-screen version of Flash Gordon.
There had been a theatrical series in the '30s and '40s.
That's where I first saw it as a child.
Where are you taking me? These Earthmen must be a stupid lot.
He's evidently never seen a light bridge before.
It had the energy and it had the feeling
that we were looking for and at one time we did try to get the rights to the Flash Gordon comic strip.
But there requirements were so draconian that we decided that
it would be much too restrictive.
Before even putting pen to paper to write the script,
Lucas's mind was a melting pot of ideas,
that kept getting bigger and bigger.
The first film is this incredible mish-mash
of Westerns and Flash Gordon and World War Two bomber mission movies
and it's got kind of Arthurian mythology going on in there.
But somehow it's smoothed over.
Hey! We don't serve their kind here. What?
Your 'droids, they'll have to wait outside. We don't want them here.
Wait outside. We don't want any trouble. I heartily agree with you, sir.
Essentially, these stories were Westerns set in space.
So, the cowboys were the sort of space explorers.
Er...
They're very kind of small, soap-opera style stories
but set in fantastical places.
You can see lots of '30s serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rodgers in Star Wars.
Flash Gordon most notably inspired the now iconic opening
of the first Star Wars Film.
There's little dissolves and wipes. They go through all the movies,
even the prequels, even down to the opening crawls,
that yellow text that goes up at the start of the movie
and tells you what's been happening.
That first shot where you see the spaceship come up
from the bottom of the screen with lasers firing at it,
and then it's being chased by this huge triangular spaceship
It's so big that it just keeps coming.
It's seconds before it's actually entirely on screen.
From that moment, everyone's thinking 'This is like nothing I've ever seen.'
Imagining this remarkable world was one thing.
Getting it out of his head and onto the page
and then up onto the big screen was quite another.
It was extremely agonising because he was never a good writer.
There were technical problems, money problems, casting problems.
Simple disbelief was the worst of them.
As the new film has even its stars tripping over themselves with excitement,
back in the early '70s this now-familiar galaxy
was still far, far away from what it is today.
Little did Lucas know that it would be the struggle to realise this universe
that made it the enormous multi-billion pound success story it was to become.
He had real problems getting this bizarre story,
set in the future and also kind of in the past,
and making these worlds come real.
I have to say, in defence of all those people we showed it to
that the script was not an easy read.
It was very convoluted. You had to use your imagination very carefully,
with a whole group of character names, planet names and oddities.
I can see somebody from the outside scratching their head about it.
As Lucas struggled to create his universe,
many of the film's most famous characters
were not how we know them today.
Luke Starkiller, as he was in the first draft, was an old man.
You know, Han Solo was a green alien,
R2-D2 talks in the first draft.
Like with any creative process, the characters change in the making of it.
You know, C-3PO was supposed to be a an oily used-car salesman.
Lucas can't find anyone better than Anthony Daniels to do his voice.
So he becomes a prissy English butler.
Sir, my first job was programming binary load-lifters,
very similar to your vaporators in most respects.
Can you speak Bocce? It's like a second language to me.
With all the major studios confused as to what his vision actually was,
Kurtz and Lucas turned to the help of conceptual artist Ralph McQuarrie.
Ralph McQuarrie, hugely influential in the history of Star Wars,
the ultimate concept designer that Lucas could have found,
you know, came up with a lot of the look and the feel of it.
For me, he did a lot more than just design the movie.
I think he kind of told the story in part, as well.
We could only afford for him to do five drawings to begin with,
and he's the one that came up with the look of some of the characters.
To give an example, George's brief for the stormtroopers,
I think all he said to him was 'I need these kind of scary,
skeleton-like space soldiers.' That was it.
So we end up with these stormtroopers, these super-iconic
space soldiers that we all know now.
He was just commissioned to do several paintings
just to show the board at 20th Century Fox
and help get the movie green lit.
And those five drawings helped to convince Fox to do the film.
But even with the studio on board, they were forced to bankroll the project themselves.
I don't think that the studio felt very positive about the picture.
I don't know how we did it.
20th Century Fox gave us such a hard time.
