George Lucas interview

GEORGE LUCAS

George Lucas is a happy man. Not only is his latest addition to the Star Wars saga Attack of the Clones receiving some rave reviews (his friend and colleague Steven Spielberg publicly announced it his second favourite Star Wars movie after Empire Strikes Back when he saw it last week), but most of the negative attention given to The Phantom Menace has subsided.

Those who have already seen Attack of the Clones will know that there is plenty to cheer about. So when Tiscali caught up with Lucas, as well as his producer Rick McCallum and the actors Samuel L Jackson (Mace Windu), Hayden Christensen (the nineteen-year-old Anakin Skywalker), Christopher Lee (Count Dooku) and Ian Macdiarmid (Supreme Chancellor Palpatine) they were all in chipper spirits, despite being out late the night before celebrating the director's 55th birthday.

Lucas is sanguine about The Phantom Menace three years after its release. He still strongly defends the film which disappointed so many and sees it as an essential first chapter in a six-movie series. It looks like fans will have to like it or lump it, although the director concedes that he himself is not a great fan of beginnings:

"When it all started I wrote it as one little movie, which was Episode 4 and I wanted very much to start in the middle. I don't like to start at the beginning because the first act is not always that entertaining, but you have to have it. So I figured out this method by saying well, we can all just come in at the middle."

But he is intent that all of the movies should be seen as separate entities that can stand alone in their own right.

"My primary concern", admits the director "is to make each episode work for the audience and make it so that it is not necessary to have seen the movie before and the movie after."

It's nearly twenty years since the third part of the first trilogy hit our screens %u2013 so what exactly has Lucas been up to, apart from producing the Indiana Jones television series?

"Well, one of the exercises I wanted to do after Jedi was to see if the companies I had built could survive not having Star Wars in their life. So we went for fifteen years, and the companies not only survived but they prospered and we were now able to finance a $120m movie."

And, needless to say the writer/director/producer had to wait for technology to catch up with his vision.