Why David Lynch turned down Return of the Jedi

Started by MacGuffin, December 10, 2009, 01:54:35 AM

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MacGuffin

Why David Lynch turned down Return of the Jedi! (video)
Source: SciFi Wire

There's a bit of little-known Star Wars trivia that George Lucas once asked David Lynch to direct the third movie in the trilogy, Return of the Jedi, but I don't think we've ever heard Lynch himself describe his meeting and why he turned it down in quite this way. Until now, in the video below.

At a seminar last month at New York's Russian Tea Room, sponsored by the Hudson Union Society, the director of Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive talked about the James Bond-like arrangements he had to make to meet with Lucas, how he reacted when he saw a Wookiee for the first time and why Lucas shouldn't be driving a Ferrari.

"George is kinda short, and so ... his seat was way back, and he was almost lying down in the car, and we were flying through this little town in Northern California," Lynch said.

"I had next door to zero interest," Lynch says at one point, adding later: "I could hardly wait to get home."

The mind reels when imagining what Jedi might have been like under Lynch's direction. Like Dune meets Blue Velvet, with Darth Vader sucking on oxygen and saying, "Don't you f--king look at me!!" Instead of Ewoks, a bunch of mutant dwarves living in log cabins in a town like Twin Peaks?

We'd actually buy that. Would you?

As it turns out, little-known director Richard Marquand wound up directing Jedi, giving us the movie we've all grown up with, but a chance to make film history vanished with Lynch.



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