I Lied, Okay?
Movie sequels are rarely planned until after the original becomes a hit. This means they sometimes have to do some fast-talking, since the filmmakers tried to wrap the first one in a bow, and now have to claim there are loose ends to be resolved.
Sometimes they even reshoot old scenes. The final scene in Back To The Future, where Doc Brown assures Marty everything will be okay, was redone. Same dialogue (different girlfriend), but now Christopher Lloyd gets shifty-eyed when he delivers the line.
Or they can try to explain what they really meant. In Star Wars (THE Star Wars--A New Hope) Obi-Wan says:
Before the dark times - before the Empire...a young Jedi named Darth Vader, who was a pupil of mine before he turned to evil, helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi Knights. He betrayed and murdered your father.
Unfortunately for Alec Guinness, George Lucas decided some time after the film came out that Vader was, in fact, Luke's father. (I don't believe that needed a spoiler warning.) The info was spilled near the end of The Empire Strikes Back, which meant Obi-Wan had a lot of 'splaining to do in Return Of The Jedi:
Luke: Obi-Wan! Why didn't you tell me? You told me Vader betrayed and murdered my father!
Obi-Wan: Your father was seduced by the dark side of the Force. He ceased to be Anakin Skywalker and became Darth Vader. When that happened, the good man who was your father was destroyed. So what I told you was true... from a certain point of view.
Amazingly, when I watched A New Hope recently, I noticed that just before Guinness says his line about Lukes father, he pauses and looks sideways. As if he knew what really happened. I guess that's why he's a great actor.
Sometimes they even reshoot old scenes. The final scene in Back To The Future, where Doc Brown assures Marty everything will be okay, was redone. Same dialogue (different girlfriend), but now Christopher Lloyd gets shifty-eyed when he delivers the line.
Or they can try to explain what they really meant. In Star Wars (THE Star Wars--A New Hope) Obi-Wan says:
Before the dark times - before the Empire...a young Jedi named Darth Vader, who was a pupil of mine before he turned to evil, helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi Knights. He betrayed and murdered your father.
Unfortunately for Alec Guinness, George Lucas decided some time after the film came out that Vader was, in fact, Luke's father. (I don't believe that needed a spoiler warning.) The info was spilled near the end of The Empire Strikes Back, which meant Obi-Wan had a lot of 'splaining to do in Return Of The Jedi:
Luke: Obi-Wan! Why didn't you tell me? You told me Vader betrayed and murdered my father!
Obi-Wan: Your father was seduced by the dark side of the Force. He ceased to be Anakin Skywalker and became Darth Vader. When that happened, the good man who was your father was destroyed. So what I told you was true... from a certain point of view.
Amazingly, when I watched A New Hope recently, I noticed that just before Guinness says his line about Lukes father, he pauses and looks sideways. As if he knew what really happened. I guess that's why he's a great actor.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:26 AM
7 Comments:
I have never liked the "from a certain point of view." Line. I understand what Lucas was trying to do, but it was really weak writing. It comes across like a wink or a "white lie," but the issue is too important for that. Better would have been for Obi Wan to say, in all seriousness, that consumption of the person by the dark side erases the original person - creates a new person who has no loyalty to his former beliefs or friends, and that he didn't want Luke to be distracted by misplaced sympathies when he eventually had to face Darth Vader. Even if Obi Won was wrong (ie, there was still good in Vader, and Luke was bound to find out anyway), I rather have Obi Won wrong than flip about something so important.
Maybe they will reshoot the scene someday when Guiness can be digitally recreated ;-)
If Alec Guinness were able to come back from the dead, he would not re-shoot a Star Wars scene- he actually loathed the film and didn't get it at all. There is story about some young boy running up to him in an airport bragging he'd seen the movie dozens of times and Sir Alec stared at the child and something like "Then you must promise you will never ever do so again" (in rather precise diction I would imagine)
I can't find a link (I read it in a Wilson Quarterly in the past 5-10 years in the "Summary of Other Periodicals" section)
NE Guy
He only grew to hate the film when he saw how massively popular it was. He was attracted by the script, which he thought was a real page-turner, and enjoyed seeing the movie for the first time, with all the spectable that didn't exist during the shoot. He also liked how he had a percentage of the film, enough to let him live comfortably the rest of his life without ever working again.
It's when Star Wars became a way of life (Guinness was fairly religious and may not have liked its influence), and when he became so strongly identified with the role, that he had a change of heart. I don't know exactly when he turned, but we know he was gracious enough to appear in the two sequels, after all.
I'm reminded of Guinness's appearance on David Letterman's late night show. Dave kept asking him to do the line, and he finally relented, saying "may the force be with you." Dave said that wasn't the line he was referring to.
Well you can get the very brief article from the June 2005 Wilson Quarterly "Grumpy Old Jedi" which mainly refers to Piers Paul Read's biography
-"Fairy-tale rubbish but could be interesting perhaps," Guinness told a friend; and
in a diary -"apart from the money, which should get me comfortably through the year, I regret having embarked on the film."
And the story was about a mother bragging about her son (I don't know where I got the airport) which is good because it makes him seem a little less cruel.
I've read Guinness's 1985 book Blessings In Disguise and also the stories you mention, so I have a reasonable idea of what was gong on.
By the way, the best book on the making of Star Wars is--not surprisingly--The Making Of Star Wars, which goes into excruciating detail about its conception, its writing, the production and so on. What is surprising is it only came out in 2007. (By coincidence, I re-read it last month.)
Guinness always felt the movie was a bit silly and his lines banal--not his sort of film, of course--but he did like the script, which Lucas got to him while he was shooting Murder By Death. He also found Lucas chrarming.
The shoot was a hard one, and Guinness was highly professional and an inspiration to the young cast. However, the big moment came after they left Tunisia and came to the UK to shoot the Death Star scenes. Lucas finally decided he had to kill Obi-wan Kenobi, even though in the original script he survived to the end. The idea had been around for a while, and during a lunch, he had to explain to and convince Guinness why it was the right move. In later years, Guinness had so turned against the film that he claimed he was the one who came up with the idea of killing the character.
Is it certain that the father connection wasn't in Lucas' mind in 1977?
I had thought it was, because Obi-Wan's hesitation in that scene did look dishonest to me.
OTOH, the Leia-as-sister nonsense certainly was not intended in 1977. But I think it was intended by the time Empire was filmed.
One of my claims to SF venerability lies in the fact that my first SF convention was pre Star Wars. Early 1977, and the costumed folks were mostly Trek costumes or Logan's Run. (Girls in Logan's Run outfits... that was the seventies! Of course I was a 12-year-old nerd.) My second con, half a year later, and EVERYONE was in Star Wars costumes.
Anyway, at that con, I heard from "everybody" the story of how Luke's father died. Darth Vader killed all the Jedi knights, and the last one he fought was Luke's father; Luke's father died, but in that battle Vader fell into a lava pit and was so scarred that he had to live in the iron lung suit after that.
That story had enough elements of truth in it that I wonder if it ultimately stemmed from Lucas. If so, was that his original plan, or was that part of a disinformation campaign?
Lucas did have plenty of ideas in 1977 about what happened before and after A NEW HOPE, and, as you'd expect, many of these things show up in the movies. IIRC, some of his notes from around that time have him discussing a prequel where Darth Vader fights Luke's father, which I think would pretty much end the debate.
In the otherwise weak Fanboys, I did enjoy the emnity between Star Wars and Star Trek fans.
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