One of the most telling things about film school is you've got a lot of students wandering around saying, "Oh, I wish I could make a movie. I wish I could make a movie."

The first script was one of six original stories I had written in the form of two trilogies. After the success of Star Wars, I added another trilogy. So now there are nine stories. The original two trilogies were conceived of as six films of which the first film was number four.

Film is a very tight little box. If you don't fit in that box, you're gone. Television, there's more room to move around.

I was never interested in being powerful or famous. But once I got to film school and learned about movies, I just fell in love with it. I didn't care what kind of movies I made.

You have to understand that it's a very cooperative world, not only with the environment, with but our fellow human beings. If you do not cooperate, if you do not work together to keep the entire organism going, the whole thing dies, and everybody dies with it. That's a law of nature, and it's existed forever. We're one of the very few creatures that has a choice, and can intellectualize the process.

I felt that one of the major issues in the third film is that Luke is finally on his own and has to fight Vader and the Emperor by himself. If you get a sense that Yoda or Ben is there to help him or to somehow influence him, it diminishes the power of the scene.

I've had much more down in my life than I've had up. And much more struggle. First of all, when I went into the film school everybody said, "What are you doing? This is a complete dead-end for a career."