Entertainment Weekly published a Q&A with George Lucas from the ShoWest Convention in Las Vegas. He was there to introduce the movie industry to his latest Star Wars creation, the animated summer flick Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The feature film (which opens Aug. 15) builds upon the Clone Wars shows that have aired on the Cartoon Network.
While there, however, he offered up some new tidbits of knowledge concerning the new live-action Star Wars TV series.
The live-action has [none of the characters from the movies], 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 â€â€? you’ve only seen one of them. [Lucas Laughs].
…Some of the characters from the features find their way in there, so it’s not completely divorced. It’s as if we just went down the street and told a different story. You know, we were doing, I don’t know, 24, and now we’re going to move down the street here and do The Wire. Same thing, it’s just different people doing the same thing in the same city.
…all the same rules, all the same places, all the same stuff, and a lot of the same species. So it’s a familiar world, it’s just that you’re seeing a completely different side of it.
Lucas confirmed the show would have at least 100 one hour episodes.
Yeah, I’m going to 100 episodes no matter what.
He also spoke a bit of how things are done when you’re George Lucas and you have enough money to pay for the whole series yourself and don’t have to do things the way the networks do.
…what we do in our TV series is we write the entire first year and finish it as a script. Then we start getting ready to shoot it, then we start casting, and then we do it. We know where the whole first year is before we even start to work on it. I mean, I can do that because I’m financing the whole thing. So I’ve got it pegged out for 100 episodes, and I know exactly what I’m going to do and how I’m going to do it and what the risks are.
When can we expect to see the new live-action Star Wars series?
…it should take another couple years. The live-action TV series probably won’t go on until around 2010. It’ll take this year just to get through all the scripts and then another year to get them all shot.
Lucas doesn’t expect to be too incredibly hands on for this project, though.
I’m doing it just for fun now. You know, I’m an executive producer now â€â€? I don’t do the day-to-day work. I check in once a week, maybe, and it’ll be the same thing on the live-action show. I’m also [producing] Red Tails [his long-in-the-works project about WWII's Tuskegee Airmen] â€â€? I’m producing all these things now. And then, hopefully, in a year or two I’ll be completely removed and I’ll just be able to go off and do my own movies again.
But we do know that the Star Wars movies are definitely finished. When asked if there would be anymore Star Wars feature films, Lucas was pretty adamant about his response.
No more, no more. I mean, except for this kind of stuff, which is sort of spinoffs of TV shows.
I encourage you to read the entire interview at EW.com. I guess I should also point out that it was reported last week that Lucas said he will consider the live-action series a part of the “official canon” of Star Wars mythology.
The series is being shopped to HBO and Showtime, but will end up on whatever network is willing to pay George Lucas the amount of money he wants to make. That’s how it works.
As long as he’s more hands off and lets other people write it, then it has a chance to be good I think.
Yeah, I was happy to read that he doesn’t plan to be too hands on. Let other people do the work and see what happens. It’ll probably be pretty good.
@ Mike – I agree – hands off it has potential.
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