It’s one of the greatest controversies in Star Wars lore: George Lucas’s decision to digitally alter his blockbuster 1977 film so as to make alien bounty hunter Greedo – rather than Han Solo – shoot first during the pair’s encounter at the Mos Eisley cantina on Tatooine. Now the film-maker has finally revealed his thinking behind the change, and it’s all to do with his concern for the future of Han’s relationship with Princess Leia.
Speaking to the Washington Post about the long-running space opera he sold to Disney for $4bn in October 2012, Lucas says he went back to the scene in 1997 for moral reasons.
“Han Solo was going to marry Leia, and you look back and say, ‘Should he be a cold-blooded killer?’” he said. “Because I was thinking mythologically – should he be a cowboy, should he be John Wayne? And I said, ‘Yeah, he should be John Wayne.’ And when you’re John Wayne, you don’t shoot people [first] – you let them have the first shot. It’s a mythological reality that we hope our society pays attention to.”
Lucas’s digital tinkering to the cantina scene is perhaps the most famous, though not necessarily the most jarring, of the changes exacted for the special edition cuts of the original Star Wars trilogy.
Other painful moments for fans include the reintroduction of a deleted scene from the 1977 film in which Han Solo meets Jabba the Hutt. The original segue used a human actor to play the gangster, but the later cut features a CGI version of the slug-like alien from 1983’s Return of the Jedi. This caused continuity issues, because Solo walks behind the original human actor in the scene, so Lucas “got round” the problem by digitally lifting Ford into the air and having him stand on CGI Jabba’s tail.
Lucas refused to apologise for tinkering in the Post interview, which describes him as “a passionate defender of an artist’s right to go back and tweak his work”. But the film-maker does reveal he has spent the past 15 years suffering from the derision of fans in the wake of the special edition versions and the oft-derided Star Wars prequel trilogy, to the point where he avoids the internet and has no Facebook, Twitter or email accounts.
Lucas recently revealed he has no plans to return to directing Star Wars movies for fear of criticism and the lack of room for “experimentalism” he believes the saga now allows.
“You go to make a movie and all you do is get criticised, and people try to make decisions about what you’re going to do before you do it,” he told Vanity Fair. “And it’s not much fun. You can’t experiment. You have to do it a certain way. I don’t like that, I never did.”
