How did you feel when you found out it was going to cost $120 million of your own money to make "Attack of the Clones"?
I blinked when I had to do "Empire Strikes Back" at $25 million, because that was everything I had and more, and if that hadn't worked I'd have been in deep... problems. By the time I had gotten to this one, one of the exercises we went through after "Jedi" was that I said, "I wanna see if my companies can survive not having "Star Wars" in their lives." And we did. We went through 15 years and these companies not only survived but they prospered. So they were able to finance a $120 million movie.
Was there a moment during the making of "Clones" when you thought, Thank God I don't have to answer to anyone but me for this?
I think it was actually more with "Phantom Menace" that that happened. When I said to my colleagues that I was going to start from the beginning, and with a nine-year-old kid, they were saying, "This is a disaster, this will never work, it'll destroy the franchise. Can't we get Harrison Ford back?" If I'd have been at a studio, if I'd had to answer to somebody, that film would probably never have been made. And then the story wouldn't work. I'm trying to tell a six-part story, and a studio wouldn't be interested in a six-part story, they just want sequel, sequel, sequel, sequel, sequel.
It's been said that Steven Spielberg and yourself pioneered the event movie. However, it then paved the way for movies like "Godzilla". Do you ever feel, "Oops, I created a monster"?
That was written, unfortunately, by uninformed, cinematically-illiterate journalists, because David O Selznick would roll over in his grave if he thought we had invented the event movie. And so would DW Griffith. Even if you forget those movies, Irwin Allen existed before I did, and his films ["The Towering Inferno", "The Poseidon Adventure"] were hugely successful. So it's not like we invented this stuff.
Have you ever thought about doing the last three films [Episodes VII-IX] in the saga?
No, because I've got a lot of other movies I wanna make. This next film is the end of the saga as it was originally written, there wasn't anything else ever done.
Read Episode One of the interview.
