source: (@LivioRamondelli)

Lucas sequels would have featured the Whills



This quote from George Lucas is out of a companion book to James Cameron's "Story of Science Fiction series" on AMC.
Pretty interesting. As Lucas states, it no doubt would have been divisive but then again what isn't in Star Wars these days not to mention the whole hullabaloo Midichlorians caused. Still it's cool to hear any bits about what George's ST might have included.

*sigh*

Tell us more, George.

I recently finished reading Rinzler's The Making of Star Wars and was delighted to learn that midi-chlorians had been a part of Lucas' ideas for Star Wars nearly since its conception.

Yep; from the begining just like the Whills. Maybe, Luke's exile in Lucas' Episode 7 is due to his discovery of the Whills?

Someone please leak Whill concept art. It exists at Lucasfilm somewhere.

Lucas' ST would have been a lot different approach than Disney's rehashing of the Rebels vs. Imperials story from the OT. I suppose it could still happen cinematically. It's just that Luke, Leia, and Han won't play a part in the story.

As an admitted unconditional George defender, I'll say anything he'd do with Ep. 7-9 would be utterly fascinating and compelling to me. This direction is completely fresh and unexpected, and very much plays to George's avant-garde filmmaking roots.

Doing The Clone Wars clearly reinvigorated George. Every indication I got from him in 2005, just as Revenge of the Sith was released, was that he was content that his story was finished. Considering how well-done Clone Wars were, he got his creative juices flowing again, and it seemed to naturally lead him to contemplating Ep. 7-9. Back in the OT era, he'd go back and forth as to whether his overall Star Wars series had 3, 6, 9 or even 12 films. Documented interviews show him vacillating between those numbers, so the existence of Ep. 7, at least in his mind, was there throughout the years.

Basing films on the microscopic level removes several potential problems: he isn't reliant on aging and grumpy actors, he's basically totally freed up in terms of his story "sandbox" (something Ep. 7-8 seriously fucked up IMO) and he can present his story using all of ILM's talents and create a pure animated experience.

My guess is the tone and story of his sequel trilogy would have nicely dovetailed off the brilliant Yoda arc that concluded The Clone Wars. That seemed to deal directly with these concepts, particularly the conversations between Yoda and Qui-Gon on Dagobah. Those floating glowing balls that represented Qui-Gon's presence on Dagobah may very well have been a way to tangibly represent the Whills, as they were a vessel for Qui-Gon's ability to communicate with Yoda. The Force Priestesses might be connected to the Whills as well.

I'd pay an obscene amount of money to see his detailed outline for Ep. 7-9. And I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy every bit of it.

I thought of the final Clone Wars episodes as well. Maybe, Filoni will be allowed to tackle this subject through Resistance?

Here's the full exert:

---

Lucas: Everyone hated it when we started talking about midichlorians in The Phantom Menace. A whole aspect of this film is about symbiotic relationships. It’s about recognizing that we’re not the boss. There is a whole ecosystem there.

Cameron: There’s a whole ecosystem called microbiome inside that we’ve just started getting to know.

Lucas: The next three Star Wars films] were going to get into a microbiotic world. But there’s this world of creatures that operate differently than we do. I call them the Whills. And the Whills are the ones who actually control the universe. They feed off the Force.

Cameron: You were creating a religion, George.

Lucas: Back then, I used to say it means we’re just the cars, the vehicles of the Whills they’re traveling around with. We are the vessels of Whills. And the connection is via the midi-chlorians. The midi-chlorians are the ones who communicate with the Whills. The Whills, in the general sense, are the Force.

Cameron: But in fact you’re just drawing a surface, a facade of science around an idea that is timeless, namely, the mind, the soul, the sky, the cause of all being. In your world, you’re accessing the basic archetype, the mind, a deity, and all that.

Lucas: I worked this whole concept with the Force, the Jedi, and everything from beginning to end. I just never had the chance to finish it and tell people about it.

Cameron: It’s a creation myth, and without a creation myth you can not build a world. Every religion, every mythology is based on it.

Lucas: If I’d held on to the company, I could have done it, and then it would have been done. Of course a lot of fans would have hated it, just like they did Phantom Menace and everything, but at least the whole story from beginning to end would have been told.

---

Based on Lucas' general comment, it's hard to tell how much of the film would take place "microbiotically" or how the human protagonists would interact with this world.

