Lucasfilm president on why George Lucas made the Star Wars prequels

Star Wars has gone through one hell of a roller coaster ride over the course of its 40-year life. The original trilogy changed movies forever, basically creating the blockbuster as we know it today and turning a generation of moviegoers into diehard fans. Two decades later, creator George Lucas rolled out the Star Wars prequel trilogy, which followed Anakin Skywalker — the man who would become Darth Vader — as he got swept up in the events that lead to the rise of the Galactic Empire.

These movies were much more divisive than the original three, with fans at the time dinging them for lifeless direction from Lucas, among other things. However, recently they’ve been getting a bit of a rehabilitation, both because fans who were young when they saw the movies are coming of age, and perhaps because the most recent trilogy of movies — made after Lucas sold the rights to the franchise to Disney — has been very divisive itself.

In any case, more and more people are looking back at the prequels with fondness. On the latest episode of Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy took a walk down memory lane and gave her take on why Lucas chose to make the Star Wars prequels in the first place:

"I was around with the movies that were in between [Star Wars trilogies] which is the Indiana Jones movies. I don’t think he ever stopped thinking about whether he would do more Star Wars and I think what happened during Indy was that he was not on the floor directing. He was not necessarily in it, because it was primarily Steven [Spielberg]. So, with anybody like George, and anyone who’s a filmmaker, they get antsy after a while at not being able to be on that floor telling stories, making movies, and his love of pushing the technology, obviously, we were doing a certain amount of that with each of the Indiana Jones movies, but it wasn’t like Star Wars and I think that each time we would push the technology, in making those movies, he got the bug to start thinking about what that might mean for Star Wars."

That definitely does sound like Lucas, who’s famously interested in film technology…possibly more than he’s interested in film storytelling, or at least that’s one of the impressions you can get from watching the oddly stilted Star Wars prequel movies. He even criticized the new Star Wars movies for not doing enough with technology. “There’s nothing new,” he was reported to say after a private screening of The Force Awakens. “There weren’t enough visual or technical leaps forward.” For Lucas, the technology’s the thing.

At the moment, it’s unclear if Lucas will ever return to that galaxy far, far away. I selling the property for billions of dollars, I wouldn’t be shocked if he wanted to step back from it, although Disney is doing plenty with it in his absence.

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h/t Cinema Blend