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Tulip posted:So there's this joke I've heard, mostly in nerd circles, that the only thing that Lucas says to his actors was "Faster!" and right now I'm wondering where the heck this came from. Every picture I've seen of Lucas on set is him out of his chair in a close, seemingly pretty easy conversation, and maybe it's just because I grew up in our Joss Whedon world or I live on the east coast but Star Wars isn't that fast, particularly in line reads. Han's the resident City Slicker Rogue, and his dialogue is certainly snappier than the other characters, but even then I'd describe him as relaxed, not frantic. Vader and Obi-Wan are outright glacial. So what's the deal with this joke? Allegedly Lucas's most common directions to actors on Star Wars was "faster!" and "more intense!" I don't think it was always about line readings but just the general action of the scene. I can't recall if my recent readings confirm that this was literally true or not, but it definitely fits with the general impression - hell, in one of the notes pages scanned above he has underlined "Must be fast paced." And Star Wars was considered an incredibly fast-paced movie at the time. In fact, I read one contemporaneous review that described the movie's cutting back-and-forth between scenes of characters in different settings as a gimmick and that it should have stuck to one locale/ group of characters at a time in order to slow the movie down and be more immersive.
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Oct 4, 2020 16:15
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Huh, interesting. I've seen other scifi from that era and it's often outrageously ponderous to the point of just being poo poo1, though compared to the Chanbara and Westerns he was pulling from he was definitely on the fast side (I don't think he's that fast compared to Kurosawa but compared to Leone, ep4 is pretty fast). That said I felt like ep4 is fast not because of things in-scene but because it's a tight structure with several action scenes. The characters tend toward stating their motivations and feelings very directly, there's little to no waffling about those motivations. They generally say what they want, then do it. Luke's bored, he gets himself in trouble. They hear the princess is in trouble, and it's just two steps: they hire Han, then they break into the Death Star, and then the next round of motivations laid out, then executed. That part about that critic wanting the movie to spend more time on a given planet and such is funny given that one of the big contributions Marcia Griffin made was to just slaughter scenes from Tatooine, generally considered a good idea and it got here an Oscar so  1A good movie to compare to Star Wars is Logan's Run, which came out the year before and, if not a direct influence on SW, at least drew from the same well and did have a successful run on the box office. Logan's Run is an utter loving slog, largely because it has about a million plot points that have terrible thematic coherence. Multiple entire scenes could likely be cut to no difficulty. It's 3 minutes shorter than SW and the reads are faster but it feels over twice as long. Tulip fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Oct 4, 2020 |
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Oct 4, 2020 16:31
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I think it was a joke among the original cast members and nerds seized on it as a way to smear George as a person when he didn’t make the prequels exactly what they wanted them to be You see him all over the set and speaking closely with the prequel actors as well, in stills and in video
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Oct 4, 2020 16:44
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Tulip posted:That part about that critic wanting the movie to spend more time on a given planet and such is funny given that one of the big contributions Marcia Griffin made was to just slaughter scenes from Tatooine, generally considered a good idea and it got here an Oscar so My understanding of those cut scenes (Anchorhead/Biggs and Luke watching the Star Destroyer battle) was Lucas wasn't terribly convinced he needed them (scripting and filming them on friends advice) and cut them out fairly early.
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Oct 4, 2020 17:09
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Tulip posted:That part about that critic wanting the movie to spend more time on a given planet and such is funny given that one of the big contributions Marcia Griffin made was to just slaughter scenes from Tatooine, generally considered a good idea and it got here an Oscar so Oh definitely, my reaction to that review in general was that the writer was a pompous idiot. Cheesus posted:I also see "Marcia Lucas saved Star Wars in the edit room" as another favored myth. It's no secret that at a couple points Star Wars was kind of a disaster that needed tons of editing work to salvage. Just how much of the credit should go to Marcia or Paul Hirsch or to George himself who also contributed isn't totally clear, but by all accounts Marcia was absolutely an invaluable resource.
