Lucas Main Event Play-By-Play @ Starwars.com
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"As you can see it's quite a turnout at the Main Event of Celebration V," Stewart says.
"It's just like your show only a smaller audience," Lucas says.
On being in Orlando:
Stewart welcomes Lucas to Orlando, asking if he's spent time here previously. "Yes, I live at Disney World. I went on the Star Tours ride before we take it down and open up the new one."
On an uber-long funny fan question from Chris in George about landspeeder inconsistencies in A New Hope:
Why is C-3PO driving when he's only been on Tatooine 60 hours, and he was wandering around the desert lost now he's driving a landspeeder. And earlier he's not even sure what planet he was on. But the question is his landspeeder wasn't an XP-38 but an inferior X-34, and he has a confused robot navigate. George, why?
LUCAS: "It's amazing what wonders a good oil bath can do for you"
Does a protocol droid come with a GPS?," Stewart asks.
LUCAS: "No, Artoo is the GPS. So without Artoo, he's lost"
On seeing a room at Celebration full of working astromechs built by fans in comparison to the R2-D2 units he worked with originally on film:
LUCAS: "It's a tragedy" "It's the great irony of life. I spent literally 8 years trying to get R2-D2 to work no more than 10 feet in a straight line. To be able to have one droid that could actually take its leg out and go into the tripod position and move forward all at once. In the end, the droids -- there were eight of them -- were so inadequate that we had to take a fiberglass mold of one of them put it on a couple of sticks and run them with some wagon wheels on it and pull it by a string. Here they have the most beautiful Artoo units you'd ever possibly imagined and they are magnificent. If only I could make another Star Wars."
On how Lucas comes up with character names (question via a fan called Chadmiral Ackbar):
LUCAS: "Right from the very beginning, the one thing about writing is that I don't want to do it. So I go to work at 9, I get up at 6, and all the writing is done between 5:45 and 6. I have to get my three pages a day done or I'm toast. So I spend my day doing things that are supposed to be important but don't really matter like waiting to get the mail, and one of those things is to write down names. I have a book that has names and I write names with my son. Wherever we are if I see something I like I'll write it down."
"Why don't we have characters like Friendly's?" says Stewart. "Oh, there's the new Admiral Nabisco!"
"If you look real hard, you'll see some of that," Lucas says. "Where we live and where Skywalker Ranch is an old Indian site of the Miwok Indians. So that's where Ewok came from. Dexter Jettster is named after my son who I call Jettster. Darth Vader is dark water or dark father in Dutch, or Dutch-ish."
On the 501st Legion elite costuming organization:
LUCAS: "The thing about the 501st that's great is that it sprang into life from the fans, from going to conventions", "Two guys getting together wanting to build suits, and now it's like 5,000 strong in 32 countries. They're everywhere I go; wherever we need them. And visiting kids in hospitals and you don't understand the significance of that until you see it in action and see the smiles on the kids' faces being overwhelmed. It's just a great thing all the way around."
"Is there any concern that the largest 501st overseas is in Germany?" Stewart jokes. "They're called stormtroopers. Do the Polish 501st ever get nervous?"
"The Belgian 501st have TIE fighters, so no one is going to take over Belgium," Lucas says.
(A fan yells "What about the Rebel Legion?")
"I don't think you were supposed to put that information out there," Stewart says to the fan. "That's a secret!"
On staying true to his vision when faced with obstacles:
When filming A New Hope, how did Lucas stay positive given everything was turning against him? (question from Matt from Orlando)
LUCAS: "It helps to be nuts"
STEWART: "I think you've just written the title to your autobiography"
LUCAS: "You have to have such persistence and be so stubborn and just say, 'I'm right, I don't care what the rest of the world thinks.' It's the only way you can do it. March forward no matter what happens. You just keep going no matter what the odds are to get there. On New Hope and even then on Empire Strikes Back it was very dark. Even after A New Hope, getting the next film going was very, very difficult. And there were a lot of times where it looked like it wouldn't get finished. And you just say, 'I believe in this completely. And I will sink with the ship if that's what it comes down to. If you don't have that commitment, it won't happen."
On Luke Skywalker's name not being changed to protect his identity:
LUCAS: "There is a logic to that", "The first part being is that there's a lot of Skywalkers. Is there one Skywalker in the universe? No. You should see the phone book!"
STEWART: "I always thought Skywalker name was somewhat unique?"
LUCAS: "No, no, no, there's even the Skywalker wine"
"Then the other part which is the one place that is the most painful for Anakin Skywalker is Tatooine, because that's where he grew up, that's where he lost his mother. The core of his sense of loss is on that planet. It's called denial. You'll notice also the Emperor has long suspected that there are children.
You got to remember that Vader didn't even know that there are children at all. He killed Padme and didn't even know that the babies existed. He just put that out of his mind. "But the Emperor knew there was a possibility because he told a lie that said, 'You killed her,'" continues Lucas. "He knew she was pregnant and that there was a possibility these kids might still be alive.
When Luke blows up the Death Star and you come back to this movie we're celebrating now, the first thing he says is 'Skywalker's alive. You son lives.' And that's the first time Vader really finds out he does have a son. The Emperor kind of knew it, he was just waiting for something to get in sense a ripple in the Force and say 'A-ha!'"
