Continuing coverage from the Episode II press junket at Skywalker Ranch. Here's an excerpt from the LA Times:

On the grim nature of the new episodes: I'm basically [going] against the marketing wishes of what you would normally do in a film like this. But I've got to tell the story, and I knew when I started that this was going to end badly. I see this as one movie in six parts, and if you see it from the very beginning to the very end, the father is redeemed by the children, and it all works out. You just have to accept the fact that the middle is pretty grim.

On building a better Yoda: We had created digital dinosaurs [for "Jurassic Park"] and made them look real in a real environment, and we also accomplished that [in "Phantom Menace"]. But creating a digital character from scratch and having it fit in is one thing--having to replicate an existing character and make it look real and like that existing character that people knew was a huge challenge. We tried to do it for "Phantom Menace," but we were going too far too fast. It didn't work, so I went to the puppet again.

We have a couple of wide shots with the digital character running around, but I couldn't really do a digital Yoda [then]. We kept that crew working and struggling. When we started production [on "Attack of the Clones"] I had to commit to a digital Yoda because I couldn't get the end scenes with a puppet. It just wouldn't work with throwing a puppet around. So we put extra energy into it, and about nine months after we finished shooting we saw the first Yoda, and it was a great thing.

On the decision to make the second trilogy: When I got to the end [of the first trilogy] and everyone said, "Are you going to do more?" my feeling was, probably not, because I couldn't tell the back story. And that was the only other thing I had written. At that point I really wanted to go off and raise my family and do a lot of other things. [Later] I was thinking--my kids are old enough, the companies are all established, I'm independent, I can do any kind of movies I want to do.

And I thought, do I finish "Star Wars"? I love the story of how Anakin became Darth Vader, and obviously I like the world, and I also liked the idea of working in a medium where I wasn't constantly banging up against the technology all the time. This was after "Jurassic Park," and we now had the technology, if I did it digitally. The idea of being free to let my imagination loose in this world I'd created was exciting to me.

Hit the link above for more! Thanks to Raphael for the heads up.