George Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan discuss killing off Luke Skywalker in Return of The Jedi

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Kasdan: I think you should kill Luke and have Leia take over.

Lucas: You don’t want to kill Luke.

Kasdan: Okay, then kill Yoda.

Lucas: I don’t want to kill Yoda. You don’t have to kill people. You’re a product of the 1980s. You don’t go around killing people. It’s not nice.

Kasdan: No, I’m not. I’m trying to give the story some kind of an edge to it.

Lucas: I know you’re trying to make it more realistic, which is what I tried to do when I killed Ben—but I managed to take the edge off of it—and it’s what I tried to do when I froze Han. But this is the end of the trilogy and we’ve already established that there are real dangers. I don’t think we have to kill anyone to prove it.

Kasdan: Ben and Han are fine. Luke got a new hand two cuts later.

Lucas: By killing somebody, I think you alienate the audience.

Kasdan: I’m saying that the movie has more emotional weight if someone you love is lost along the way; the journey has more impact.

Lucas: I don’t like that and I don’t believe that.

Kasdan: Well, that’s all right.

Lucas: I have always hated that in movies, when you go along and one of the main characters gets killed. This is a fairytale. You want everybody to live happily ever after and nothing bad happens to anybody.

Kasdan: I hate it when characters get killed, too.

Lucas: Oh, you do.

Kasdan: I do.

Lucas: I resent it and I resented it when I was a little kid. I would watch and there would be these five guys and one of them would be the funny clown and halfway through, one of them gets killed. Why did they kill the lead? He was the best character.

Marquand: I felt that about Ben the first time I saw Star Wars.

Kasdan: But that one worked like crazy.

Lucas: Yes, I know. But we’ve done that. The same thing with Han. The biggest reaction we got was when people asked, “How can you leave the movie half finished?” Well, the main thrust of this one is that it has to be fun.

Kasdan: There isn’t much fun stuff. There is the Jabba stuff.

Lucas: That’s fun.

Kasdan: And the Ewok stuff and that’s it.

Lucas: There are three parts to the movie: Jabba, the Ewoks, and Luke and the Emperor. Luke and the Emperor are not fun and the other two are. I think that we can roll along with the fun parts and still have this undercurrent of a fairly serious study of father and son, and good and evil. The whole concept of the original film is that Luke redeems his father, which is the classic fairytale: a good father/bad father who the good son will turn back into the good father. We can have a serious line and still have a fairly light film.

The whole point of the film, the whole emotion that I am trying to get at the end of this film, is for you to be real uplifted, emotionally and spiritually, and feel absolutely good about life. That is the greatest thing that we could possibly ever do.

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