About money, about time, about everything.
The first thing to get right was the cast,
and whilst it's hard to imagine anyone else playing Han, Luke or Leia,
the actors we know today weren't a foregone conclusion.
Open auditions were held.
We had hundreds, we had hundreds and hundreds. It went on for two weeks.
And a few good people came out of this. One was Christopher Walken.
Christopher Walken was Lucas's first casting for Han Solo.
I know Jodie Foster was a potential Princess Leia at one point,
one that Carrie Fisher always feared she was going to be replaced by.
Harrison Ford had appeared in American Graffiti,
but then hadn't got much more work and had gone back to being a carpenter.
And Lucas literally hired him away from a house he was working on,
and talked him into doing this film. He did not really want to do this,
didn't think it was his strength.
Can't get out that way. He cut off our only escape route.
These were the core unknown actors who would translate Lucas's script
into some of the most iconic cinema characters there's ever been.
Star Wars has possibly more memorable characters
than any other movie franchise I can think of.
I mean, Luke Skywalker, the hero,
the boy who kind of comes from nowhere to save the universe.
Han Solo, the hero who doesn't really want to be a hero,
and doesn't realise he's a hero, the ultimate rogue.
I would say that's the character that came the least out of Lucas's background.
This was a movie character. He wanted a swashbuckling hero.
He modelled him on Errol Flynn.
And originally, the Obi-Wan Kenobi character and the Darth Vader character were one character.
I've been waiting for you, Obi-Wan...
And then he split them into the good Force - Obi-Wan Kenobi -
and the bad Force - Darth Vader.
Whilst this allowed the climactic pivotal scene where good confronts evil,
it also allowed for the formation of the concept of the Force.
It was Gary Kurtz who really came up iw5ht the idea of the Force.
The concept of the Force, I think, came up early on in the story.
We wanted something that was spiritual in nature
and...and was simple enough that it could have been
around for hundreds of thousands of years.
But easy to talk about.
Princess Leia provided an unusually strong female lead character for the time.
Technically, she is being rescued at the beginning of the film,
but that's because she has very definitely put herself
in a situation where she's going to save entire armies and planets.
She's essentially an ultra-spry.
He wanted, like, a really great kid sister kind of character.
And so he wanted someone who would be tough and yet funny.
And so tough-talking Leia, with that hairstyle, was born.
Governor Tarkin, I should have expected to find you holding Vader's leash.
I recognised your foul stench when I was brought on board.
But the major casting decision was to make two robots or droids,
lead characters of the movie.
I think the robots are the centre-piece of the story in a way,
because we're seeing the film, at least the first half, through their eyes.
How did we get into this mess? I really don't know how.
The droids are the movie's humorous way of allowing the viewer
to relate to the rest of the film's strange universe.
I've got to rest before I fall apart.
The first film we shot on the entire movie was the scene where
Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru buy the droids.
This scene helps establish the diversity of characters
populating the Star Wars galaxy.
Wildly imaginative droids, creatures and races
scraping a living in the shadow of the Empire.
Like many elements of the Star Wars universe,
the creation of C-3PO was accidental.
We spent quite a bit of time in the design of C-3PO's head
and in the way R2-D2 looked.
At the end it was almost right. It had the little mouth, everything.
It just wasn't quite working and George
saw two pennies that were left around and he stuck them in the clay
and suddenly there was C-3PO.
It's interesting that over time C-3PO and R2-D2 have become
the thing that the whole thing hangs on.
You look back and you think, of course, that's how it works
and how the story is told. I think that's a great 'in'.
I've just about had enough of you.
Go that way. You'll be malfunctioning ithin a day, you near-sighted scrap pile.
You can feel their fish-out-of-water-ness,
in a desert and that they're old friends but don't particularly get on.
It really draws you in.
(WHISTLING)
No more adventures. I'm not going that way.
He's cheeky, he's irreverent, he's got his own ideas about things.
He's basically the hero of the whole film. He gets the plans to the rebels
which leads to them destroying the Death Star,
and yet is a bin without a face or a voice.
And he is not your archetypal hero, either.
