George Lucas, Dave Filoni and Catherine Winder Press Conference
Isn't voiceover easier?
Catherine Winder: "No, not what we do."
George Lucas: "You do it all over and all the time."
Catherine Winder: "We need it all the time."
George Lucas: "You need people available every week and you can't really afford multimillion dollar actors to do a television series. A television series, the license fee on your average television series is about $200,000. It's nothing. So those guys make more during their coffee break. When we decided to do the feature, when I said, 'Hey, this is great. Let's do a feature,' then we went back to the actors and we said, 'Okay.' We told them we were doing the TV series just so they knew, as a courtesy, but then we said, 'Look, we're doing a feature. Would you like to do the voice in the feature?' Some of them said yes, some of them were off doing features because this all was done, again, fairly rapidly. It wasn't like we said, 'Okay, next June we're going to do this.' It's like, 'Could you come in in a month, in four weeks and do this? Can we have two days?' Some of them were all over the world and some of them said, 'Yeah, it would be great, I'll come in and do it,' and some of them couldn't."
"What happens in new animation, it used to be animation you just had actors play the parts. The secret is a lot of people, especially in television animation, they didn't hire really great actors. Even in features they didn't. So the idea of hiring a really good actor, a Tom Hanks to play the thing, was a really revolutionary idea. That was mostly Jeff Katzenberg who said, 'You know, we need really top actors.' Well, there are a lot of top actors that aren't movie stars. Partly they did it because they were great actors. Partly they did it because they wanted to use them for publicity, so they could sit up here and talk to you."
"To be very honest with you, much as I love you guys, I don't really think I need to hire an actor, a big movie star to go and publicize my movie. If the movie works and you like it and you love it, that's fine. But I don't need Angelina Jolie here to have you guys come and say, 'I'm only going to this press conference because Angelina's going to be there and I want to get her autograph.' That's what it comes down to in the end and that's what they do. They simply use them. They have two days in the studio or three days in the studio and then they have like two weeks doing press. So they're mainly paid for the press stuff. They're not really paid for doing the movie. I'm sure I'm going to hear from Jeff about that."
Dave Filoni: "They get me instead of Angelina Jolie now so I don't know if that's a selling point, but okay."
What's the inspiration behind Ahsoka and Ventress?
George Lucas: "Ahsoka was primarily, I wanted to develop a character that would help Anakin settle down. He was, at the end of Episode II, is kind of a wild child. He and Obi Wan don't get along. So the idea was to see how they become friends, how they become partners, how they become a team. Then one of the ways to do that, because when you become a parent, you become a teacher. You have to sort of become more responsible. It sort of forces you into this adulthood thing. So what I wanted to do was take Anakin and force him into this kind of, 'Now I have to teach somebody and now I have to be slightly more responsible and I have to…' So it was that juxtaposition. I happen to have a couple daughters so I have a lot of experience with that particular situation and I just said, 'Rather than making it another guy, why don't we make her a girl because that's fun?' I have a lot of girls and they're just as hard to deal with in their teenage years as boys are. That's really how that [came about]. Ventress, he's the expert on that."
Dave Filoni: "Ventress was a character that was actually developed for early concept art of Attack of the Clones. There was the idea that maybe the Sith apprentice, the new one after Darth Maul would be a girl. That got abandoned eventually in favor of Count Dooku, Christopher Lee's character, but the concept art existed. The comic books and novels on the Clone Wars that were done before had utilized that character, that concept art and created this new character, the Ventress. So when it came time to develop the idea of the Clone Wars as a series, we thought, 'Well, that's a big fan favorite character. Let's draw her out.' It just so happened that we were introducing Ahsoka at the same time, so here you had these two new girls coming into this story at the same time which, you know, was actually kind of an advantage too because you have one that’s the apprentice of Anakin Skywalker trying to be trained in the traditional ways of a Jedi and you have one that's the hidden apprentice of Count Dooku who was the evil opposite end. That actually works really nicely for the stories that we're trying to tell."
When are you going to make those indie movies you keep talking about?
George Lucas: "I just haven't had time. Opportunities present themselves. I wanted to do an animated Clone Wars TV series and I said, 'Oh, I want to do that.' So I've got about maybe 50 projects sitting here and I have to sort of say, 'Well, which one works now?' It makes sense for me to do these TV things. I love television. It's a lot more fun than doing these giant movie things, so I'm doing some television."
Can you mention your TV projects?
George Lucas: "Well, this is one of them. That's why you're here. I mean, you're really here for the feature but of course that goes over into the TV show."
What are the prospects for an Indiana Jones 4?
George Lucas: "Well, that's one of those things. That sits on the shelf there as one of 50 projects that I have to deal with. If I can come up with a story, it's very hard to come up with stories for that thing. It's really impossible because it has to be real. It has to be something that actually happens. It has to be something people know about and it has to be supernatural. It's a really difficult research project, which they're researching now. Last time it took us 14 years."
