Lucas himself recounted his stress and hospitalization while making “Star Wars” in the 2022 documentary series “Light & Magic.” The series, streamed on Disney+, is named after its subject: Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects company founded by Lucas in 1975 which brought forth “Star Wars” from imagination to reality.
“I ended up on my way home, flying from LA to San Francisco thinking, ‘Oh my god, this isn’t going to work. This is a mess! [I’ll] never get to work again,'” Lucas recalled thinking. Once he was in the hospital, his doctors asked him if he was under stress (“Yeah,” he answered). Since it’s a director’s job to manage their crew and set, the stress wasn’t confined to Lucas himself. “Everybody else was panicked,” Lucas said. “What if I died? People didn’t even know what the movie was. Y’know it was in a million little pieces. Nobody knew what I was really doing.”
The “Star Wars” prequels are often lambasted for relying on CGI and green screen instead of practical effects and physical sets like the original films. I agree this was to the films’ detriment, but I understand Lucas’ affinity for digital filmmaking. Making the “Star Wars” films was a never-ending series of headaches (and sometimes worse) for him. When he went back to Tunisia to shoot the Tatooine scenes for “The Phantom Menace,” the bigger budget did nothing to stop sets from being destroyed.
Digital effects may be less tactile, but so long as there’s still a human hand guiding them (and not an artificial one), they can be beneficial. There’s nothing practical about risking your health for a movie, after all.
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