Sorry, fellow nerds, George Lucas has no intentions of releasing the original versions of the first Star Wars trilogy on home video anytime soon. When asked about it during a lengthy on-stage interview at the Cannes Film Festival , Lucas noted that they’d already been released on laserdisc and that everyone at the time said they looked terrible. (I can confirm this, but they looked awful because of the shoddy video mastering, not the actual source material.
) He also insisted that the special effects on the original films were incomplete — “movies get abandoned, they don’t get finished” he said, echoing Leonardo Da Vinci — and that part of his reasons for restoring, revising, and adding new VFX to them in the late 1990s was because he wanted to complete them the way he saw them. “I’m a firm believer that the director or the writer or the filmmaker should have a right to have his movie be the way he wants it,” he added, sounding slightly more annoyed than usual. None of this is news, of course.
And Lucas’s wide-ranging chat at Cannes didn’t exactly offer any revelations. Rather, it was a chance for the packed audience to sit in the presence of the man who made Star Wars for 90 minutes. (The wild standing ovation he received beforehand, complete with several rounds of boisterous cheers, confirmed this fact; it was by far the most enthusiastic applause I’ve heard at the festival this year.
) And the avuncular, soft-spoken Lucas was very much in character in.
