Now that the Star Wars saga is complete, what projects are George Lucas working on next?
Rick McCallum: “He’s gone completely nuts. He’s mad now. He’s doing Indiana Jones–the script, which he should finish by Sunday, and then he’s meeting with Steven [Spielberg] to try and figure out where they’re going to go and what changes that they want to make on it. He’s got another idea for an animated musical, which I won’t tell you about, plus literally dozens of documentaries. He hasn’t really focused yet on what we’re going to do after we get this first trench out, once we get the [Star Wars] series started and once we get it all completed, but that’s really to do more with the fact that we only just completed the cut of the worldwide tour of Star Wars in the middle of August. So we’ve just been settling down and trying to get this basic stuff in terms of the animation and the live action series going on, and then he’ll start to really get into what he wants to do which will be interesting I think.”
What’s the current state of development for both the new animated series set during the Clone Wars and the upcoming live action Star Wars series?
McCallum: “The animation is being done right now as we speak. That is being done here at the ranch. A lot of the f/x will be done in Singapore, but that won’t really start moving forward, because right now it’s just conceptual work and script work. All the scripts, I think that George is trying to get 13 scripts done first before we really get into it. That will start happening probably towards the end of March. And the live action television series is something that we’re planning for just at the beginning of 2007. We’re just starting to interview writers and trying to really figure out which direction to take it. It’s going to be much darker and grittier and much more character based. He envisioned somewhere like a hundred hours between episode three and episode four with a lot of characters that we haven’t met that have been developed in other novels and that sort of thing. So we’re really excited about that. It’s like finally we can have the opportunity to answer everyone’s questions once and for all by the time we finish the series.”
How are you going to shoot the live action series, and where do you plan on shooting it?
McCallum: “Principle photography will take place all over the around. Probably with the base in Sydney, and I guess we’d be shooting in hi-def–or anything else that evolves in the next twelve months that would replace hi-def. I don’t see that happening, but there might be newer cameras that are cheaper with more optical discs that would record. But basically we’ll be hi-def.”
What about the project about the Tuskegee Airmen, the African American fighter pilots from World War II, that George has been planning for some time?
McCallum: “In fact we’re actually meeting today. We have 15 pilots, original pilots and that’s what we’ve been doing this morning–which I’ll rush back to as soon as I’m finished with this. They’re here for the next three days, and we’re just going through their experiences and listening to everything that they have to go through. So that’s something that’s really coming up for it. We don’t have a writer yet. We’re starting to really figure out what’s going to come out of these next three days, and then we’ll start on that immediately. I don’t think that we’ll be shooting that probably until the end of next year or the following year 2007, but at least were making real headway on that.”
Can you talk about the plans for bringing the Star Wars saga into 3-D?
McCallum: “Yes, I can. It’s a two-part problem right now; One, there is only about 100 or maybe 350-400 digital screens worldwide. But I’m really excited that finally, after all this bulls**t that we’ve been waiting for and listening to, the industry trying to get its stuff together–it looks like the first real deployment of digital cinema is going to start taking place at the beginning of the year. That’s being done by a couple of companies–Christie Vision and Technicolor–and I’m praying that they won’t lose focus and that the industry with come together and really start to respect their audiences for the first time. Theater owners really understand that 3-D, whether it’s true or not, is a catalyst to make them understand that we really need to do something about our falling audiences. I don’t think that’s just an issue about the quality of films. It might be because of DVD or the access to large screen television sets. There is a sociological change taking place about where young kids are starting to see their movies. Nonetheless I’m very excited that once we get to two and a half-three thousand screens, then we will start the process of working with some of the companies out there. One of them is called N3, which is taking a 2-D movie like all six of ours and creates a 3-D image which creates no eye strain. You can sit there for two hours with those fantastic glasses anywhere in the theater. We’ve not only done major tests for it, but we’ve done sections of it that are really startling because in the process you can literally pick out every visual FX and change the perspective of it as you deal with each element–and often in our films we have 20 or 30 elements. So even though the film wasn’t planned to run, with the idea of the 3-D becoming available we can actually take advantage of it. So I think that it’s really going to become a major form of entertainment soon. I think that Peter Jackson is going to have a ‘King Kong’ version at the end of his theatrical run. Jim Cameron‘s next picture is going to be shot in 3-D. Robert Rodriguez and Bob Zemeckis. So I think finally these big guys are going to really dictate to the studios. So 3-D is something really exciting for them and it’s not for everything obviously, and it’s not for every film, but for certain big, live action, huge movies it presents a really extraordinary opportunity to differentiate between the DVD market and the theatrical market.”
Was there any footage shot for Episode III of Liam Neeson as Qui-Gon Jinn that made it onto the DVD?
McCallum: “Actually there was a quick little assembly of a sequence when Yoda is thinking–there’s that scene. And George [Lucas] thought that it might be nice to have Liam [Neeson] come in, and then we did a little voice over and it just didn’t seem to have the impact that we originally had planned. So we never shot it.”
We saw almost nothing of Jar Jar Binks in Episodes II and III. Was that a reaction to the fan backlash against the character?
McCallum: “Without being defensive and without skirting the truth I did all of the animation on Jar Jar and I was just too tired to continue on in Episodes II and III. [Laughs] No. I think that there really wasn’t–I promise you–a reaction from anyone. I’m not being defensive about it, but you have to understand that the film was designed for kids between eight and twelve. There’s no question about that, and we always knew that was going to be the case. I remember in ’91 when George laid out the plans for Episode I we knew that we were going to get a lot of grief over this, but it’s the story that he wanted to tell and that it was about Anakin as a young [boy]. We knew that was going to be a problem. And then as Jar Jar evolved, we never actually expected the kind of reaction that we got from anyone over, let’s say, 17 or 18, but truthfully for kids between eight and twelve years old, after R2, Jar Jar is one of the most favorite characters out of all six films. And of course as he gets older, if you were eight or nine or ten years old watching Episode I, that started to change. We didn’t have Jar Jar in Episode II as much because of the fan reaction, but he just didn’t have the same place in the film. He had fulfilled his mission on Episode I, and he probably had more in Episode II just because of the reaction than we would have had had he not gotten that reaction– if that makes sense.”
What are the plans so far for The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles on DVD? What sort of extras do you have planned for that? Obviously, DVD wasn’t a reality when you were making it.
McCallum: “Well, it wasn’t a reality in terms of the way that we shot it. So one of the things that we have been doing is that we’ve been upgrading the quality of the original 16 millimeter image, and also redoing the soundtracks so that people can take advantage of it in their home. But also over the last 18 months we’ve been doing–God, we’re up to like 56-60 documentaries now, and we’re planning 95 altogether, plus a lot of lectures that tie in to the historical aspects of what’s going taking place in relationship to where Indy is as a kid and as a young man. So I’m really excited about that: we’ll finally have the opportunity to get it out to the audience worldwide that it never really reached in the United States. It was an extraordinary success outside of America. Even though we had really faithful viewers and we were put all over the place, it was just during that period when network television was falling apart. So we never really got the mileage that we always wanted or expected. So I’m really thrilled that the DVDs look great so far. We have about three completed. We have 22 that we’re doing all together. It’s exciting and that’ll be done in about 18 months. The thing about DVDs, for us, is that we don’t just do one video master for anything. We really make an effort to try and get the best quality that we possibly can and get the best amount of material, and that does take a long time. We’ve been working for almost two years on this DVD [Episode III] where we’ve been simultaneously finishing up the film and also at the same time trying to put some really great stuff together.”
