George Lucas on “Indiana Jones 5”

Times Online interviewed George Lucas and he had some interesting things to say about The Clone Wars and Indiana Jones 5, and much more.

“It’s completely separate from the Star Wars films,” he explains. “The Clone Wars has all of the characters everybody knows – from Yoda to Anakin to Mace Windu to Obi-Wan – they’re all there. The live-action series, meanwhile, has nobody there, because it’s after Episode III, so everybody’s dead, basically, or hiding somewhere. You hear about the emperor, just like you do in Episode IV, but it’s mostly about a whole different world. I mean, there are a million stories in the big city – you’ve only seen one of them.”

He added that the box office numbers for “Crystal Skull” did not surprise him and if a new movie were to be made, it will be once again a big undertaking.

“We were hoping for box-office figures like that, which is, ultimately, with inflation, what the others have done, within 10%,” Lucas explains. “So, we squeaked up there. Really, though, it was a challenge getting the story together and getting everybody to agree on it. Indiana Jones only becomes complicated when you have another two people saying ‘I want it this way’ and ‘I want it that way’, whereas, when I first did Jones, I just said, ‘We’ll do it this way’ – and that was much easier. But now I have to accommodate everybody, because they are all big, successful guys, too, so it’s a little hard on a practical level.

“If I can come up with another idea that they like, we’ll do another. Really, with the last one, Steven wasn’t that enthusiastic. I was trying to persuade him. But now Steve is more amenable to doing another one. Yet we still have the issues about the direction we’d like to take. I’m in the future; Steven’s in the past. He’s trying to drag it back to the way they were, I’m trying to push it to a whole different place. So, still we have a sort of tension. This recent one came out of that. It’s kind of a hybrid of our own two ideas, so we’ll see where we are able to take the next one.”