PLUME: When you talk about the development of Star Wars and the transition in tone through Empire and Return of the Jedi and now eventually what happened with Episode I, do you think that George’s storytelling became more simplistic, or less mature? How would you characterize the elements that you saw emerging with the difficulties that were happening towards the end of Empire and what eventually led to Return of the Jedi?

KURTZ: I think it became simpler. You don’t need complicated interpersonal relationships, you don’t need difficult dramatic structures for this kind of story. Empire, in a way, is a typical second act of a three-act play. It’s the problem act – everybody has problems, everybody has difficulties that they’re trying to get out of, and usually the end of the second act is you’re leaving everybody in deep shit. And, in a sense, Empire does that. Luke’s hand is cut off, and Han Solo is frozen and he’s off somewhere – all of the key elements are left unresolved. It’s very rare that you see a feature film that ends that way and is satisfactory.

We were a bit afraid of that whole concept. Knowing that there was going to be a third film obviously helped, but still – that wasn’t going to be for another three years, so the idea of presenting this to an audience and having them accept it was a scary proposition. I had never done it before. It seemed to work, though. It seemed to work quite well. The audience was very satisfied, and anticipated the next part. I think part of the reason that they were satisfied was because they were satisfied with the characters themselves. The characters seemed believable in the story.

Star Wars, the first film, is very much a comic book story. It’s a very archetypal standard story about a hero coming of age and engaging with the world and trying to right some wrongs – and all of those things worked very, very effectively – but the dialogue is fairly pedestrian as far as movies go, and the adventure is carried along by interesting side bars and some of the individual effects… and the fact that it’s kind of a rollercoaster ride in a sense, with very, very archetypal energy, so that you can associate with the key character elements very, very easily.

There’s a lot of undercurrent in Star Wars that, if you take it on the surface, a four-year-old can really enjoy it – but there’s a lot else going on, under there. In that sense it’s multi-layered, and Empire is as well. That’s the thing that bothered me a bit about Jedi and certainly about Episode I, is that those layers, those subtexts – they’re all gone. They’re not there. You accept what’s there on the screen – it either works for you as a surface adventure, or it doesn’t. But that’s all there is. There’s nothing to ponder.

PLUME: No depth.

KURTZ: There’s no depth in it. And that’s where I think the mistake is. And I’m sorry that it happened that way, because the potential for a lot of that is great – it could have had a lot of depth, without damaging the surface story. The sign of a good movie is one that can work on very, very many levels and, depending on your mood when you go to see it, you can see those, or not, as you want. But it doesn’t interfere with your entertainment of it.

PLUME: How did you observe that change in George, because obviously he was the one who guided it towards that lack of depth…

KURTZ: Well, I think that he felt Empire was an ordeal for him – using his own money, it went over budget and over schedule a bit. Kershner was slow, we had some problems with Mark Hamill who had an injury – typical movie stuff, really. But even though it did cost a little more than was budgeted, there was no way it was ever going to lose money. He really didn’t have to worry too much about it – the combination of the merchandising and the distribution would never be a problem.

PLUME: It was never George’s intention to direct Empire?

KURTZ: No, no. After Star Wars, he didn’t really want to direct the others. I think he was unhappy that I – I’m the one that recommended Kershner, and had worked with him before. I think he was a good choice for Empire, I think he worked really well, but he wasn’t the kind of director… George, I think, had in the back of his mind that the director was a sort of stand-in – that he could phone him up every night and tell him what to do and kind of direct vicariously over the telephone. That never happened. Kershner’s not that kind of director, and even when George showed up a couple of times on the set, he found that it wasn’t easy to maneuver Kershner into doing what he would have done.

So, on Jedi, he was determined to find a director who was easy to control, basically, and he did. And that was the result, basically – the film was sort of one that George might have directed if he had directed it himself… but maybe not, because it goes through so many interim bits, that if he had directed it probably would have been quite different.

PLUME: For better or worse?

KURTZ: I think probably for better. But, I don’t know, because as I said, he had gotten into this mode of saying that the audience is interested in the rollercoaster ride and that he could make just as much money, and it doesn’t have to be complicated, doesn’t have to have as difficult a story. There are a lot of other people who do that all the time – that’s they’re kind of movie making philosophy, the sort of Jerry Bruckheimer approach to movies. A lot of Hollywood movies have been based on the idea that the story is the subtext of the action, so that’s certainly nothing new. But it’s not very satisfying, I don’t think, personally. But, you can make a lot of money, and if that’s what you want to do, then you do it that way.

PLUME: How did the arguments between you and George escalate during Empire?

KURTZ: It was just a matter of trying to get done and he, I suppose, wasn’t very good at delegating. Sometimes he would want to control everything, and then other times he would go away and you wouldn’t hear from him for a long time. It was difficult to fathom kind of how he approached all that, and he comes out of school doing everything himself – the documentary school where he wrote and directed and shot and edited all by himself, and there’s certain feature films you can make that way, and others you can’t. He had a good eye, and he’s a very good editor, and the films that he directed for the most part have a good visual sense.