Droid building was one thing but creating what's come to be known
as a battered universe required all manner of invention.
We decided at the very beginning that we would have a dusty, used universe,
almost like an American Western film might have been.
We didn't want the technology in the film to have any relevance, really.
We wanted the spaceships to just work. You get in, turn them on
like you drive a car.
You don't have to know anything about how anything works.
Prepare to make the jump to light speed. But, sir!
They're getting closer.
Oh, yeah? Watch this.
Watch what?
The spaceships, particularly the Millennium Falcon, it leaks oil,
it doesn't always work, doesn't always jump to light speed,
gave it a kind of reality.
Things are dirty and old, they don't say 'Ooh, look at this world'.
Everything is assumed. 'I've got to go and clean up the droids.'
Luke's a farmer, for goodness's sake. That's a brilliant touch.
It fits with the idea that these characters,
the ones that we're rooting for,
they've got no huge political power behind them to fund them,
so of course their equipment's going to be bashed up, and somewhat second-hand
or even built themselves.
A fact that brings fear and apprehension into the new group of friends
as they struggle to put faith in each other.
We're losing the deflector shield. Strap yourselves in, I'll jump to light speed.
These are people jerry-rigging equipment,
they're scraping together the means and resources to fight the Empire.
So it almost becomes an allegory of George Lucas's own efforts
to fund, finance and make the films.
Our art department concentrated on the funkiest stuff they could find.
I said, look, I've got an idea, I know you're going to think I'm mad,
but if I go and buy scrap aeroplane parts,
I could stick all this on the set
and I think I could make this look really good.
I've got a bad feeling about this.
One particularly famous scene
required additional help from the actors themselves.
I had to find old junk that would work,
they wouldn't get hurt cos they were standing in water knee-deep
and also these walls were coming in.
I had a particular trouble. Han Solo holds a huge long rod
to try and hold it. Well, that, I couldn't get anything,
and I got two drainpipes in the end with a joint in it,
and it would never stay properly so I had to ask Harrison to help me out.
I said, Harrison, this is beyond me to have something we could do.
He said don't worry, and that's his acting. He made it work, bless him.
C-3PO, come in C-3PO!
Nobody dressed a set like Roger. He was the first person to make things look that realistic.
I don't think anybody compares, even in this day.
He's still held as the kind of gold standard.
I mean, I made the instruments out of scrap. We just put stuff together
out of anything that would look right. We put all that together.
Yeah, but this time I've got the money.
(SPEAKS ALIEN TONGUE)
And then George was always going on about Han Solo being a cowboy
so I found the Mauser. I just love the look of this gun
and I stuck things on the front, stuck another sight on that.
I didn't tell them what I was doing.
I said you'd better call George over.
Cos I thought this is the moment now I'm going to get fired
or I'm on the right track.
George came, looked, just loved them.
The brilliance is it came along with this used universe concept
where the costumes are dirty and the land-speeder is beaten up.
We got the land-speeder mocked up. The first one was too big
and George came in and said, you know, 'Imagine this as a kid.
He's a young kid, Luke, living on a planet,
he'd have a little sports car, an old one that's banged up.'
R2-D2, C-3PO, Obi-Wan, they were all in it, Luke.
And George said 'No, they'll have to hang out the sides,
like it would happen in reality.'
These aren't the droids you're looking for.
'These aren't the droids we're looking for.'
He can go about his business.
Just look at Luke's land-speeder, in that previous to this it would have been silver.
If you look closely, you can see weld marks
where a part has been pulled off and then welded back on again.
Just throwaway stuff that you don't even notice.
90% of the people that see Star Wars wouldn't realise that's the case.
But, you know, subconsciously, you're picking up on it,
and you're not quite sure how the magic trick is done.
With production at full-tilt, and with no visual effects yet realised,
Lucas and Kurtz often found themselves struggling
with the sceptical British film crew.
There were all sorts of problems. Technical problems, money problems,
casting problems. Simple disbelief was the worst of them.
You can imagine. C-3PO was constantly falling to bits
and being stuck with gold tape and the stormtroopers were clanking
and bits would fall off.
