EON Magazine has a great interview with Ken Wheat, writer of Pitch Black and the Ewoks: Battle for Endor movie:

Which brings us to the big sequel... The best of the two STAR WARS TV movies, EWOKS: THE BATTLE FOR ENDOR (1985) with Wilford Brimley, Warwick Davis, Carel Struycken and Aubree Miller in a tale of high adventure about a girl, a hermit, and an overly-cute teddy bear who search for a nasty witch on the magical planet of Endor. The duo worked from a story by George Lucas.

"Lucas guided the creation of the story over the course of two four-hour sessions we had with him," Wheat explains. "He'd just watched HEIDI with his daughter the weekend before these took place, and the story idea he pushed was having the little girl from the first Ewok TV movie become an orphan who ends up living with a grumpy old hermit in the woods."

Making a great family film was the ultimate goal of the brothers.

"We'd been thinking about the adventure films we'd liked as kids, like SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON and THE SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD, so we suggested having space marauders, which was fine with George -- as long as they were 7 feet tall, of course!" Wheat quips. "The rest of the brainstorming was done along those lines. Joe Johnston (the production designer and second unit director) and Phil Tippett (the creature supervisor) were involved in the second day's story session, and they contributed an assortment of bits and pieces."

As for the man of all things STAR WARS, Lucas? involvement primarily was in the design and editing stages according to Wheat.

Wheat talks a lot more about Lucas and ILM, so check out the rest of the article!