George Lucas Discusses Writing Star Wars

In this recently unearthed audio interview, George Lucas discusses what it was like to write the first script for the original Star Wars trilogy. His first story script was so large, he ended up taking the first third to write Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope. Lucas also discusses the changes he made to Obi-Wan Kenobi’s storyline. Initially, Kenobi survived the entirety of the film, but ends up basically standing around for the last 25% of the film watching the air battles.

After the success of the first Star Wars movie, Lucas had to go back at some of the story lines that would now be difficult to translate onto the screen in the next two movies. As another example, Lucas originally planned to have Wookies as a primitive race that would reappear for the Battle of Endor. But, since he’d made Chewbacca intelligent in the first film he had to invent another race, the Ewoks, to take that place.