craveonline

Crave Online: Why did you use Samuel L Jackson and Christopher Lee but not other actors to reprise their voices?

George Lucas: You need people available every week and you can't really afford multimillion dollar actors to do a television series. The license fee on your average television series is about $200,000. It's nothing. So those guys make more during their coffee break. When we decided to do the feature, when I said, "Hey, this is great. Let's do a feature." Then we went back to the actors and we said, "Okay." We told them we were doing the TV series just so they knew, as a courtesy, but then we said, "Look, we're doing a feature. Would you like to do the voice in the feature?" Some of them said yes, some of them were off doing features because this all was done, again, fairly rapidly. It wasn't like we said, "Okay, next June we're going to do this." Its like, "Could you come in in a month, in four weeks and do this? Can we have two days?" Some of them were all over the world and some of them said, "Yeah, it would be great, I'll come in and do it" and some of them couldn't. What happens in new animation, it used to be animation, you just had actors play the parts. The secret is a lot of people, especially in television animation; they didn't hire really great actors. Even in features they didn't. So the idea of hiring a really good actor, a Tom Hanks to play the thing, was a really revolutionary idea. That was mostly Jeff Katzenberg who said, "You know, we need really top actors." Partly they did it because they were great actors. Partly they did it because they wanted to use them for publicity, so they could sit up here and talk to you. To be very honest with you, much as I love you guys, I don't really think I need to hire an actor, a big movie star to go and publicize my movie. If the movie works and you like it and you love it, that's fine. But I don't need Angelina Jolie here to have you guys come and say, "I'm only going to this press conference because Angelina's going to be there and I want to get her autograph." That's what it comes down to in the end and that's what they do. They simply use them, they have two days in the studio or three days in the studio and then they have like two weeks doing press. So they're mainly paid for the press stuff. They're not really paid for doing the movie. I'm sure I'm going to hear from Jeff about that.

Crave Online: What was the inspiration behind our new main character, Ahsoka?

George Lucas: I wanted to develop a character that would help Anakin settle down. He was, at the end of Episode II, is kind of a wild child. He and Obi Wan don't get along. So the idea was to see how they become friends, how they become partners, how they become a team. Then one of the ways to do that, because when you become a parent, you become a teacher. You have to sort of become more responsible. It sort of forces you into this adulthood thing. So what I wanted to do was take Anakin and force him into this kind of "now I have to teach somebody and now I have to be slightly more responsible and I have to…" So it was that juxtaposition. I happen to have a couple daughters so I have a lot of experience with that particular situation and I just said, rather than making it another guy, why don't we make her a girl because that's fun. I have a lot of girls and they're just as hard to deal with in their teenage years as boys are. That's really how that.

Crave Online: Star Wars is full of action, intrigue and drama. What do people do for fun in the Star Wars universe?

George Lucas: Well, they like pod races, they like gambling, they like card games. They go out and shoot at womprats in the canyons with their local tractors.

Crave Online: Does the mythology have an entertainment industry?

George Lucas: There is an entertainment industry but you won't find that out until you get to the live action show in a few years. I mean, there is. They go to the opera.

Crave Online: What mythological territory will the Clone Wars series travel into?

George Lucas: Well, the mythological arc of the saga doesn't really continue in these other things because that is a story. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. It's the story of one man's struggle against evil and redemption by his son and that sort of thing. This is more like, I don't know, it's more episodic. It's more like Indiana Jones actually. You have themes and things that still go through it, and there are issues like that but it's not what it's based on. This is bigger and we get to go more places. The fun part about animation especially in the Clone Wars in particular, is that we're allowed to go and do stories about clones. We get to know them and find out what they do for recreation and what Jabba the Hut's family is all about; do all kinds of things that don't have anything to do with the main character. The film itself, the series itself, the epic itself is basically about one man, so it's very, very narrow. You pass through a lot of things and you look, what's that over there, but you never get to look at it. So this allows us to go and look at all that stuff which means we're not encumbered by this mythological uberstory of the psychological underpinnings of why somebody turns to be a bad person.

Crave Online: Why an animated movie now, after you've done six live action ones?

George Lucas: Basically, I started out in animation. I studied animation when I was at college and produced some work that was a lot of fun, had a lot of animated films and stuff in my career and I've always been interested in it. When we did Revenge of the Sith, I lamented the fact that I had to jump over the Clone Wars. I jumped over the Clone Wars because it had nothing to do with Anakin Skywalker. He's just another player. We had a very narrow focus on talking about him personally. So I couldn't do that. I said, "Gee, it's too bad because there's a great, it's like World War II. It's a huge canvas there to be mined." So we decided we would do a little five minute animation series for Cartoon Network using anime and manga and those kinds of ideas that I've always wanted to work in. We hired a really great director, Gende, to do it for us. But that sort of got me going and saying, "You know, we could do a regular TV show, a big one, a half an hour show and it could really be great. We could use all the new techniques we developed in CGI animation and that sort of thing." And I said, "When I finish Star Wars, I'm going to go and start this and I'm going to do it." So that's basically what happened. I got to fill in a blank and go around in a universe that is not restricted and therefore not quite as dark and we can have a lot more fun with it. We can enjoy it. It's a little bit more lighthearted.