10 Directors Who Turned Down Star Wars Movies

The order in which we rank our favourite Star Wars films might have been a lot different had Steven Spielberg directed Return Of The Jedi, and according to Star Wars documentary Empire Of Dreams this would have been the case had it not been for a dispute between George Lucas and the Directors Guild of America.

The Guild didn't like how Lucas opened his first Star Wars film with the now iconic crawl, going against tradition and bumping the main credits to the end of the movie. When he refused to alter the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas was fined $250,000 and ended up leaving the Guild as well as the Writers' Guild and the Motion Picture Association of America.

The move backfired when he attempted to draft in Spielberg to direct the next film in the franchise, Return Of The Jedi. While Spielberg wanted the job, his Guild membership meant that he had to refuse Lucas, forcing the latter to look for a non-union director and eventually settle on Richard Marquand.

Rumours about Spielberg being in the frame to direct a Star Wars film circulated when the prequels were announced (according to Ron Howard, Spielberg was the first to turn Lucas down for The Phantom Menace) and they continued to do so when the new Disney-made trilogy was confirmed, though the director has always insisted that he has no plans to intrude on his friend's universe.