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Oct 4, 2020 17:58
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In a development that ties pretty much all the relevant topics of this thread together, Michael Kaminski, the author of The Secret History of Star Wars, was interviewed in a podcast just over a month ago, and in it he makes reference to both Pollock's Skywalking as well as the JW Rinzler Making of books. You can check it out yourself here: http://www.starwarsreport.com/2020/08/25/the-secret-history-of-star-wars-exclusive-interview-w-michael-kaminski-swr-445/, but I jotted down some notes:
There was a couple other things I was going to put but I forgot them! Oh well
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Oct 6, 2020 17:32
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SidneyIsTheKiller posted:I was most curious how Rinzler's books might have affected his perception on things but it doesn't seem like they have. Most frustratingly, he still insists Empire's father twist was invented during the writing of the 2nd draft (and this is presented as if it were a verifiable fact rather than an educated guess) though Rinzler's book makes that assertion look quite a bit shakier. SidneyIsTheKiller posted:Speaking of which, he goes into a bit of how some major changes to Episode III occurred after shooting already started (I hadn't read these chapters in his book), which definitely jives with my impression that the finished film is definitely not the same story that Episode II was setting up.
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Oct 7, 2020 00:18
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AdmiralViscen posted:I think it was a joke among the original cast members and nerds seized on it as a way to smear George as a person when he didn’t make the prequels exactly what they wanted them to be It's also weird because some of the most common criticisms of the prequels are the exact opposite: that they're too slow and bogged down with politics. The most popular parts are the fast, intense scenes.
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Oct 8, 2020 21:36
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Robot Style posted:I could see how he might not believe everything in Rinzler's book, since he did eventually clarify that a mention of midichlorians ostensibly from 1977 was actually added later at the request of Lucas to bring his original words in line with his later thoughts about the prequels. I think I'm going to PUKE.  I take it back, Michael Kaminski, you go right on with your disgruntled self.
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Oct 9, 2020 03:20
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Robot Style posted:Rinzler's Episode 3 art book goes into this a bit as well. It seems the biggest changes (unless there's other things Kaminski mentions that were left out of official BTS material) were a massive reduction in the stuff aboard Grievous flagship (apparently early cuts had the whole thing lasting around an hour), and reshoots to adjust Anakin's turn to the dark side. Yeah he goes into how after principal photography there was a ton of editing and rearranging, and focuses on how during that process the idea that Anakin's turn to the dark side would be primarily motivated by an attempt to save Padme from her foretold death, and commissioned reshoots in service of this new plot. Though Kaminski has a habit when speaking of not clarifying when he's relaying facts and when he's conjecturing, so grain of salt and all that. For me Episode II was rather obviously setting up a next installment in which:
It pretty much writes itself! I didn't need it to go down like this necessarily (I actually like the whole fable-like quality of Episode III's "deal with the devil" story) but it was weird to watch all those threads get dropped, and since the new plot came so late in the game it leaves Anakin's turn, supposedly the most important moment in the entire saga, feeling disjointed and unconvincing.
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Oct 9, 2020 03:28
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SidneyIsTheKiller posted:and since the new plot came so late in the game it leaves Anakin's turn, supposedly the most important moment in the entire saga, feeling disjointed and unconvincing. It's odd that you should say this; I would argue that one of the biggest problems with Episode II is that it makes Anakin too evil already. By the end of Episode II, Anakin is already a mass murderer, making his "turn" in Episode III rather superfluous. (It's also not really what was set up by Episode VI, which made it seem like Anakin's fall was a matter of one dramatic moment of anger that gave Palpatine an opening to mind-control him, maybe even just attacking Palpatine himself with impure motives. In other words, something along the lines of, at worst, Anakin killing the Tusken would have been the moment he became Vader, and from that point on he was Palpatine's puppet and no longer fully responsible for his own actions. But I suppose Lucas decided it was more interesting if Anakin was more morally blameworthy than that.) Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 16:02 on Oct 9, 2020 |
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Oct 9, 2020 15:44
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Silver2195 posted:It's odd that you should say this; I would argue that one of the biggest problems with Episode II is that it makes Anakin too evil already. By the end of Episode II, Anakin is already a mass murderer, making his "turn" in Episode III rather superfluous. (It's also not really what was set up by Episode VI, which made it seem like Anakin's fall was a matter of one dramatic moment of anger that gave Palpatine an opening to mind-control him, maybe even just attacking Palpatine himself with impure motives. In other words, something along the lines of, at worst, Anakin killing the Tusken would have been the moment he became Vader, and from that point on he was Palpatine's puppet and no longer fully responsible for his own actions. But I suppose Lucas decided it was more interesting if Anakin was more morally blameworthy than that.) Oh, I didn't mean that Anakin's turn came too late in the story, I meant that Lucas changed his mind about Anakin's motivations so late into the production. Even taking Episode III in isolation, it feels like a story about Anakin's anger and hatred hitting a boiling point before (and most confusingly, after) we see his turn is actually a desperate gambit to save Padme. And that's because that was what it was all about before Lucas decided to change it at the last minute.
