(Continuing discussion from the
Quotes thread.)
While it is clear even from that context that Lucas always meant "other people fucking with the artist's work", there are still a couple reasons why it would have been nice if he had paid more attention to himself:
1. He hits some of the specifics of what he considers "damaging" fairly directly, especially and wrenchingly:
Tommorrow, more advanced technology will be able to replace actors with "fresher faces," or alter dialogue and change the movement of the actor's lips to match.
But more concretely and much more importantly:
2. The idea that Star Wars is George Lucas's work -- solely, for him alone to alter and deprecate without regard to the hundreds of other people who put their own hard work into the film, the actors who were cut out of vital scenes and replaced with more studio-friendly counterparts, the special effects artists whose genius exceeded the limitations of the period being written over by another CG animation, and the other producers and screenwriters and cast and crew and the director whose hands touched the canvas -- is pretty blatantly wrong, extremely demeaning to a lot of people, and has led to a lot of the problems that plagued his later efforts.
If there's any positive thing you can say about Disney taking over it's that they will probably make
damn sure that no single person can take credit for what gets produced.
