What George Lucas Said About The Prequels: “I’m Making A Movie That Nobody Wants To See”
The prequel trilogy of Star Wars has gained a following over the years, but it has not been without its criticisms. A fair number of fans felt that the story of the trilogy could have been executed better. To go into all of the things that such fans believe could have been done better would be a bit of an undertaking, but overall, aspects of the trilogy felt very different from the original trilogy. These movies and the characters and factions who appeared in them were not always how fans who had only seen the original trilogy expected them to be.
However, it seems that George Lucas was already aware that the prequel trilogy which he set out to make would not please everyone. In Paul Duncan's recent book The Star Wars Archives: Episodes I-III 1999-2005, the following words from Lucas were included:
"I know everybody wants to see Darth Vader in his black suit with his lightsaber, but the whole point of it is: How does this nice little kind kid, who has good intentions, is just like us, go wrong and became Darth Vader? And the second part of the story is: How does a democracy become a dictatorship?
I told people at Lucasfilm that they're going to have to face the reality that I'm making a movie that nobody wants to see, but I want to tell that story. I'm more interested in telling the story than I am in just doing a franchise where you tell the same story over and over again."
Come to think of it, George Lucas could have very well made the prequel trilogy look a lot like the prequel trilogy if he wanted to. Anakin Skywalker could have already been in the Darth Vader suit, and we could have had stormtroopers and familiar Star Destroyers and such right from the beginning. But when you watch The Phantom Menace, it looks the most aesthetically different from the original trilogy. Lucas had shown the battle droids to Steven Spielberg and called them the new stormtroopers in terms of their purpose, but they look very different.
As the trilogy progresses, there is some reverse engineering going on, with the clone trooper armor gradually evolving to look more like the stormtrooper armor rather than already looking like it outright. There are Star Destroyers, as well as ARC-170 fighters that look like X-Wings, but these are variations rather than outright copy and paste. Lucas was trying to show something different, right down to the story of Anakin Skywalker, whom we do not see in the Darth Vader suit until the final moments of the trilogy.
When Lucas says he was making movies that people did not want to see, it seems that part of what he meant is a trilogy about how good people can end up doing horrible things to each other. It is a topic that can resonate, but it may have made some people feel uncomfortable. This was not just the fun, heroic, and adventurous original trilogy, which did have dark moments here and there but ultimately felt optimistic as a whole. That was not quite the intention of the prequel trilogy.
There is something to be said about George Lucas knowing that he was not going to please everyone, and still going ahead with his ideas because he wanted to tell a story that he was passionate about. Even if it was not told in the most perfect way, it was something different that did not always feel like it was trying to use an obvious nostalgic formula to appease the fanbase, as run of the mill sequels sometimes do. He included moments that "rhymed," but he tried to push boundaries wherever he could. How well he achieved that is up to the viewer, but it is safe to say that the prequels, to some, ended up being movies that at least some people in the fanbase do want to see.