I'm not sure of philosophic significance either. What do the Whills get out of their machinations? Do they literally control everything in the GFFA? Does this mean that the true enemy is the Force itself? Is Anakin a conceptualized device of the Whills or an unforeseen aberration? Is Force-Ghost Anakin the only hope for destroying the Whills control?

I have 100 questions - all of which are much more intriguing than wondering about Rey's parents, whether Poe will become a true leader, whether Finn and Rose end-up together, whether Kylo finds justice and/or peace of mind, etc. I'm interested in those questions too. But, Lucas' comments have got my brain on fire in the classic Star Wars sense much more than anything Disney has originated.

That being said, I have new found sympathy for Igor and Kennedy. I realize that it's not easy to turn-out a profitable general audience-pleaser based on a microbiotic premise.

I do wish they had the nerve to try. Is Arndt's episode 7 script based on Lucas' vision?

After Solo's disappointment, there will probably never be a Star Wars movie with this high-minded a concept.

Agree 100000 percent with this part of your post.

Star Wars is DONE.

Kennedy/Johnson/Abrams/Hidalgo have KILLED it with their political machinations and outright propaganda. There is no going back. They blew it to smithereens, and there's no conceivable way to undo the clusterfuck that they gleefully created. They have gone WAY out of their way to ATTACK THE FANS, calling them racists, misogynists, etc., when the overwhelming majority of them clearly aren't. Are those fans, or fans who think similarly, EVER going back to the franchise?

Hell no!

BILLION$ in ea$y profit$, FOREVER LOST.

Lucas has always been a left-winger. But he never beat anyone over the head about it. His eye was always on the BIGGER picture, telling important truths that no one could argue against regardless of their own personal political beliefs. Smart man.

That said, his execution of the midi-chlorians was ham-fisted, and that is a major issue of the prequels. It doesn't mean that the idea itself was bad though. I rather like the idea of defining what the Whills are, what their goals are, and how it impacts the macro-scopic actions of our heroes and villains.

The odds of us ever seeing the above? Just about zero.

Solo is going to have lost $100+ million dollars. What was once unthinkable, has happened.

Ep. IX is going to be even worse. Virtually everyone I know not only has NO interest in it, they WANT IT TO FAIL because they're/someone they know is being wrongfully accused and belittled by the films' creators. Those that still "like" The Last Jedi, are constantly kept on their heels, trying to defend the enormous and obvious machinations of that film. Those fans are going to be so bruised by the time that Ep. IX comes out, can you imagine how much enthusiasm they're going to have for it? What a mess! There is no coming back from this. None.

Way to go Disney!

Are we all reading the same thing here? If the sequels featured midichlorians, the world would have fucking revolted.

People talk about TLJ bastardizing Luke's journey, well according to this treatment there was no free-will to begin with. This would have been to Star Wars what Prometheus was to Alien: answers to questions nobody really cared about. Well, I guess Solo just did that too.

The sequels have plenty of narrative problems - chief of which is that there is no compelling continuation of the story that ended with ROTJ - but this would have been disastrous. Daring, but disastrous.

Have some faith! :-D

It's been clear over my many years being here that I don't rank Lucas as being in the Top 100 of script writers, but in terms of narrative concepts he's in the Top 50.

The midi-chlorians were revisited numerous times in The Clone Wars. How much griping about it? Pretty much none. Why?

Filoni.

Lucas needs someone to tastefully reign him in, and Filoni proved that it could be done. If Lucas is paired with The Right Person = Magic.

Filoni doesn't have to be "the" man to get the job done, but Lucas has to have someone of his caliber to counterbalance his ham-fisted way of pushing a plot through with mumbo jumbo dialogue.

What could've been, we'll never know.

Perhaps Luke's self-imposed exile was due to his discovering the nature of the Whills, and that they're all not beneficial nor benign. Imagine fleshing out Lucas' statement that organic bodies are merely automobiles for the Whills to steer about... How would that FEEL to discover that? That even in The Best of ways, EVERY living thing is merely a pawn?

I wouldn't have minded that at all. Yes, the midi-chlorians were poorly addressed in the films, but they could've been fleshed out much better, more convincingly. No, they're not present in the Original Trilogy, but the characters are largely (and rightfully) ignorant of the mechanisms of the now-dead Republic and the present Empire. After all, how many of today's civilians know anything about how Roman era formations carried out their killing on the battlefield? Almost none. How about how police officers REALLY work? Again, almost none. There'd be no Western World without the blood drenched Roman formations, yet in spite of their utter importance to world history, few know anything about them. Police officers have an enormous impact on the functioning of today's society, but once more few know anything meaningful about how they truly operate. Thus I don't see the topic of midi-chlorians or the Whills as being just "thrown in" there so that they "violate" the Original Trilogy.