His director of photography did not understand his vision.
I was trying to shield him from all of the problems with the studio,
and discussions we had, as well as the crew problems that were going on, day to day.
The movie's cinematographer, Gil Taylor, was Lucas's sternest critic.
The number one guy who was heard to say loudly on the set
that this film was a load of rubbish and that Lucas didn't know what he was doing.
I think the shooting crew didn't really think much of the script.
They felt it was a bit like a Carry On film.
He couldn't quite get his head round it.
This what looked like kid from America
was getting to direct this huge film.
He was an old-school kind of cameraman who worked with Kubrick
and Hitchcock and insisted that his crew wore a coat and tie all the time
and that was not our style, really.
It didn't work out entirely but, hey,
he's a good cameraman and we got a good result.
George Lucas become so frustrated with his British crew
that he finally forced a vote on the overtime
and the entire crew voted against him. He didn't like that at all
because sometimes it was just an extra half-hour to finish a set.
And he said that was maybe his lowest moment.
He wasn't sure he would even be able to finish the film
with a crew that believed in him so little.
Little did George know what he was creating,
nor how rich it would make him.
Back in the mid '70s, simply finishing the film seemed an impossibility.
His very job was on the line.
He had breakdowns, he was hospitalised a couple of times.
There was a time when Fox was considering replacing George.
With the film in the can and the movie's premiere only weeks ago,
Lucas decided to hold a preview screening for some fellow directors.
About a month before it was actually released to the public,
we had a very disastrous screening for friends.
Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola.
Before the visual effects were in, before there was any music,
before there were any sound effects. It didn't go down well.
They all, except Spielberg,
thought is was the most ridiculous thing they'd ever seen.
Steven Spielberg was the only one there who said, 'Well, this has some potential...
when it's fixed.'
Many of the film's visual effects took months to create.
Some, such as the jump to hyper-space, didn't.
This was down to one man.
It took maybe an hour to shoot that.
And it looked great and George loved it and so we used that
and it's only about 30 frames long.
That little shot where the stars whoosh.
Following that, interestingly, the Millennium Falcon had to...
had to - woosh - disappear down to a pinpoint.
I took the model against black and then shot
a 4 x 5 colour Polaroid of it, cut the Polaroid out,
put it on a piece of glass and - woosh - pulled it back.
And that got one of the biggest reactions from the audience of all.
Indeed, one particular shot forms the turning point of the whole film
and is only on screen for less than half a second.
The other one that takes, like, about 12 frames,
is the shot when Luke has to fire the rocket into the Death Star.
So he's coming along and the Death Star is, like, this model,
it's about 40 feet long.
You can see the size of the Death Star...racing by.
He's down low in the trench and you catch a shot of him
he's going...and then he pushes the button,
and this little animated rocket goes shooting down in 12 or 14 frames,
something like that. That was the verve of the movie.
Even thought the shot is only on the screen for half a second,
everyone remembers that shot.
Finally, in May 1977, the first film in the franchise,
Star Wars: A New Hope, as it was later titled, was released.
Everybody was waiting for him to fail.
Stories about this turkey, which had cost $10 million at Fox,
filled with weird characters and strange names,
nobody was going to go see this.
There were lines around the block, as they said, right away.
It was very different to how films come out now,
where you've got this massive media campaign on the internet
and all the trailers. It was very much a word-of-mouth thing.
You see the snowball effect, where it's famous for being famous.
It was self-perpetuating cos on the evening news you saw these lines
of people waiting to see Star Wars, and that made other people go.
Star Wars just kept growing until it reached $540 million,
the largest gross in Hollywood history.
But while the Star Wars universe was going from strength to strength,
Lucas's interest in directing was on the wane.
George did not have a good experience directing the film,
so he didn't want to consider directing any more.
He said to himself on the final day of principal photography of Star Wars,
'I am never doing this again.'
Whilst Lucas took on executive producer duties,
Kurtz and director Irvin Kershner were tasked
with keeping the characters and universe alive.
It's the second act of a three-act play.
