George Lucas on Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Published August 11, 2008 in Movie Interviews

By Fred Topel | Image property of LucasFilm

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

George Lucas has been promising to explore the Clone Wars fro a long time. The prequels were supposed to have them, but they end up falling between II and III. There's an internet cartoon, but that doesn't count. Still, Lucas decided that animation was the best way to explore this part of the Star Wars mythology.

Lucas Gives Us The Clone Wars

"Basically, I started out in animation," said Lucas. "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."

Even Lucas was sorry The Clone Wars had to go in favor of Anakin's journey to full Darth Vader-ness. "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 kind 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."

The Clone Wars TV series will air on Cartoon Network later this year, but first the Clone Wars movie opens in theaters. "We ended up doing the TV series. The first few shots came back and I looked at them on the big screen. I said, 'This is fantastic. This is better than we ever imagined it would be and this is so good it could be a feature.' So I said, 'Why don't we make a feature?' We have Ahsoka, one of our main new characters, I said, 'Why don't we just make a picture that introduces her, that actually introduces one of the main characters?' So we did that but it's purely something I wanted to do in terms of exploring animation and doing something that I enjoy doing. I sort of moved from features to television."

The series will follow Ahsoka from where the film leaves off. "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."

Star Wars: The Clone Wars will hit theaters on August 15th.

For stills, posters and more movie info, go to the Star Wars: The Clone Wars Movie Page.

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Compiled By (Sources)

Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of LucasFilm
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