Brian Volk-Weiss’ latest Icons series turns the spotlight on the Star Wars movies created and produced by George Lucas, revealing a number of surprising new aspects on a movie franchise that has been investigated many times before – including the first on-camera interview with the original film’s editor Marcia Lucas. Paul Simpson chatted with him about a galaxy far, far away…

 

Obviously, you’re a Star Wars fan; what did you learn from this, that you really had never expected to learn?

I’ve been studying this movie – that might be an exaggerated word but I think it would still qualify as studying – for at least three of my four and a half decades on this planet. I would conservatively estimate I learned at least 60 to 70 new things – some huge things some tiny things.

On the huge score, I had never in my life heard that there were plans to not shoot the ending of A New Hope. Fox was pressuring them to basically have the movie end with rescuing Princess Leia, and Lucas and his lawyer Bruce, everybody, had to fight to keep the ending in. Even though I can’t prove this, I’m pretty sure we would not be sitting here fifty years later talking about the movie had the ending final trench run not been filmed.

So there was huge stuff like that but then there was little stuff like, one night Phil Tippett and a bunch of guys were out drinking and getting a little drunk and crazy. They’re leaving the bar and Phil Tippett realised his shoelaces were open. So he’s down tying his shoelaces and someone was like, ‘What are you doing man, hurry up.’ And Phil Tippett was so drunk he slurred his words and said ‘Give me a break, I’m just tying my… salacious.’ And that’s where Salacious Crumb got his name.

Or the fact that the guy with the gold sparkling eyes, that metal thing in the back of his head, had a flashlight just slammed in the back of his head to make his eyes light up right before the cameras rolled.

So it was this huge stuff and this small stuff and then we got the first ever filmed interview with Marcia Lucas. It was a six hour interview, in Hawaii, and her off-handed comments were frequently mind blowing. The thing she said about how they’re at a dinner party and somebody goofing around is like ‘What if Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s father?’ That’s how Lucas came up with the idea.

I’m in this business because of Star Wars; I’d probably be a dentist or a banker in New York without Star Wars. So to be sitting there with all these eye witnesses, not to mention the gut-wrenching story of watching a marriage dissolve was also a pretty powerful sombre thing to see.

Where do you draw the line in telling that part of the story? Did you have any bits where you went ‘No, we’re just crossing the line here.’

Absolutely. I don’t like punching down. I want the audience to feel emotions when watching documentaries that I direct, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t like to “burn metal” – that’s a quote from Aliens, by the way. When I give notes, in editing, when I want something cut out because it’s just too gut wrenching, [I say] we’re burning metal. What it basically means to me is that the story beat we’re covering, we have covered it already; by adding this additional moment, we are burning metal. We have established a sad moment, we have told a sad story, we don’t need to depress the audience. There’s a way to make the audience cry from pathos; that is very different than people watching something I’ve directed and they’re depressed for the next six hours.

So Marcia, like I said, a six hour interview, I conservatively cried two dozen times. She was crying too, by the way. If you look carefully, you’ll be able to see she’s crying. So it was pretty gut-wrenching. They were very human stories about a relationship evolving in a not great way.

The other thing is – I just want to be very clear when I say this – Marcia never said to me, ‘I’m still in love with George Lucas.’ She never said that but I’ve been around for a while, interacting with my fellow humans and to me, at least at this point in her life, she’s closer to eighty than she is seventy, I definitely got the feeling she has some feelings for him. It’s in the show, we didn’t cut that completely. She went into a bit more detail that I didn’t feel moved the story along, so we didn’t use all of that but you’ll see in the last episode, she’s pretty open about where she stands with him. She didn’t pull any punches.

It’s funny, about one in every twenty-five to thirty interviews I do, I’ll think to myself ‘Does this person understand the black box next to me is recording everything they’re saying and doing?’ And honestly, during Marcia’s interview, I probably had that about ten to fifteen times.

It’s her first on camera interview ever, but it’s also her second interview, ever. The last interview she did was in the 70s and it was for a local newspaper in San Francisco. So yes, it’s technically her first on camera interview but it’s also her second interview, period.

During the interview, I have never seen anybody be so forthcoming and she just didn’t care to do anything except answer the questions as truthfully as she could.

How did you get the access?

We’ve been making shows like this for a little bit over five years and if there’s anything I’ve learned, it is not relevant how big or small somebody is, it’s all random to a certain degree, luck. For the Aliens episode, The Movies That Made Us, we got Sigourney Weaver like that; we never were able to get the Second AD! The Second AD wouldn’t return our calls; people were calling him and he wouldn’t do the interview but we got Sigourney Weaver after three days of trying. From my point of view, it’s never obvious ahead of time who’s going to be easy and who’s going to be hard.

We were making all the phone calls, sending all the emails, doing our thing, weren’t getting anywhere and then we were interviewing, I believe, Ken Ralston. We’ve interviewed him before for other shows that we’ve done, so we know him and as he’s taking off his mic, he’s like ‘Hey, who’s your big white whale? Who you trying to get that you don’t got?’

And I’m like ‘Marcia, Marcia, Marcia.’ And he’s like ‘Well, who are you talking to?’ And I gave him the names and he was like ‘No, no, no. You’ve got to call this person.’ So he gave us an email address off his phone, right then and there.

