Okay, now I see your point. After reading that I feel as certain as you do that Lucas would absolutely never ever create the last 3 episodes, and I was very stupid to ever post such a thing. Thanks for enlightening us. It took Lucas almost 20 years to get around to creating episodes 1-3. Of course he wouldn't go straight from 3 to 7, he would run off and do other things for a decade or so. Part of the point of 100% CGI is that Lucas could sit in his easy chair and write, direct and edit the entire movie without ever having to leave his ranch. The original actors could sit in a sound stage and say their lines, and perhaps do a little acting so the CGI animators could get all the physical inflections right.
Earlier, Lucas let go a potentially revealing slip of the tongue. Expounding on the difficulty of constructing each film as a self-contained whole, he said, "the challenge for me is telling a six-part story: so in Episode I there are things that I have to get in that refer to Episode VII... no, hang on, we're not there yet. I mean Episode IV."
Lucas has said before that there are no plans for another three films after his sextuplet of movies are finished. When pressed, he reiterated it again. "The next film," he says, "completes the saga as originally written."
Interesting that he says "the saga as <i>originally</i> written". Of course Lucas isn't going to commit to anything. It's something he'll get around to doing down the road when he feels like it. Think about it. This presents Lucas with the perfect scenario to recreate real people digitally for a movie. No one has done that before, and that is where things are heading. Movies like Final Fantasy are one thing, because they show totally fictitious characters. Since they never existed, you can pretty much do anything you want with them as long as they look and act like a human. The real future is in digitally cloning people that are either dead or too aged for their role. Industrial Light and Magic is capable of producing the most advanced CGI in the world, and does all the special effects for the majority of films made. Star Wars 4-6 had a dynamic cast of actors that millions of people would love to see mixed back together in the Star Wars universe. Lucas owns both Industrial Light and Magic and the Star Wars franchise. It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together. I think Lucas would do it if only to be the first to reproduce real actors in CGI. Then a few years after Lucas breaks new ground we'll be watching new movies starring Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Shirley Temple as a child, and new Little Rascals movies starring the original cast.
Dan East
