Quote Originally Posted by Revolutionary_Jack View Post
Considering that Lucas is a better director than any other non-Lucas director on Star Wars, I don't see a jot of truth in this.

American Graffiti itself is better than every single film that Kershner, Abrams, Johnson, and whoever else made. Most people act as if Star Wars was the first thing he did. In fact for a lot of critics, at least until the 90s (when SW fans grew up and infiltrated the movie critic business), Lucas' was a case of a promising film-maker, for THX-1138 and Star Wars who became a less interesting film-maker when he made Star Wars.

Most of his contemporaries were baffled with the idea of why he became a producer.
“If I made as much money as George Lucas, I would not decide to become a studio mogul. I cannot understand why he doesn’t want to direct films anymore, because American Graffiti and even Star Wars were very good.”
-- STANLEY KUBRICK

The way Kubrick says, "even Star Wars" is an indication that he thought it was one of his lesser works.

Lucas cast all the actors in the OT, personally cast them. He came up with the characters and names, and places. He came up with the vision. Most of the heavy lifting on the original films were done by him and him alone.

And look...even if you don't share my view about the Prequels (ROTS is the first Star Wars movie I saw in theatres, on my last day of school moreover, and I thoroughly enjoyed it and was immersed in it), I don't see how them being bad somehow negates Lucas as a film-maker. Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather III is not a good movie, but literally nobody will say that the solution is to do a reboot of Godfather without Coppola at the helm and promote those movies by saying Coppola isn't involved. The same guy who made the OT, made the PT, in the same way. A lot of the stuff people complained about the prequels had been there in the original trilogy all along. Like the Jedi Order recruiting child soldiers. Go back to ESB, one of the first things Yoda tells Obi-Wan's ghost is that Luke is too old to start training. Luke is basically about 18-19 then, right? So right there, Lucas was setting that up or as it happens...subconsciously laying down tracks.
Well, some may say that American Graffiti was well edited and well written than well-directed. Regardless, the idea that the person who directed Attack of the Clones or Phantom Menace is working in the same galaxy (if you'll pardon the pun) as any other Star Wars director that has come along since, just strikes me as completely insane.

Look, I get loving the prequels if you grew up with them but I can't understand how anyone, with even a trace of objectivity, could claim that they are better-made films than the sequels. They just aren't.


I thought you had a problem with one film-maker doing everything and needing collaborators and so on.
Where did I say that? All films are a collaboration.