With story material, some of the characters were complicated, and the scripts work well. He seemed to work best as a collaborative writer, where other writers came in and had some say in adding certain things so you’d get a variety of point of view, like Willard and Gloria Huyck on American Graffiti. The Huycks also did a polished last draft on Star Wars to add some humor and some edginess to some certain bits, and I think it helped a lot.

PLUME: Would you say that George tends to be a cold writer, as far as emotional warmth or character depth – we were talking about this as far as American Graffiti, that everything tended to be somewhat sterile as far as George’s original drafts of that film.

KURTZ: I think that’s probably the case. The other writers tended to add extra elements, especially emotional elements. George tends to write about the facts, in effect.

PLUME: Very documentarian.

KURTZ: Yes, because that’s his background.

PLUME: At what point did you decide to divorce yourself from the Star Wars process?

KURTZ: Well, it was just the difficulties of finishing Empire, and the fact that – at the very beginning with American Graffiti and with Star Wars, and into the start of Empire – it was a very, very small shop… there were four or five of us in the office, and that was it. Then, in the middle of Empire, we were here in England shooting and George was back in San Francisco working with ILM on visual effects and other things, too. He hired some film people from other companies and started to expand into a much bigger operation… some marketing people, and some merchandising, and people to negotiate in some of the toy deals… and by the end of Empire, it turned into kind of this big organization. Not big necessarily in terms of actual physical numbers – there weren’t that many people – but there were enough, and it was an entirely different attitude about everything. That was part of it, and also the fact that I think he blamed me for all the things that were difficult on Empire – a director that was difficult to control, a film that was too expensive, and all those things.

PLUME: Do you think that he felt he’d outgrown the need for a set of controls… A “no-man”?

KURTZ: I don’t know. I don’t think we ever talked about it in those terms, but I think that he did chafe a bit under the idea of someone saying “that’s not a good idea,” some of the time. At the very end of Empire … we decided at the very last minute – we pretty much locked the picture in the mix and just getting ready to make 70mm prints – and we decided that there had to an extra shot at the very end, to identify this rebel fleet.

If you remember how the end works, it’s before you go into the medical department, who are working on Mark’s hand. It’s the establishing shot of the fleet, and we had a shot already of going into the window and showing Mark inside, and we just decided that it was confusing We didn’t know exactly how that was sorted out, so we wanted a long shot at the beginning, and then one at the end that shows the whole fleet when the Falcon flies off. They weren’t very difficult to do, and all the ships were there … just pile up the composites, and they were rushed through, just to get it done. Very last minute. One of them wasn’t particularly good, and George said, “Oh well, maybe we should just let it go.”

I said, “It’s worth at least one more go through. One bad shot can ruin the whole movie, basically.” Which I really believe is true, and it just wasn’t very good. It was just a compositing problem, had nothing to do with the individual shot elements – I can’t even remember what shot it was, now. I think making a movie wears everybody down. You have to be really careful of the decisions you make at the very end, because you can kind of throw a monkey wrench in, very easily.

PLUME: Just to get it out the door?

KURTZ: Yeah, just to get it done. So, I really don’t want to criticize any way of making movies – anybody makes a decision about what they want to make, and they make it, and it goes out there, and the audience is there or it isn’t. You can argue for years about the Pauline Kael approach, about whether movies are art or commerce or how much intellectual content you have. One of the things I remember Pauline Kael said quite clearly is that, “The young filmmakers of the ’70s mostly didn’t have anything to say. They were good technicians and they knew all the tricks, but they didn’t have any passions, like some of the filmmakers in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s did.”

Now, whether that’s true or not – I don’t generally believe in vague generalizations – but, there is a certain amount of truth to that, because a lot of films that have come out since the ’70s have been quite shallow. Good looking films, but not much to say. Maybe that’s part of the problem, the filmmakers haven’t lived enough. Their entire experience is based on old movies, rather than life. As such, they’re referential all the time – referential to old movies rather than to life experience. So I suppose the only answer to that is material that isn’t that way, material that’s written by novelists or screenwriters that have a substantial amount of real life experience and have interesting things to say about various topics.

Anyway, as it relates to Star Wars, the key is that the original Star Wars, and to a great extent Empire, resonated with the audience because there seemed to be something there that appealed to them. Saying something to them that they may not have even noticed – it was subconscious and they wanted to see it, they wanted to be immersed in that experience, to be able to see it several times.

That’s one of the reasons the films were so popular. If you think about the fact that Star Wars came out so long ago, when ticket prices were that much cheaper, the reason it made as much money as it did is because people went back to see it many times. There are some infamous stories about people seeing it about two or three hundred times. I’m not sure if that’s true or not…

PLUME: A scary thought.

KURTZ: It is a scary thought. But even seeing it five times was unusual at the time, and there are films that make a lot of money with the audience seeing it only once, because there’s a big audience and the ticket prices are so much higher. There are lots of films that have come out down through the entire history of film that people do see over and over again, because they’re nourishing films and they resonate strongly, story-wise, with the audience. I like to think that Star Wars and Empire are that kind of film. They fit into that way of looking at films… nourishing.

