Speaking with the Light the Fuse podcast, director Brian de Palma looked back to an iconic screeing of the original Star Wars, one shown before the release of the film, with no music or visual effects when George Lucas was keen to canvass the honest opinions of his fellow directors. Over the intervening years, Steven Spielberg has claimed that he was the only director in the group to see the potential in Lucas’ third big screen release, something de Palma denies.
“Everybody who was involved in that meeting, everyone has a different version of what happened. I was just watching the biography they did of Steven and he related how he saw it. They always portray me as the guy that says the worst thing that drives everybody crazy, but if you’re gonna show me something I’m gonna tell you what I think about it. Why am I there unless I’m gonna give an honest appraisal of what I’ve seen? And in this case, the fact that Steven says that only he saw the possibilities of Star Wars, that’s not really true.”
“We all saw it as a terrific thing that George had done and we were well aware of where the special effects weren’t there, and how they had cut in all these planes from other movies that were supposed to be the ships and stuff like that. But I did make a joke about The Force, that’s true … I just thought the idea of The Force, you know – ‘The Force,’ I would say, and I kept repeating it. ‘It doesn’t seem like a great name for this kind of spiritual guidance, “The Force.”‘ So needless to say I had a lot to say about The Force, which obviously I was terribly wrong about.”
“The other thing was the movie starts in chapter [four], we’re in a world nobody knows anything about, he’s got all these funny names for people, I said, ‘George you’ve gotta set this up somehow like those crawls in the Flash Gordon movies.’ George had that idea, but it was all gobbledygook basically, so I and Jay Cocks went over the crawl and basically rewrote it so it made some sense. And that was our contribution, but I said some things very direct to my director friends about their movies that went on to be extremely successful. Sometimes I was right, sometimes I was wrong. They did the same for my movies.”
- Hardcover Book
- Insight Editions (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 192 Pages - 11/09/2021 (Publication Date) - Insight Editions (Publisher)