It's the problem act, when all the trouble comes up.
The Empire Strikes Back is the strongest film of the original trilogy
because Lucas gave it the deepest meaning.
It's the ultimate battle between father and son,
between good and evil, between the past and the future.
Set your harpoon. Follow me on the next pass.
So we were able to turn
the traditional storytelling devices upside down.
We put the big battle scene at the beginning, rather than at the end.
The story kind of tails off with all of our heroes in really bad shape.
Shooting began in Norway in March 1979.
Look again now at the genius of Hoth being a snowy planet.
That means you're seeing all these spaceships in the daytime.
Everything's white, there's nowhere to hide your special effects.
It's inspired and dark and scary and cold and fundamentally different.
A lot darker. A lot more sort of vivid on the screen.
You know, the colours are much more interesting,
the lighting's a lot more interesting.
We spend time on Dagobah, we get that wonderful misty aura to it.
It was in this setting we first met one of Lucas's most successful creations.
Yoda was an interesting character
because he was completely different to anything before.
They had so many variations of that puppet.
And it kept breaking down all the time on the set.
They had spent a month, I think, just shooting those Dagobah scenes.
But Dagobah held a surprise for the audience and it wasn't just the mist.
We're being watched. Away put your weapon. I mean you no harm.
It seems to the moment, with the appearance of Yoda
when the whole Muppet nonsense begins to take over Star Wars.
Yoda was one of the most successful characters
ever introduced in any sequel ever.
It's such a tremendous way to advance the narrative.
The unlikely-looking Yoda turned out to have
powerful connections with Luke's past,
and provided much-needed narrative connections with the first film
helping to drive home the concept of the Force yet again.
Like his father. Was I any different when you taught me?
There's a lot of frustration involved in working with puppets.
For Yoda to work, the audience had to believe he was a real creature.
That was probably the most difficult part of the film,
so I had to take care in lighting him so he looked real.
Another character who made his debut in The Empire Strikes Back was Boba Fett.
At first he looks just like a supporting artist.
You may take Captain Solo to Jabba The Hutt after I have Skywalker.
He's no good to me dead.
But after only a few lines he became a cult favourite.
Boba Fett turns up at the very end. He's a bounty hunter,
who goes in pursuit of Han Solo,
and you never see his face. He wears armour and everything.
He's all yours, bounty hunter.
Despite having little to do on screen, Boba Fett became a sensation.
Boba Fett was probably the most notorious bad guy in the universe, ever.
Being Boba Fett, I had to say 'Put Captain Solo in the cargo hold.'
And I remember I said, well, they can't hear me.
(DEMONSTRATES MUFFLED VOICE)
Put Captain Solo in the cargo hold.
No. Right, let's do it once again.
'Put Captain Cargo in the solo...' Oh!
Oh, Captain Cargo.
Obi-Wan has taught you well.
This climactic scene that has since gone down in cinematic history
was actually shot in remarkably sparse conditions.
I enjoyed the challenge of that climactic scene on the ramp,
because there was no set. There was a foreground, there was a ramp.
But there was no background and I said to the production designer
that I could probably do something with smoke, steam and some beams of light...
to create an atmosphere and to distract the audience
from the fact that there was no background.
Another scene that shocked and amazed audiences across the world
was when one of the greatest narrative twists of all time
was revealed.
Luke Skywalker is Darth Vader's son
and you had to spend three whole years
waiting to find out if it was true and what would happen next time they met.
It was arguably this cliff-hanger that fuelled the success
of Star Wars' merchandising back in the early '80s.
Two films into the franchise, and Lucas's gamble
on the merchandising potential of his characters was paying off.
The financial success was on an intergalactic level.
Lucas, while he was writing Star Wars,
imagined action figures of the characters he was creating.
So when it came time for The Empire Strikes back,
he controlled all merchandising rights.
I was obsessed with the figures, more than the films,
because the films were every couple of years.
The films were playing on a loop and developing and spiralling.
So, the merchandising becomes vital to the story universe
living on with fans, as they are able to reinvest,
reconnect with the franchise during those long gaps
when there aren't new movies.
