Available this week is the latest issue of Star Wars Insider. Here's a preview of the feature article with Robert Watts. Watts' association with Lucasfilm began as production supervisor on the original Star Wars. He worked on all three films of the original trilogy, as well as the first three Indiana Jones movies.

Insider: Did you think Star Wars would be a big success?

I always thought the movie would be a hit. I expected it would probably do James Bond kind of business, which was top of the range at the time, but I don't think anybody expected it to take off like it did. The film to which it bore the nearest comparison was 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I had worked on with Stanley Kubrick, but that was a very different world, in which everything was pristine. In a sense, the difference between those two movies is that 2001 was what you might call hard science fiction. Stanley Kubrick insisted that everything was correct, that airlocks worked, that there was no sound in space, and so on. Star Wars is more of a science fantasy because we didn't really bother with any of that stuff. While everything in Kubrick's film was immaculate, in Star Wars it was grubby, so the Millennium Falcon needed oil and it didn't always get into hyperspace. I think that sense of reality -- albeit in a fantastical setting -- is partially what caught the public imagination.

How did you prepare to work on the first film?

George showed us four movies before we began the shoot: 2001, Silent Running, Fellini's Satyricon and Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. Satyricon contains all those kind of elements you see in the cantina sequence. He wanted us to get that dusty, used look into it that you find in Once Upon a Time in the West. It was a really tough project for George because he hadn't done anything of that size before. He hired the crew members because we had experience with big movies. I talked to George a lot during shooting. It was a difficult shoot, partly because Fox wasn't sure of the film. Luckily, Alan Ladd Jr. stood by us and when the movie opened, it doubled the price of Fox's stock on Wall Street. Fox never tied up the sequel rights, which shows the lack of confidence it had in what George was doing. So when it became a huge hit, George owned it all!

When we came back to make The Empire Strikes Back things were different because we weren't being beaten up by Fox. In fact, George financed it, with his own money, but Fox was distributing.

How did your kids react to dad being involved in Star Wars?

My kids visited the set during the filming of the cantina sequence. My eldest son was 14 in the summer when we were shooting Empire, and I got him a job with the camera crew. He's now a captain on a Boeing 747. They grew up with it. It's strange. I asked them what it was like, and they said it was just normal.

---

Read the full interview in issue 101 of Star Wars Insider -- on sale May 6. For more information visit www.titanmagazines.com/starwars