And it took about three weeks of back and forth with her team and then I woke up one morning, in LA, knowing that I was flying to New York at 3pm. I woke up and I had an email saying that she had confirmed and was available “tomorrow and for the next nine days.” And if there’s anything I’ve learned with someone like her, you don’t wait for the next nine days. So instead of going to New York at 3 o’clock, I cancelled all my meetings – we’re talking probably 30 meetings – booked a flight and at 2 o’clock flew to Hawaii. From getting that email to sitting in front of her was about 23 hours.

When it comes together, it’s a ‘pinch me’ moment.

Hawaii is three hours behind LA, six hours behind New York and during that six hour interview, I got hundreds of emails and texts and a fair amount of phone calls. Any other time in my life, on the hour drive from the interview back to my hotel, I would have been returning calls, returning emails. I sat the entire ride back staring out the window. It was like I’d been hit by a train. All this stuff she had told me, it was a very emotional interview, for both of us. More for her than me.

How much did it alter your entire plan for the series, once you got that information from Marcia? Because obviously, she’s front and centre in the first episode. Did it actually make you go ‘I’ve got to go right back, junk everything that I was thinking we were going to do and retell the story’? Or did you filter it into what you’d already got mentally set up?

Well it’s funny, what I’m about to tell you almost never ever happens. But by the most random luck, she was one of the first interviews we did. We had, I think, a nine week shoot and I think we interviewed her in week two or three.

So it’s interesting, the phenomenon you’re describing actually happened the opposite way of what you just asked because her interview allowed us to change our questions for everybody after.

Again, I’ve never seen this before, but so many people when we interviewed them after her would be like ‘Um, how do you know that?’ And I’d be like ‘I told you, we interviewed Marcia.’ And they were like ‘Holy shit, she said that? OK, well then I guess I can talk about it.’

So she actually really helped us prime the pump. It’s usually the other way around, Sigourney Weaver, we had to open that episode to put her in and not only put her in, she’d given us so much information. We had the same thing with Sam Neill for the Jurassic Park episode. He said yes after we had locked and not only did we have to open it up, which is very expensive, by the way, to put him in but also, we had to re-jigger a few things around to match what he had told us, after we had confirmed its accuracy. But with Marcia, she was either the end of week two or the beginning of week three because, in addition to a pretty long shoot for a documentary television show, we do three months of research and during the research phase, casting is happening simultaneously.

Usually at this stage in an interview, I would ask you what was the biggest challenge of the project but I have a feeling you’ve already answered that.

I’ve made a lot of documentaries now; this one to a certain degree, I could say I truly had no problem. We were very close to getting Harrison Ford – we’d already worked out the logistics, the money, everything – and at the last minute it just didn’t happen. But I would refer to that as a disappointment not a problem.

We filmed all over the world, we sent a crew to Tunisia, we filmed in Italy and Canada, whatever. We had some trouble getting our footage out of Tunisia but we got the footage. I’m working on a show now, that if you asked me that question, I could talk for three hours about how many challenges and problems we’re having, but this show? It really came together.

Marcia aside, of those six hours, what’s the moment you’re most pleased as a creator, not necessarily as a director, of putting it on screen for people to see?

One of the things that I always try to do in everything I direct is give the audience a sense of context.

If you’re walking through the woods, in the snow and you see the biggest paw print you’ve ever seen in your life and it looks like the animal was 10,000 lbs, 50ft tall, whatever, if you take a picture of that and you put it on Instagram… If you normally get 300 likes per picture, if you just post that picture you’ll probably get about 300 likes. But if you post that exact same picture with a dollar bill next to it and you give that paw print a sense of scale, a sense of context, I guarantee you, you’ll get a thousand likes.

And that’s what I feel we accomplished based on the reaction I’ve seen on all the fan sites, on social media, on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes. The amount of people who say, ‘I’m the biggest Star Wars fan I know and I had no idea how close it was, that this movie, didn’t get made or got made in such a bad way, I never would have seen it.’

We did that very deliberately because if you really pay attention to the first two episodes, it is shocking that the movie happened. The amount of times everything went wrong, the amount of times George Lucas took risks.

This is again what people don’t understand that I feel we really shined a spotlight on, for George Lucas. The Empire Strikes Back, the biggest budgeted independent movie of all time. You know what beat that record? Return of the Jedi. Return of the Jedi was the highest budgeted independent movie of all time, you know what beat that record? The Phantom Menace; every single time, after A New Hope.

Look at James Cameron, look at Steven Spielberg, look at Spike Lee. These are some of the greatest directors of our time, [but] they’re still using studio money. We really tried to capture how entrepreneurial George was. We got that largely because of Marcia and then we started doing all the other interviews and there’s a recurring theme – George’s father.

And I feel we’re one of, if not the, first documentary ever about Star Wars to show why George did what he did. Building Lucasfilm, building what would become CGI and digital cinema etc. It all goes back to his dad who owned a stationery store in Modesto, California. And they didn’t have a great relationship but his dad kept saying, ‘Be your own boss, use your own money.’

That’s what I think we captured, and to the best of my knowledge – not to pat myself on the back but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen every documentary ever made about Star Wars – I have never seen that particular story told.

Icons Unearthed is available on Amazon Freevee now