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Oct 10, 2020 16:04
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Actors are hard to use, can't hold that against Lucas too much. Always thought it was weird that there's a director of photography but not a director of acting. You can hear much of the original plot for Ep3 in the Ep2 DVD special features. iirc there was lots of finishing the Sifo-dyas plot and getting ghost radio transmissions from Qui-gon and Lucas realised at some point that it was plodding and a bit boring and redid the whole thing to start at the previous mid-point, the Grievous flagship.
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Oct 11, 2020 09:58
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josh04 posted:Actors are hard to use, can't hold that against Lucas too much. Always thought it was weird that there's a director of photography but not a director of acting. Interestingly, those dangling plot points still seem to have bothered him - so much so that he spent a few episodes of The Clone Wars show dealing with the legacy of Sifo-Dyas as well as Yoda going on a spirit quest triggered by Qui-Gon's Force ghost voice.
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Oct 17, 2020 07:31
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josh04 posted:Actors are hard to use, can't hold that against Lucas too much. Always thought it was weird that there's a director of photography but not a director of acting. There is. It's the director.
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Oct 28, 2020 06:48
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Well if he's so smart why can't he hold the camera too, eh?
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Oct 28, 2020 10:19
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The split between Director and Director of Photography used to be a lot larger. Back before monitors and video villages, the DOP was really the only one who saw what the shot would look like before it was printed for dailies. Some of them really didn't like the introduction of monitors because it allowed more people to have access to the image, and thought that it demystified the role of the Cinematographer as some sort of wizard that made pictures out of nothing. I think the Keanu Reeves documentary Side By Side goes into this a bit, and there's definitely an undercurrent in there of people who are opposed to digital filmmaking because it represents the democratization of movies in general.
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Oct 28, 2020 17:43
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Robot Style posted:I could see how he might not believe everything in Rinzler's book, since he did eventually clarify that a mention of midichlorians ostensibly from 1977 was actually added later at the request of Lucas to bring his original words in line with his later thoughts about the prequels. SidneyIsTheKiller posted:I think I'm going to PUKE. So a couple weeks back I reached out to JW Rinzler asking for some specifics about the notes pages covered by Making of Empire. My main goal was to determine whether or not they were the same source for the "midichlorians" quote in his Making of Star Wars book that turned out to be Lucas revisionism, though I didn't say so directly because I didn't want to come off accusatory like "so are your books full of LIES then?" I did, however, ask if they might have been something Lucas added to or revised over time. To my surprise, he eventually got back to me! According to Rinzler, the notes in question were found in the files for Empire and he said explicitly that they were found after his book for Star Wars (so they were not covered at all there). He elaborated that it was not totally uncommon for material from one movie to end up in the archives for another, and that the notes could have been written anywhere from pre-1975 up to whenever Star Wars officially became Episode IV. While at this point I'm not sure I completely trust anything Lucas-adjacent anymore, I do feel slightly better about the validity of those particular notes, which IMO are some of the most compelling SW historical material out there and also appear to throw some popular fan narratives into question. I REALLY wish Rinzler had scanned every page.
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Nov 7, 2020 02:20
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SidneyIsTheKiller posted:It's no secret that at a couple points Star Wars was kind of a disaster that needed tons of editing work to salvage. Just how much of the credit should go to Marcia or Paul Hirsch or to George himself who also contributed isn't totally clear, but by all accounts Marcia was absolutely an invaluable resource. To add to this, here's what the Cantina scene looked like without editing. https://youtu.be/Q9lIi_gaULo Now, that's all just raw footage put in order and most likely wasn't anybody's idea of what the final cut might look like, but no matter what it was going to need a steady hand at the editing room, you couldn't at all assume it would play like gangbusters as long as the footage looked great and it followed the script.
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Nov 7, 2020 03:02
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