I had the chance to speak to producer Rick McCallum for Star Wars Insider journal and one of many questions I requested that did not make it into the ultimate print concern was about this very thought, particularly since he was there at Lucasfilm for many years, engaged on all the things from “The Younger Indiana Jones Chronicles” to the “Star Wars” Particular Editions, the prequels, and even the un-produced live-action tv present “Star Wars: Underworld.” I addressed the matter point-blank, asking him, “Critics have pointed to folks such as you or others round George Lucas and say, ‘The issue is that he had a bunch of ‘sure males’. Nobody ever informed him no.’ And I am questioning in case you might dispel a few of that.”
To which he replied:
It isn’t one thing I might dispel categorically as a result of on one stage they’re proper, however to take it right down to the extent that we’re all “sure males” is simply ludicrous. Clearly, there have been numerous arguments and fights and discussions. Discussions, I might say, greater than fights, however heated discussions about what the difficulty is. I am not attempting to guard myself about it, folks can assume no matter they need to, however George has an thought of what the movie is to him. He informed us — all of us, actually — in that assembly after we have been going by the visible results, “Look, lots of you’re gonna hate this. I am making this for my children, and you are not gonna like Jar Jar Binks. However that is what I wanna do.”
I feel for all of us, we believed he earned the best to really feel that approach. So you purchase into that and nonetheless say, “Okay, I do not agree with this?” or “God, does it should be like this?”
However I do not assume you’ll be able to cut back it right down to the truth that all of us have been “sure folks” as a result of that simply shouldn’t be the reality.
That was not essentially the reply I used to be anticipating, but it surely makes lots of sense. Watching “The Starting,” the documentary that covers the making of “The Phantom Menace” exhibits precisely that in quite a few scenes that includes McCallum. He fought when he wanted to, however in the end his job was to provide George Lucas’s imaginative and prescient, proper or fallacious.