I don’t know that you can always put your finger on what it is. It’s very easy for the film critics to analyze why a film is popular or why a film is good, but in the long run, it’s very, very subjective. You get six people in a room, you’re going to get six different opinions about any film – and they’re all right. There’s no wrong. I’ve never wanted to look upon the idea that Nights of Cabiria and The Seventh Seal are great classics, and The Sting and Jaws aren’t because they’re Hollywood adventure movies. You can make a case for any kind of movie that appeals to you.

PLUME: I mean, the bottom line, is always…

KURTZ: …if you enjoy what you’re seeing, and you get something out of it…

PLUME: Then it’s great art to you.

KURTZ: Then it’s working for you. Whether or not it will last, whether or not 30 years down the road you can still watch a film and say, “Yes, I like that.” Like you can with Sullivan’s Travels, or Citizen Kane, or dozens of other films from the ’30s and a lot of the other ’30s films – in fact the majority probably. 90% are films that you wouldn’t want to watch again. I think that applies to books and theater and everything – everything created, paintings even, music… a little bit of it is going to float to the surface and be around in 30, 40 years, and the rest is not.

PLUME: Which can be said of any time period and, as you said, any genre.

KURTZ: Yeah, it applies to everything across the board.

PLUME: Would you say, in trying to transition out of Star Wars, that your departure was acrimonious?

KURTZ: No, no… I think it was… I think we both were frustrated and decided we just didn’t want to work together anymore for the time being. Also, I had for a long time wanted to work again with Jim Henson, and he wanted me to do The Dark Crystal with him, and it was an entirely different kind of challenge. One of the problems at that particular moment was it looked to me like Jedi was going to be disappointing – with the change in the story, with all of the story material that I had really resonated with being tossed out, and that whole Ewoks thing, and the new Death Star and the same kind of climax of Star Wars. It was, from a creative challenge point of view, kind of a rehash. So the idea of doing something like Dark Crystal, a whole film made up of mechanical creatures with very little in the way of optical effects, trying to make that come to life was an entirely different kind of challenge. That was much more appealing to me.

PLUME: So it was a mutual …

KURTZ: It was pretty much a mutual thing, yeah.

PLUME: How would you characterize your relationship with George now?

KURTZ: I think it’s pretty normal. He is very busy, and a very reclusive character, but I talk to him once in a while. I saw him at the Special Edition premiere here in London and I’ve seen him a few times. We both went and spoke at this 25th anniversary screening of American Graffiti at the Motion Picture Academy. I’ve talked to him on the phone a couple of times – not very often, because it doesn’t seem to come up.

PLUME: He doesn’t solicit advice?

KURTZ: No.

PLUME: And, overall, your opinion on Episode I would be?

KURTZ: Well, I don’t know that I’m a very impartial observer. As I said, I knew what some of the history was about and what it could have been in terms of way back when we were talking about it, so in that sense just going to see the film and seeing the way it turned out was a disappointment because of my built-in connection to all of that past. That’s not fair for the film, because the film isn’t that film, or it isn’t one of the ones that we talked about – it’s a different film, with a different script. But I think I’m objective enough to say that even given that parameter and given the script that they ended up with, I felt it was very, very weak. It isn’t very dramatic and I was very bored in watching it. There were no surprises … nothing that was unexpected, and there wasn’t anything that I was looking forward to. I was quite disappointed, actually.

I had a long discussion after that first time I saw it, because I saw it at the opening weekend when I was at a Star Wars Science Fiction Convention in Dallas, Texas – the big one. There were about 8,000 people. The next day, lots of people asked me about it, and I said, “Well, I’m not the one really to ask about it. You either like it or you don’t.” In talking to smaller groups, and some of the people I was with, it felt to me like the dramatic potential of the story and the way the story went wasn’t handled as well as it might have been, and that’s always a very subjective thing. There are lots of ways you can do it. Any ten filmmakers would have taken the same script and made it ten different ways. I’m not sure how valid that kind of criticism is. In the end, it’s what you like or don’t like. As I said before, there’s no good or bad or right or wrong, so to say you don’t like something is perfectly valid. To say it isn’t great, because I would have made it better, is not so valid.

PLUME: But as far as tendencies go, you could definitely say that – with his emerging tendencies that you witnessed firsthand – this is a film that George would have made.

KURTZ: Well, it seems that way, and I am just hoping that the next one is more sure-footed and better dramatically, and more interesting. I would love it to be. On the other hand, it feels like, from things that I’ve heard and what people have written about, that the money from the toys and the merchandising was so much more than from the film that you could very easily fall into this trap that it doesn’t make any difference what’s in the film as long as it has lots of referential material and it comes out and it’s finished. Then, even if the film goes right in the toilet and doesn’t even make any money, you’ll make all the money on toys. Well, that’s obviously not true, because if you have a total turkey, then you’re not going to sell toys, but…

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