Word: filming
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...swagger of a con man who's not as smart as he thinks. Sebulba, Anakin's rival in the Podrace, walks on his hands and throttles rivals with his feet. "George said, 'Think of a spider crossed with an orangutan crossed with a sloth,'" recalls Rob Coleman, the film's animation director. Coleman would pester Lucas for backstory on obscure creatures like Sebulba, "but I've never been able to stump him. He marinates in this world...
...takes a village to make a movie: all those artists prying the Phantom menagerie out of Lucas' brain. The film had tens of thousands of visual elements, and Lucas signed off on all of them; he would stamp "O.K." or "Fabuloso" on the designs he liked. "George is very collaborative," says Rick McCallum, who produced Episode 1. "But finally it's his word, his world...
...occasional renegade whisper below his palace balcony. "Critics say the problem with George and Steven [Spielberg] is that they've created these well-made megamovies that are basically B movies," Lucas observes. "Jaws, they say, was just a big horror movie. Star Wars is just a big sci-fi film. That our films are not like The Exorcist, The Godfather and the great films of the '70s. Well, they were B movies too. And Gone With the Wind was just a soap opera." Lucas thinks of himself as a Marin County rebel against the Hollywood empire, in a cadre...
...right, what powerful man doesn't also want to be universally respected and loved? But now, sitting in a dark theater at ILM looking at his near-finished film, Lucas seems bracingly lighthearted. "What's that? White dirt on the print?" he asks. "Yeah, that's good dirt," says a wiseacre, and everybody laughs. Lucas is a genius at fussing: a sun is setting too fast in one shot, while in others, he wants light rays bouncing off buildings, more traffic, less confetti. No one acts cowed by the billionaire boss...
LUCAS: Yes, I know what that is. The groundwork has been laid in this episode. The film is ultimately about the dark side and the light side, and those sides are designed around compassion and greed. The issue of greed, of getting things and owning things and having things and not being able to let go of things, is the opposite of compassion--of not thinking of yourself all the time. These are the two sides--the good force and the bad force. They're the simplest parts of a complex cosmic construction...