These days, Lucas has big projects on his mind–the 20th-anniversary release next February of a digitally enhanced “Star Wars” and, beginning in 1999, the three prequels that fans have been craving for years. Lucas bristles at the notion that he’s late in returning to the saga that made him an icon, as well as a fortune. What’s he been doing for 20 years? Letting ILM pioneer new technology and making his own film company, LucasFilm, a “laboratory” for production techniques. Both those efforts, he says, will enable him to make the new “Star Wars” trilogy better–and cheaper–than most studios could ever imagine. From his retreat far removed from Hollywood, that’s a prospect he relishes.
Big action films now routinely cost $100 million or more; Lucas projects that each of his new movies will come in under $60 million. The secret is going fully digital. He’ll design storyboards at the keyboard, shoot scenes for each of the different films simultaneously and, when directing, view by satellite editing changes made back at the ranch. “It’s not an assembly line,” he says. “I don’t write first, then design, then shoot. I’m doing everything together. We’ll be as facile with images as a writer is with words.” Lucas even intends that half the backlots for the new movies will be virtual: actors will perform against green-screens and computer-generated sets will be inserted later.
The magic has already been applied to the old “Star Wars.” Next year’s “special edition” will fix some nagging “irritations.” For example, when Luke Skywalker’s entourage enters the city of Mos Eisley, Lucas is adding more creatures, spiffier engine trails and Jabba the Hutt–all digitally. While a stationary, animatronic Jabba did appear in the third installment, “Return of the Jedi,” Lucas had a place for him in the first film and actually shot Harrison Ford opposite a human stand-in. But since there was no way to make Jabba mobile, Lucas had to cut the scene.
In the rerelease, Jabba has been mapped onto the original film plate, and the magicians have even figured out how to get Ford to step over his long, digitized tail. ILM spent hundreds of hours creating 4.5 minutes of new footage and restored the master print damaged by age. Cost: $5 million. Why go to all that trouble for such minor changes? It’s not the money; the trilogy has already taken in $1.3 billion worldwide. You have to understand George Lucas. “I’m a perfectionist,” he says. “I want my movie perfect forever.” Now if only he could make digital movie critics.
