One Of The '70s' Most Successful Directors Thought Star Wars Was Ridiculous

Few critics or audience members today will dispute that George Lucas' "Star Wars" is anything other than a cinematic landmark. It's won scores of accolades and launched one of the best sci-fi franchises, not to mention one of the biggest merchandising businesses on Earth, with throngs of fans all over the world that span multiple generations. But when Lucas showed a rough cut of the film to some of his director friends, one well-known name had some harsh words for him: future "Scarface" director Brian De Palma didn't seem to grasp the film.

"What is this Force s***?" De Palma reportedly snapped at Lucas after the screening (according to "The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film" by J.W. Rinzler). "Where's the blood when they shoot people?" De Palma also asked, clearly looking for more realism than Lucas' fantasy epic had to offer. For his part, De Palma has acknowledged that while he had his criticisms — some of them pretty big — he also says he saw the film's potential.

"I did make a joke about the Force, that's true," De Palma said on the "Light the Fuse" podcast decades later (via Collider). "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, however, that his criticisms were all part of the process of reviewing early cuts among friends: "Sometimes I was right, sometimes I was wrong. They did the same for my movies."

Brian De Palma wasn't shy about telling his good friend George Lucas that his early cut of "Star Wars" needed work, but it wasn't just criticism and negativity. According to Steven Spielberg, who attended the screening as well, De Palma also had some suggestions on how to improve the movie. One of those was the creation of the film's opening crawl, which became a staple of the franchise.

"I was in on the very first rough cut of 'Star Wars' with De Palma," Spielberg told Empire Online in a 2016 interview. According to Spielberg, De Palma expressed frustration that the film dropped audiences into the middle of a complicated story with no context, telling Lucas, "'Nobody will get it. It's just a void with stars and some silly ships moving around.'" But along with that criticism, De Palma offered up a solution — an opening "crawl" that would provide the necessary context he was looking for.

"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 wrote his own, 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 rightly argue that without De Palma's input, "Star Wars" might have simply confused moviegoers, rather than dazzle them.