Sunday, September 19, 2021

George Lucas on The Force during the production of the original trilogy


During the production of A New Hope:I’m dealing with the Force a little more subtly now. It’s a force field that has a good side and a bad side, and every person has this force field around them; and when you die, your aura doesn’t die with you, it joins the rest of the life force. It’s a big idea—I could write a whole movie just about the Force of Others. Now it really comes down to that scene in the movie where Ben tries to get Luke to swordfight with the chrome baseball when he’s blindfolded. He has to trust his feelings rather than his senses and his logic—that’s essentially what the Force of Others comes down to.​The Force really doesn’t have anything to do with the lightsaber. Anybody can have a lightsaber. It’s just a weapon like a pistol, and Leia could use the lightsaber as well as anyone else. But she really hasn’t had any training with a lightsaber because she doesn’t really like them; she prefers pistols. The Force is really a way of feeling; it’s a way of being with life. It really has nothing to do with weapons. The Force gives you the power to have extrasensory perception and to be able to see things and hear things, read minds and levitate things.​The Force is a perception of the reality that exists around us. You have to come to learn it. It’s not something you just get. It takes many, many years. Luke is on the road to knowing the Force, but it will be another twenty years before he actually begins to cope with it on a real level. He’s still an amateur. As far as Luke knows, Ben is the last of the Jedi Knights. But there could be more. Obviously Darth Vader knows the Force, but as far as we know at this point, Luke is one of the last surviving apprentices of the Force. The Force is always there, however. Anyone who studied and worked hard could learn it. But you would have to do it on your own.During the production of The Empire Strikes Back:I may bring back Ben eventually; I’ll have to bring back his voice. May also bring back the ghost of Ben, not the person of Ben. Luke is learning the Force through a combination of things, rituals. Some of the Force came from Carlos Castaneda’s book Tales of Power [1974]. The idea that you can see things in another dimension would work great, that Ben is now part of the Force and he can be there with Luke. As Luke goes through this experience, he begins to see Ben in this other dimension. He can begin to see his ancestors in this other dimension with the Force, which would mean we could then bring them back in a different kind of way. “Ben will explain to Luke that he will gather all these powers, but he can’t use them for evil or he will succumb to the dark side of the Force. If you use it for evil, it will start using you. It is a force for good, but the more you become addicted to it, the more it controls you and the side that controls you is the bad side. The side that you can control is the good side. The good side is a passive side and the bad side is an aggressive side. Two sides to the Force: One is aggressive, one is passive in relationship to things.” (In one of his notes, Lucas wrote, “The mood of a warrior calls at once for control and abandon; the Force commands you and obeys you—unity of opposites.”) “If you use it well, you can see the future and the past. You can read minds and you can levitate and use that whole netherworld of psychic energy.​Vader is completely consumed by the evil side of the Force. He is an instrument of the Force rather than having his own free will in terms of what he does. He really is driven by the Force. When we kill him off in the next one, we’ll reveal what he really is. He wants to be human—he’s still fighting in his own way the dark side of the Force. He doesn’t want to be a bad man, but he is. He can’t resist it. He’s struggling somehow to get out of what he is, struggling with his humanity.​In the fight, Vader is using the dark side of the Force and he’s really tricking Luke. It limits Luke’s ability to throw things around or use lightning bolts. If he wants to be aggressive, he has to use the dark side. So in the beginning of this fight, Luke will be shielding himself against Vader, but he’ll finally get mad enough to where he starts to pick things up and throw them at Vader, which gives him the upper hand. But even as Luke gets the upper hand, Vader knows that he’s winning because he’s getting Luke to use the dark side of the Force. The audience would also know—it’s a physical way of manifesting the idea that the more lightning bolts he shoots at Vader, the more he’s succumbing to the dark side of the Force. The more he’s winning, the more he’s losing. It will also make a more exciting fight. You’ll be rooting for Luke, because he’ll be so outmatched, and the only way he can survive is to use the dark side.​The Force evolved out of various developments of character and plot,” says Lucas. “I wanted a concept of religion based on the premise that there is a God and there is good and evil. I began to distill the essence of all religions into what I thought was a basic idea common to all religions and common to primitive thinking. I wanted to develop something that was nondenominational but still had a kind of religious reality. I believe in God. I also believe that there are basic tenets that, through history, have developed into certainties, such as, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ‘Do unto others …’ is the philosophy that permeates my work.During the production of Return of the Jedi:They become the Force. The concept is that when you die, your energy drains into the Force, which is made up of all living beings. We are just personifying it a little bit, which I think is all right.​A back and forth with Lucas, Kadsan and Marquand:Kasdan: The Force was available to anyone who could hook into it?Lucas: Yes, everybody can do it.Kasdan: Not just the Jedi?Lucas: It’s just the Jedi who take the time to do it.Marquand: They use it as a technique.Lucas: Like yoga. If you want to take the time to do it, you can do it; but the ones that really want to do it are the ones who are into that kind of thing. Also like karate.All quotes from The Making of Star Wars trilogy of books by the late, great, J.W. Rinzler. via /r/StarWars https://ift.tt/3lEOslF

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