Alec Guinness Thought One Aspect Of Star Wars' Script Desperately Needed Rewrites
Although the "Star Wars" franchise is seen as a reliable cash cow today, when it was being made back in the '70s it hardly seemed like a guaranteed success. Not only was it possibly a little too weird for mainstream audiences, but the dialogue left a lot to be desired. "It seemed to me the dialogue was pretty ropey," Obi-Wan actor Alec Guinness explained in a 1977 interview, even as he liked the script overall. "I went on reading and I thought, 'No, I like this. If only we can get some of the dialogue altered.' And then I met [George Lucas], we got on very well, and I found myself doing it."
While the movie turned out to be a huge hit, it did so in part because actors like Guinness were constantly changing up the dialogue to make it more natural. As Han Solo actor Harrison Ford told GQ in a 2017 interview, "George usually sits near a monitor, far removed, so I had to convey my impression ... or my feelings ... about the dialogue across a great space. So I did shout it. 'George! You can type this s***, but you sure can't say it! Move your mouth when you're typing!'"
He clarified that it was meant as a good-natured joke, not the angry shouting fans sometimes characterize it as, but the truth in the story is clear: Lucas is bad at writing dialogue, and he himself would be the first to admit it. "My dialogue is very utilitarian and is designed to move things forward," he told Empire in 1999. "I'm not Shakespeare. It's not designed to be poetic."
Not one of George's strong suits
Although Lucas thankfully had plenty of editors and improvising actors on set to help pave over this issue in the original trilogy, critics at the time still had no trouble pointing out that the dialogue was the movie's weak point. John Simon of New York Magazine described it as "dialogue of overwhelming banality" back in 1977, and Peter Keough of the Boston Phoenix casually dismissed the dialogue as "lousy."
That might seem surprising to modern viewers, but the main reason the dialogue in the original "Star Wars" trilogy seems as good to us today is because we have the prequel trilogy to compare them to. It's hard to get on the original movies' case after decades of hearing bafflingly clunky lines like "I'd rather dream about Padme," and "From my point of view, the Jedi are evil" — and, of course, "I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere." Lucas may have rightly said his dialogue was not as good as Shakespeare's, but after watching the prequels, his dialogue in the original trilogy starts does start to look sort of Shakespearean in comparison.
The "Star Wars" prequels gave us George Lucas at his most unrestrained, with precious little editorial feedback to prevent him from going through with three screenplays that clearly needed at least another round of polishing. The original "Star Wars" movies were great because the clunky dialogue was rewritten, as Alex Guinness hoped it'd be. It's just a shame that the prequels didn't follow suit.