The Star Wars machine was now a two-pronged affair,
with the merchandising bringing in almost as much money as the films.
1982, and with The Empire Strikes Back having made over $500 million,
the third instalment, Return Of The Jedi, went into production.
I remember George saying to me one day,
'Do you know, I've got this problem.
All the heroes are scattered across the galaxy.
How am I going to bring them all back together again?'
But of course, Jabba's Palace became the venue
in which they were all brought together again.
This scene in Jabba's Palace, is possibly one of the film's most infamous,
bringing together the full cast and introducing us
to the most expensive puppet character in film history.
There was Jabba The Hutt, three puppeteers inside him, working away.
Everyone was a bit nervous about whether it would work,
cos he's the main character in that scene, not a background character./
So we more or less jumped inside him and started working.
You're acting with a pile of rubber, which has four people inside and three outside operating remotes,
that operate the eyes and the tongue and everything.
Master, bargain rather than fight. He is no Jedi.
But it's that old thing, you suspend disbelief
and you do get into a relationship.
I did have a relationship with Jabba.
These guys really knew what they were doing.
It was just very easy to go with it and believe this was,
you know, a nine foot giant slug.
I just like the result. I like the three-dimensional quality of him,
I like the fact that he looks as though he's heavy.
For instance, the drool and stuff coming from his nose and mouth
is actually real. The builders had a bucket of stuff,
I don't know what it was.
(DROOL OOZING) Urgh!
We did rig him up with a garden sprayer early on.
In his nostrils. We could have fired snot 20 feet across the set.
I think Carrie might have objected
if she'd had projectile snot all over her.
The weird thing for me came whenever he had to speak,
because he's got this huge voice in the film.
But when we filmed it, the voice was being done
by a young girl stage manager,
standing way behind us on set.
You would have this moment of tension with Jabba The Hutt,
he'd be angry and his tongue would be lolling and he'd be looking at Luke Skywalker
and you'd hear this girl from the back saying,
(MIMICS) 'It's an old Jedi mind trick.'
Jabba's Palace was teeming with monsters
but it took real effort to make it look convincing.
For every single monster we hired one person
whose job was to have a hairdryer on cold and put it in the mouth
of the monster between takes.
I was used to directors wandering around looking at things like that,
you know, framing stuff like that, and maybe like that, you know.
And George was the first director I ever saw who came into the studio
and he framed things like that. The Lucas frame.
When I first saw Return Of The Jedi I was so excited
that when it finished I couldn't remember what had happened.
I just sat in the cinema going...
Then you get to Endor, speeder-bike chase, possibly, arguably,
the finest action sequence in the whole series and so thrilling.
Again, it's not in space. There's no stars, it's not round asteroids,
it's through trees, under trees, tree stumps.
Choom! Choom! Oh, come on!
Luke lopping the front off the speeder-bike and then it spins.
The logic of that. Of course it spins, the steering's on the front.
The sound design of those speeder-bikes. (MIMICS)
Argh!
I love Return Of The Jedi. I think people diss it.
'Oh, yeah, the third one. It's got Ewoks in it.' No!
(HIGH-PITCHED CALLS)
Return Of The Jedi was almost designed
to close all those open loops.
The film even allowed us to feel sorry for Darth Vader.
You know the Emperor was killed, Darth Vader was killed.
Everyone was happy, you know, and they all lived happily ever after.
I think he basically took the franchise out
and shot it in the head.
But any desire for the Star Wars phenomenon to fade away
was wishful thinking.
The true success of the franchise was yet to come.
You didn't think I'd run, did you?
In 1997, 14 years after Jedi, George Lucas brought out special editions
of the original trilogy.
This was his chance to use the latest CGI technology
to improve the visuals, such as seeing Jabba The Hutt
moving independently for the first time.
Lucas could actually gauge how popular the franchise still was.
He always said that the original movie
was only 25% of what his original vision was.
Don't fiddle with my films, George.
He sees himself as an artist
not just a filmmaker.
It is true that he wanted Star Wars to be something different.
He wanted it to be filled with creatures roaming around.
