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NOV
24 - CHRISTOPHER MCELROY'S ACCOUNT OF THE ANNOTATED SCREENPLAYS
NOV
24
Here's
a very interesting account by Christopher McElroy of Prequel related stuff
in the new book "Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays.":
"The
scripts themselves aren't much--in fact, you can find them on the net--but
it speaks of the scripts in their earlier forms (I'm trying to summarize
them right now from the book, and may give you the summaries later). But
it also has interviews by all the creative people in the SW Trilogy, and
I've been taking notes on them. Here is a series of quotes in the book
from George Lucas, on ANYTHING even remotely Prequel-related:
On
making up names for the films:
"As
I was writing, I would say the names to myself, and if I had a hard time
dealing with a name phonetically, I would change it. It had to do with
hearing the name a lot, and whether I got used to it or not."
This
isn't really Prequel-related, but here is George on why we will NEVER see
the Biggs scenes in ANH:
"I
wrote it, and I shot it, and I looked at it. It worked okay, but it wasn't
great. I could not get out of my mind that poetically speaking, I REALLY
wanted to have this clean line of the droids taking you to Luke, Luke leading
you to Ben, Ben leading you to Han, and Han leading you to Princess Leia.
I wanted each character to take you to the next person. I finally said
'I don't care what people say, that they don't like this movie about robots.'
I just decided to trust my heart, and I structured the story that way because
of the way I felt about it, not because it was logical."
From
his notes about Ben Kenobi:
"He
has the James Bond-like quality of always being in control. He is very
sure of himself and always comes out ahead, regardless of the danger."
On
his type of moviemaking:
"As
you go along, you're constantly trying to balance the elements in a movie,
so that you have all the issues that you're trying to deal with, but you
don't overindulge in one particular area. In the kind of movies I make,
I tend to stress the plot side of things. Usually the characters are archetypes
to such a degree that it's not necessary to go into a lot of detail because
I'm not dealing with deep psychological problems. My films are storytelling
movies, not character movies. So with that in mind, I try to get to the
cleanest, to the most simple way of portraying things."
On
what the audience expects vs. what he's doing:
"They're
not what you expect, but that's the story I want to tell and I've committed
myself to it, so I'm just going to continue regardless of whether it's
the wisest thing to do in terms of conventions. These films aren't sequels;
they're the continuation of a grand story. Therefore, some end up and some
end down."
On
being "The Great Recycler":
"Usually,
if I like something and I have to drop it, I put it on the shelves and
very often end up using it later on. The thing about writing is that ideas
aren't precious; you have to get over the thought that everything you think
up is brilliant. When you think of something, you have to be willing to
throw it away. More important than to think up an idea in the first place
is to be able to reject it if it doesn't work, if it doesn't fit. You have
to be very hard on yourself when you write a script, and only use things
that are symmetrical to the center of your story. You should NEVER use
an idea just because it's a cute idea."
On
the relationship between the Jedi and the Old Republic:
"You
will see that the Jedi have the same relationship to the Republic (as Darth
Vader and the Sith had to the Empire)--they're like public servants, they're
like marshals or policemen. They basically do what they're told to do."
A
surprising tidbit on Ben:
"One
of the things that will never get explained is how Ben was able to retain
his identity (after death), because it happened somewhere in between the
third and fourth movies. I set up that this is a discipline he learned
from Yoda; Yoda told him how to do that. We don't ever get to see how he
DOES it, but the idea of retaining your identity after you've passed on
is something that Ben learned as a Jedi."
On
Bail Organa's role in the Prequels:
"The
man Leia called Father was obviously not her father. He is part of the
group that ends up fighting Darth Vader in [Episode III] that will be out
in 2003 (laughs)."
On
Princess Padme:
"The
part that I never really developed is the death of Luke and Leia's mother.
I had a backstory for her, but it basically didn't survive. When I got
to [Return of the Jedi], I wanted one of the kids to have some kind of
memory of her because she will be a key figure [in the Prequels]. But I
really debated on whether or not Leia should remember her."
On
how Anakin became Vader physically:
"I
didn't have a very specific idea about what Vader might look like under
the mask. I knew that he had been in a lot of battles, and at one point
I thought that he had had a confrontation with Ben and Ben had sent him
into a volcano. But he was all but dead, and basically he was manufactured
back together, even though there was VERY little left of him. So he is
kind of this 3/4 mechanical man and 1/4 human, and the suit he wears is
like a walking iron lung. By the time we got to the third film, we were
able to articulate what Vader looked like under the mask, but until then
I just knew that he was pretty messed up because he could barely breathe
or speak."
On
editing the SW films:
"The
way I work is that I cut the movie together, [then] I look at it and figure
out what's missing. At that point, it's more about how the movie flows
together than how the script flows together. I'm acknowledging more and
more that a script and a movie are two different things."
I hope
that helps provide some guidelines on what rumors are likely to be true
and which aren't." |
