Writer-Director Lawrence Kasdan has always been partly attributed for the success of The Empire Strikes Back. But did you know Lucas offered him the opportunity to work on The Phantom Menace script? Check out this interview in The Baltimore Sun:

Then why does he bring in other writers?

I think he hates to write! In both Empire and Jedi, I came in as a fireman - with Jedi I had already done Body Heat, so it wasn't an obvious move for me to do another Star Wars movie. I just liked working with George and wanted to help him out when he said he was behind the eight ball. He knows there are certain things he wants to get in and somehow curl a story around and it's not easy - that's why he gets stuck. I saw him a couple of weeks before he left to shoot Phantom Menace - and we did a speaking thing at USC - and the first remark he made to me was, "Hey, do you want to write Phantom Menace?" I asked, "Aren't you starting to shoot it?" "Yeah," he said, "but it would be great if you took a second pass at it." For George, the movie is bigger than the script.

When you say that, on "Empire," George was not interested in all the "that too" stuff - what would you include in "that"?

He doesn't care about the relationships between people beyond the broad strokes; he's not interested in the humor that can be wrung from understanding the characters' eccentricities. If the humor isn't there in the simple version of a scene he has to do, he's not interested in it. What he's interested in is moving the plot forward. He doesn't want a three-minute scene about character. So he's the opposite of me that way.

I'm not interested in plot, I'm interested in characters surprising you - scenes when you discover something new about them or they change their relationships to each other. I like fast-moving narrative too, so it was easy for me to get on George's train. I just wanted to mix it up. That's not to say he isn't interested in larger matters. He's always filling out some large scheme, and the people are there in his movies to represent different philosophical [constructs].

Can you give me an example of a philosophical character?

Yoda is one of the great creations. How many directors have been interested in Zen masters over the years? Just think of Kurosawa or Hawks or John Sturges (The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven). But George created this little creature who did a lot of the same stuff as their heroes and I wrote him good and he was huge.

Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back is the equivalent of Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate and Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. Like I said, a lot came together in Empire. Kersh's bleakness - and Frank Oz, who "played" Yoda [he was the puppeteer and the Jedi's voice], did great.

So you had the introduction of this incredible character and it really worked. And because it had all of that it will always be more acceptable to people who write about movies, who after all are not 8-year-olds.

But to me, the first Star Wars is the mind-blower - it's like a Van Gogh or Monet or Picasso that takes everything that came before and uses it in a new way. It was an astounding movie that really blew everyone's mind. It took genius to do that, I think. It was no accident.

And do to it for $11 million. ... I'm looking forward to the new one, because it's unadulterated George. How many people do you meet that are so strongly one thing and are able to impose their vision on millions of people?

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