George Lucas has already sworn to stop making big-budget movies in response to fans’ criticisms, but he still has an axe to grind. In particular, about the common complaints about his endless revisions of the original trilogy. In a new interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Lucas addresses those longstanding complaints, saying that Blade Runner has gotten recut three ways from Sunday, and nobody seems to mind. But also, he claims that the intention was always that Greedo shot first, and that the original sequence just had an editing problem. Says Lucas:
https://gizmodo.com/george-lucas-promises-never-to-make-another-star-wars-m-5877264
The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.
So there you have it. Lucas isn’t making huge revisions that undermine the character arc for Han Solo and remove all the rough edges from his character — he’s just fixing some weaknesses in his direction the first time around. You believe him, right? [Hollywood Reporter via Slashfilm]
