This letter from Ron Howard to Newsweek after they grilled 9 year old Jake Lloyd’s performance in The Phantom Menace.
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It's been a long, long time, but if I recall, the kid's performance was not the issue with that movie
I rewatched it recently, and you are absolutely right.
"Yippee!"
Scripts fault, not kids.
Also, director's fault. Lucas was very micromanage-y about the performances, IIRC.
Well Lucas wrote the script too, all his fault.
The real problem was no one challenged him on the writing or directing in the prequel trilogy.
George is great at writing concepts and worlds, but he is not good and writing believable people. Especially when it comes to a kid, and also really terrible at romance.
But in the original trilogy he took a lot more input from others. His then wife helped edit the scripts, the actors challenged him on a lot of his really bad script choices, and after the first movie, other people helped write and direct them.
But when it got to the sequels, he was a god that no one would challenge, and it turned out like it did.
Yea. I guess I could have worded that differently, but I was basically trying to say that it wasn't just the fault of bad dialog / writing. Like the actors could have elevated the writing a bit with adding their own spin on the dialog (or challenging the dialog as you say), but IIRC Lucas basically told them exactly what to do and how to do it... and we got what we did. Even great actors turned in mediocre performances in the movie... it's how you know that you can't put it on the actors.
I think that is also a symptom of how powerful and unchecked Lucas was. Even established actors wouldn’t challenge his ideas, while in the og trilogy the main three were constantly pushing back and they were relative nobodies then.
ugh, sentence I can hear.