Few critics or audience members today would dispute that George Lucas’ *Star Wars* is a cinematic landmark. The film has won scores of accolades and launched one of the best sci-fi franchises in history. Beyond that, it also sparked one of the biggest merchandising businesses on Earth, with throngs of fans spanning multiple generations across the globe.
However, when Lucas showed a rough cut of *Star Wars* to some of his director friends, not all reactions were glowing. One notable filmmaker, future *Scarface* director Brian De Palma, didn’t quite grasp the film’s vision. According to *The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film* by J. W. Rinzler, De Palma reportedly snapped at Lucas after the screening, asking, “What is this Force s***?” He also quipped, “Where’s the blood when they shoot people?”—clearly expecting more realism than the fantasy epic offered.
Despite his harsh initial criticisms, De Palma has acknowledged that he saw potential in *Star Wars*. Reflecting on his reaction, he admitted, “It doesn’t seem like a great name for this kind of spiritual guidance, ‘the Force.’ So, needless to say, I had a lot to say about the Force, which obviously I was terribly wrong about.”
De Palma insists that his candid feedback was part of the normal process of reviewing early cuts among friends. “Sometimes I was right, sometimes I was wrong. They did the same for my movies,” he said.
But De Palma’s involvement wasn’t limited to criticism. According to Steven Spielberg, who also attended the screening, De Palma provided valuable suggestions on how to improve the movie. One of his key contributions was the idea of the film’s iconic opening crawl—a feature that would become a staple of the *Star Wars* franchise.
“I was in on the very first rough cut of *Star Wars* with De Palma,” Spielberg told *Empire Online* in a 2016 interview. De Palma expressed frustration that the film dropped audiences into the middle of a complicated story with no context. He told Lucas, “Nobody will get it. It’s just a void with stars and some silly ships moving around.”
Along with this criticism, De Palma offered a solution: an opening “crawl” that would provide the necessary background information. “I said, ‘George, you’ve gotta set this up somehow, like those crawls in the *Flash Gordon* movies,'” De Palma told the *Light the Fuse* podcast.
According to De Palma, Lucas initially wrote the crawl himself, but it needed a lot of work. “It was all gobbledygook basically, so I and [screenwriter] Jay Cocks went over the crawl and basically rewrote it so it made some sense. And that was our contribution.”
One could reasonably argue that without De Palma’s input, *Star Wars* might have simply confused moviegoers rather than dazzle them. His candid feedback and creative suggestions helped shape the film into the timeless classic it is today.
https://www.looper.com/2016158/successful-70s-director-brian-de-palma-thought-star-wars-ridiculous/