It's all in how it's executed.

After seeing the train wreck of The Last Jedi multiple times, it's impossible to imagine how the exploration of the Whills could've been worse. At most, the Whills would've been as awkward as the midi-chlorians - could the fanbase have lived with that, with Lucas RESPECTING the original cast? Oh yeah. For sure.

Had someone of Filoni's creative nature been paired with Lucas, then the results not only could've been illuminating and epic, but even made the Prequels' poor handling of the mini-chlorians better.

But again, will we ever know? Overwhelmingly not, thanks to the cosmic-level malfeasance, arrogance and ineptitude of Kennedy/Johnson/Abrams/Hidalgo.

Star Wars itself came way out of left field in the '70s. No one expected it, knew they wanted it or cared to make anything like it but here we all are. Let's not forget that.

You hit the nail on the head. Absolutely.

I never eye rolled with the midi chlorians explanatiom in TPM,I saw it as the expanding on understanding of the force that logically the Jedi Order would've attained given their time to study the force and the tech existent in the GFFA.

Yoda speaking of the Force as he did in ESB and ROTJ was of course more vague but mystical (which is cool as) but was because the OT was meant to be a piece in a multi trilogy story/saga I understood this to be exposition.

Just like Anakin was spoken of as this great Warrior and Pilot who had once been a good man,we did not see that till the PT.

I can't stop thinking about how amazing this could have been. I highly suspect that the microbiotic world hinted at would have been intercut with the more conventional plane of the story (of spaceships, lightsabers, planets, etc.). But I get a cold, solemn, detached, ethereal vibe resulting from what could've been Luke's intense study of and devotion to the Force, post-ROTJ. I'm combining these words from Lucas with the slight bit of concept art he had commissioned from Chiang. Also, from the Mortis stuff in TCW and Rebels.

I think we missed out on a conceptual hat-trick from ol' Georgie boy. But that's just the cross we bear.

And the blame falls upon the majority of the fanbase, who went out of their way to crucify Lucas for the Prequels. Like a religious figure of ancient times, the fanbase demonized him as evil, beat him (proverbially) and forced him to walk while bleeding to the ground and hung him on a stake and burned him until he was dead. The fanbase didn't like the PT because they thought they're owed another OT-style trilogy. We, the fanbase became what we came to hate. We forced Lucas out of a job without allowing him to tell a story about a new trilogy and replaced him with a corporate stooge in Kathleen Kennedy. A corporate stooge in which made a trilogy to be all about herself. The fanbase also almost pushed Jar Jar Binks and Young Anakin Skywalker into committing suicide but instead went into rehab to get help in the sense counseling was needed. The fanbase had to be sexual predators and racist towards a woman by the name of Kelly Marie Tran. For an group of Star Wars fans, I honestly think the fanbase did a lot of damage to Star Wars as whole even if some of the things they did wasn't intentional. At some point we as fans we need to be asking ourselves, "When is enough for us? How much damage do we need to do to the franchise before we can say, 'We have a problem?'" When we accept that we have a problem. I hope we can fix what we did to the franchise and hopefully allow George Lucas to tell his version of the Sequel Trilogy.. I don't care if it's told in a form of graphic novel or a CG tv miniseries. We've been denying George Lucas his wish to tell a 9-12 part story arc for 15 years. It's time we stopped denying him that and allow him the recognizance of being a visionary and guess what? He will always be the father of Star Wars. We can always stick forks, knives, pitchforks and etc in him, but nobody will always take that title from him.

I did warn you guys that Lucas' version of the Sequel Trilogy would be much better than the shitfest we ended up with. And the sad part? The collective fanbase including you guys are now realizing it and go, "Oh fuck!" It's really sad because 15 years of bullshit and you denied the father of Star Wars his right to tell HIS Sequel Trilogy and ended up with a corporate-ized version of the ST. We as the fanbase have to bear this because all of this? That's going to be our scarlet letter for many years and we better get used to wearing it because we have developed a stigma and that's going to be hard to wash off.

It's too bad, because I would have liked to see the Whills stuff and the whole Talon plot.