The AP spoke with George Lucas. He talked about the bad buzz on The Phantom Menace:

Lucas said fans who complained wanted him to make a movie like "The Matrix," but he needed to concentrate on furthering the "Star Wars" story line.

"It wasn't helped by the fact that the movie that they wanted 'Star Wars' to be, which is 'Matrix,' came out two weeks ahead of us," he said. "I love 'Matrix,' but I was telling a story about a nice kid who becomes a Jedi and later falls into the abyss."

As for "Attack of the Clones," Lucas is most excited about his ability to use Yoda more extensively. Technological advances in the past 20 years have given the director the freedom to spotlight the Jedi master, who was portrayed using stationary puppets in the original "Star Wars" trilogy.

"They could only move like three feet and I had to sort of go through all kinds of machinations to get a midget and put him in a duplicate suit and shoot him from far back, just to get one shot of him walking away in the forest. To get him to have a sword fight? You know, forget it," he said.

In "Clones," Yoda fights with a light saber and commands an army. But Lucas said the staff at his special effects firm, Industrial Light & Magic, at first didn't think it could be done.

"Everybody at ILM was sort of saying 'ooh' and scratching their heads and backing up a little bit. Some of them started to cry. But five years later, we did it," he said.

Yoda's mobility is vastly improved in "Clones," but don't expect the new incarnation to be as slick as other digitally produced characters in the film.

"We wanted him to actually duplicate what the puppet did. So we were trying to dumb it down slightly to be more like the puppet," Lucas said. "The important part is that he could walk, obviously be extremely physical and stuff. And that was the huge challenge. But, you know, if we couldn't have pulled that off, this movie would have tanked."

Visit the link above for more.