On creating backstories of the characters ahead of time:
STEWART: "Is all this planned out beforehand, all these backstories, or do you have to go back in once you lay it out and create a backstory through it?"
LUCAS: "No, I just make it up as I go along"
On the psychological impact of the darkness of Empire on kids:
LUCAS: "I was ending it on a real downer", "After all, 'I'm your father' -- cut your hand off, that's a little rough. I did bring in a few psychologists and asked them, 'If you were a 10-year-old boy would this be a harmful thing to you?' Mythologically speaking that is a real key psychological motif, not including the thing about your mother. And I talked with them and they said it won't hurt them at all. I was worried about it.
They said, 'Well, Darth Vader is a bad guy and some of the kids will be able to handle it and they'll just say, 'Hmmm, that's interesting.' The others who can't handle it emotionally will just say, 'Darth Vader's lying. He's a bad guy he lies about everything.' And they won't believe it. So they have a built in safety net to keep them from understanding the true nature of the father.'"
On annoying characters:
LUCAS: "There always has to be someone who takes the brunt of the ridicule", "In the first film, it was Threepio. Nobody could stand Threepio. They hated him, he was the worst character on Earth. All he did was talk, he was fussy, etc. Then, in the third film, we introduce the cute little Ewoks, and that then took all the pressure off Threepio. The last victim of this ridicule is poor old Jar Jar Binks, which is basically the same fussy mumbly guy that Threepio was."
On the generation gap between trilogies:
LUCAS: "We know we have a real honest-to-God generation gap with Star Wars, which we found out after Episode I", "Anyone over 40 loves IV, V, and VI, and hates I, II, and III. And you'll notice the kids under 30 all love I, II, and III, and hate IV, V, and VI" (at this point, a din of friendly protests arose from the audience). Now, we've got The Clone Wars for the under-ten-year-olds. Come on ten-year-olds, fight for your rights!"
On the new animated series:
LUCAS: "We are working right now with Seth Green", "I convinced him that we could do a fun little cartoon show like Spongebob Squarepants for four- and five-year-olds, and he still believes it's for 21-year-olds. It's going to be a strange mishmash that nobody really knows what's going to happen, but I know one thing -- it'll be funny!"
On the role of the Jedi:
LUCAS: "It's the monk idea", "In Star Wars, the monks are really not warriors, they're negotiators but they negotiate with a big stick."
About the Force:
LUCAS: "The whole idea of the movie, ultimately, is that you have a light side and you have a dark side", "The light side is compassion, which means you care about other people, and the dark side is that you care only about yourself."
About the fate of Darth Plagueis:
Jon Stewart asks if the insinuation that Palpatine killed Darth Plagueis in his sleep is true
LUCAS: "In theory, yeah he did kill him", "That is what apprentices do."
On his legacy:
LUCAS: "Star Wars obviously snuck up and grabbed me, threw me across the room and beat me against the wall", "It's been a very slow process of me accepting the reality of what's happened and also to get my head around the enormity of the whole thing.
And I'm philosophical enough to know that maybe it will go on, maybe it won't, and that we've made a mark on the twentieth century. Maybe it will still be there in the twenty-first century [audience applause]. My only hope is that the first guy who gets on Mars says, you know, 'I wanted to do this ever since I saw Star Wars.'"
About Obi-Wan's planet of origin:
LUCAS: "This is one of the first things I wrote in the very first script" , "He comes from the planet Stewjon."
On Baron Papanoida in The Clone Wars?:
LUCAS: "My daughter actually wrote an episode about the family", "And of course my son was upset because he didn't get to do enough of the fighting. He said I got to do most of the fighting, because, of course, I am like Arnold Schwarzenegger."
The audience was then given a brief sneak peek at a scene from Season 3 which involves the Baron in action-hero mode, defending family members with twin blasters blazing in a cantina-like setting.
About a new characters in The Clone Wars:
LUCAS: "In another episode my daughter wrote", "on the planet where Asajj Ventress comes from, there's women on one side and men on the other. The women control the planet and the Emperor used one of the men for Darth Maul. Ventress finds disfavor with Dooku and plots to get him another apprentice that she controls."
According to Lucas, this new Zabrak character -- Savage Oppress -- may share some close family ties with Darth Maul.
On a Blu-Ray Star Wars release:
LUCAS: "I wish I could say it was coming out this year but it's not", "It's coming out next year"
HAMILL: "You can see my cleft chin sticking out of the hood, but the first thing that gets applause is my lightsaber"
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At the end of RotS Vader thinks his unborn child died with Padme, so when it gets out that a Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star he doesn't realize it's his son. George said that last names work in Star Wars the same way they do in the real world. Vader is probably suspicious over that matter but he doesn't actually know what's going on until the emperor confirms it's his kid. Up until then, Vader just thinks it's some random Skywalker that Obi-Wan picked up hoping to train as a Jedi. "He's just a boy. Obi-Wan can no longer help him."
nothing like waking up in the middle of the day to the smell of new Star Wars!
Awesome news! I was hoping there would be some sort of announcement at CV.
