4. George Lucas Talks The Future
In 1980, (you know when The Empire Strikes Back was released) Lucas was saying there were seven further Star Wars films he wanted to make. He said he had "twelve-page outlines" for those film. Seven? So Return of the Jedi, the prequels, the sequels presumably. Lucas has said many times what his approach to writing Star Wars was doing huge back stories and entire arcs for characters and then splitting it down for the specific movies later on. In a telling example from Lucas form 1980;
"So, I took the screenplay and divided it into three stories, and rewrote the first one. As I was writing, I came up with some ideas for a film about robots, with no humans in it. When I got to working on the Wookiee, I thought of a film just about Wookiees, nothing else. So, for a time, I had a couple of odd movies with just those characters. Then, I had the other two films, which were essentially split into three parts each, two trilogies. When the smoke cleared, I said, 'This is really great. I'll do another trilogy that takes place after this.' I had three trilogies of nine films, and then another couple of odd films. Essentially, there were twelve films." He then added that he had
"eliminated the odd movies, because they really don't have anything to do with the Star Wars saga... I'm just going to keep it pure. It's a nine-part saga that has a beginning, a middle and an end. It progresses over a period of about fifty or sixty years with about twenty years between trilogies, each trilogy taking about six or seven years. These details really begin to show the model Lucas has been able to use with his approach to Star Wars. Talking of split trilogies and 20 year gaps is pretty much the model we have been living in with the Star Wars saga and this stuff was put into place in 1980 it seems. Around that time Lucas is also quoted to have
"titles and ten-page story outlines for each of the nine episodes". Having titles seems a bit of a stretch but given how all of this seems to be planned out, no matter how roughly, it wouldn't really surprise me. Additionally from an interview with Starlog magazine published in September 1981, Lucas confirmed that he had "the nine film series plotted, but it's a long way from the plot to the script. I've just gone through that with Return of the Jedi, and what seems like a great idea when it's described in three sentences doesn't hold together when you try to make five or six scenes out of it. So plots change a lot when they start getting into script form All of this makes total sense, in that these trilogies were more ideas on paper than actual written screenplay but even the best ideas sometimes get a little boring once you've been working on them for nearly a decade.