So he could finally do that with CGI.
(BELLOWING)
I mean, who can imagine Picasso walking into a museum,
pulling a canvas off the wall, and taking it home, saying,
'I'll be back when I've made this the way I wanted it to be'?
The special editions were a box-office hit.
With new technology at his fingertips,
and able to achieve action sequences like this, which he couldn't before,
Lucas dusted off the director's chair
and prepared to direct The Phantom Menace, first of the prequels.
Aah!
The prequels, the whole idea was to go back to the beginning
and find out how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader.
When The Phantom Menace came out, it was still incredibly - I say still -
it was as exciting for me.
It's easy to forget that Lucas was actually interested in making films for kids.
He had a completely different idea of what Star Wars was.
To him, it always skewed younger.
You know, Star Wars is, and he says himself,
he makes films for 12-year-olds.
It's not his fault that adults like them, as well.
The best example of Lucas's appeal to kids can be seen in the characters
of Jar Jar Binks and Watto. The latter became a cult favourite.
So it makes little difference.
He's a big dodgy.
Possibly, if he was on Earth, he'd have mafia connections.
Backstreet, he deals in stuff, he's a second-hand spaceship salesman.
I have great faith in the boy. He's a credit to your race.
He's street-wise, so he'd probably sound a bit...wurrr, wurrr,
and he looked a bit wurrr,
and so I just came out with the voice.
(ROUGH AND GUTTURAL) Hey, how're you doin'?
I think to a large extent the prequels are driven,
not just by the perpetuation of the universe, the desire that Lucas has
to get back to filmmaking, but his desire, his remembered desire
to work with new technologies.
My brief, when I started on Phantom Menace, from George,
was to try and come up with a new martial art.
George would constantly peg me back on the violence.
You know, I'm a little more violent than he is.
They have a lot of good stuff in them.
This whole thing about Jedi versus Sith came from the prequels.
The whole thing of fear leads to hate,
that came from the prequels.
Lucas now found himself with a new younger generation in the palm of his hand.
With the prequels he also found himself
sitting on a cinematic fortune.
Just for The Phantom Menace alone George made $2 billion.
By 2010 Lucas was almost as big as Hollywood.
It was now time for the independent filmmaker from Modesto
to finally turn his back on his creation,
selling it to Disney for $4 billion.
We are the point where the idea of Star Wars has taken over
and it has abandoned its original host.
You know, George Lucas has finally moved on.
With Episode VII on our doorstep, passion and interest
for Lucas's childhood fantasy shows no signs of stopping
As trailers for The Force Awakens promise a return to the organic mix
of real props, in-camera effects, and a move away from CGI,
the hope is that the new movie and those that follow it,
will deliver on what these Star Wars fans at a recent secret cinema event
have been hoping for,
a return to the dusty battered world of Tatooine.
I think with this upcoming release of Episode VII
we'll see a kind of return to the original way the story was told
and JJ Abrams has said that he wanted to do this the way
we did the originals.
This was George's dogged creation, to somehow pull this through
when everything was against him.
What we didn't know, when we all embarked on Star Wars,
that it was going to change all our lives, and it did.
So I think he emerges as a singular figure in American film history.
It will go down in the history of films as a major phenomenon.
Whose work has lasted? What other directors of the '70s
have a fanbase now? Nobody.
I don't think there are many films that really pull together
communities of people in that way. That kind of idea that you've
found a universe of people that can understand
how much you love the story.
We have to give a shout-out to the Force.
The fact that Lucas could create, basically, a version of the concept of God,
but put it in terms that even an atheist could get on board with...
that's huge.
There's a new Star Wars film with Han Solo in it coming out
and, you know, for me at my age, and my kids are there to enjoy it.
It feels like it's just for me.
We're actually finding out what happened next,
which for many people is more exciting than finding out
what happened before in the prequels.
I think this movie is going to be a monster.
It's going to probably have a billion dollar opening weekend.
If I was a betting man I would say that Episode VII is going to be
possibly the most successful movie of all time.
I think it's going to be good!
Time for a bonus, George.
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