George Lucas Explains Why Yoda Talks Backwards at ‘Empire’ Screening

Since the beginning of his Hollywood career, George Lucas has always done things his own way. Almost 60 years later, he hasn’t changed a bit.

Appearing at a 45th anniversary screening of “The Empire Strikes Back” on the opening night of the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival, Lucas discussed his introduction to longtime friend and collaborator Francis Ford Coppola, his earliest experiences with the studio system and his path from “American Graffiti” to the industry-changing blockbuster “Star Wars.” However, despite the best efforts of host and moderator Ben Mankiewicz, he barely mentioned the film that the sellout crowd was there to see — and only then when he was good and ready.

Suffice it to say that Lucas’ career is one that’s been thoroughly documented and deconstructed; no fewer than eight books have been written about him, along with a handful of documentaries and nonfiction series. Even so, it was fun to hear him recount his grumpy disinterest in studio filmmaking — from that first day on set — and take up the lion’s share of the 35-minute conversation to get around to explaining how, because he’d overwritten the original script for “Star Wars,” he already had the story mapped out and ready to go for “The Empire Strikes Back.”

“I write like a blueprint,” he told Mankiewicz. “It’s not got a lot of detail on it. And when I got the script [for ‘Star Wars’] done, there was a 130 to 180 pages. So I cut it into three parts and said, ‘I’ll focus on the first one, because we’ll never get enough money to make the whole thing.’”

To be fair to Lucas, Mankiewicz may have inadvertently made a tactical error by beginning their conversation with a question about his friendship with Coppola. But to be fair to Mankiewicz, he could not have known that Lucas would provide an unhurried, granular account of his earliest days on the set of Coppola’s “Finian’s Rainbow,” and the…