George Lucas: I went too far

Star Wars creator George Lucas made a candid admission many fans had been waiting for when he said he “may have gone too far” in The Phantom Menace.

STAR Wars creator George Lucas has made a candid admission many fans have been waiting for.

Lucas told an early screening audience that he “may have gone too far in a few places” when he made Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

Lucas said the story was “disjointed” in a rough cut of the franchise reboot.

His comments were made in a “making of” featurette in the movie’s DVD set, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

“It’s a little disjointed,” Lucas said.

“It’s bold in terms of jerking people around. I may have gone too far in a few places.”

The hour-long making of footage also includes Ben Burtt, the movie’s film editor, who criticised the film’s pace.

“In a space of about 90 seconds, you go from lamenting the death of a hero to escape to slightly comedic with Jar Jar to Anakin returning ... It’s a lot in a very short time,” Burtt said.

The footage captured Rick McCallum, the film’s producer, watching the film with “his hand over his mouth” in shock.

“It boggles the mind,” Lucas said. “I have thought about this quite a bit, and the tricky part is you almost can’t take any of those pieces out of it now, because each one takes you to the next place. And you can’t jump because you don’t know where you are.”

After the audience left the screening, the footage shows Lucas, McCallum and Burtt in a “slightly heated exchange, The Hollywood Reporter says.

“I do a particular kind of movie of which this is consistent,” Lucas said.

“But it is a very hard movie to follow. But, at the same time, I have done it a little more extremely than I have done it in the past. It’s stylistically designed to be that way, and you can’t undo that, but we can diminish the effects of it. We can slow it down a little bit, so if it’s intense for us, a regular person is going to go nuts.”

The film was not a hit with Star Wars fans.

The news comes as a production designer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi revealed Lucas wasn’t happy when he went backstage to look at how Episode VIII was being made.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi’s production designer Rick Heinrichs told The Hollywood Reporter that the legend of the franchise personally came to tour the set at London’s Pinewood Studios.

Heinrichs described him as a “cranky guy” who was not a fan of the amount of sets that were being built.

Heinrichs recalled that The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson originally had about 160 sets in his script.

Despite this, Lucas told Johnson that he was highly impressed by The Last Jedi and said it was “beautifully made”.