The horror.
Very few directors have had as many conversations about their work, when you take into consideration just how many movies George Lucas has actually directed.
Stanley Kubrick directed 13 movies.
Terrence Malick has directed 10 movies.
George Lucas? Just six. And four of those were Star Wars movies. And three of those were the prequels.
While the majority of fans –Â both Star Wars and just movie fans in general – viewed the prequels as some kind of personal attack, the reviews at the time were spectacularly kind, with Attack Of The Clones clocking up 66% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Revenge Of The Sith is sitting pretty with 79%.
When Lucas sold LucasFilm to Disney for a little over $4 billion, fans thought that was him done with corrupting their childhood memories of their favourite movies of all time, but we’ve got some bad news for you.
Ron Howard is the current director of Solo: A Star Wars Story, having replaced the two directors of The Lego Movie, and on his first day in the director’s chair, Lucas showed up on set.
Not only that, he actually ‘helped’ direct a scene in the movie, which producer Kathleen Kennedy told Entertainment Weekly all about:
“He had intended to just kind of stop by and say hi, and he stayed five hours. There’s even one little moment in a scene that — I can’t tell you what, sorry — but in the scene on the Millennium Falcon where George said, ‘Why doesn’t Han just do this.’ It actually is a funny little bit that will probably get a laugh.”
“And Ron happened to be by the monitor and not inside the Falcon and he goes, ‘Oh that’s a great idea,’ and ran in and said, ‘George wants us to do this.’ So that was pretty cool. I think George felt pretty great about that. He could revisit these characters, and I think he felt so comfortable, obviously with Ron being there, that it was just fun for him.”
Howard himself said that having George on set that first day was very helpful:
“He came by to visit the first day that I picked up shooting. George and his wife, Melody, came by to pay a little set visit. It made me feel great. He told me just trust my instincts, you know?”
“I know he kind of fundamentally feels like, first and foremost, [these films are] sort of for 12-year-old boys, and yet even he knows that it’s grown so far beyond that, and the fans have grown with the series in a great, important way.”
Whether or not Lucas’ influence will remain over the rest of the movie remains to be seen, but the first trailer does have us pretty excited. If you haven’t watched it yet, you can check it out here.
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