George Lucas Explains Why Yoda Talks Backwards at ‘Empire Strikes Back’ Celebration

George Lucas has always done things his own way, even after almost 60 years in Hollywood.

At the 45th anniversary screening of The Empire Strikes Back during the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival, Lucas made a rare appearance. He spoke about his early days in the movie business, his friendship with Francis Ford Coppola, and how he went from making American Graffiti to creating Star Wars. Even though the crowd came to hear about Empire, Lucas only talked about it when he felt like it.

Many books and documentaries already tell Lucas’ story, but it was still fun to hear him explain how he didn’t really enjoy working in the studio system. He said he had already planned out the story for The Empire Strikes Back while working on the first Star Wars movie.

“I write like a blueprint,” Lucas said. “It’s not got a lot of detail on it. And when I got the script [for ‘Star Wars’] done, there was a 130 to 180 pages. So I cut it into three parts and said, ‘I’ll focus on the first one, because we’ll never get enough money to make the whole thing.’”

Host Ben Mankiewicz started by asking Lucas about Coppola, which led Lucas to tell a long story about working on Coppola’s movie Finian’s Rainbow. “I was 22, Francis was 27. He had a beard, I had a beard. We both had long hair. We’re both film students,” Lucas said. “Everyone else on the crew was like 65 years old.”

Lucas also had some fun ignoring the instructions to hold the microphone closer to his mouth. Finally, Mankiewicz got Lucas to talk about one of the biggest questions fans have: why Yoda speaks the way he does.

“Because if you speak regular English, people won’t listen that much,” Lucas said. “But if he had an accent, or it’s really hard to understand what he’s saying, they focus on what he’s saying.”

Lucas added, “He was basically the philosopher of the movie. I had to figure out a way to get people to actually listen — especially 12-year-olds.”

Lucas didn’t say much about making Empire, but he did share how little support he got from the studio when making Star Wars. At first, he offered to write, direct, and produce the movie for $50,000, but he had one important demand: he wanted the rights to make sequels.

“I said, ‘I’ll do it for $50,000, to write and direct and produce… But I do want the sequels.’ And I wanted the rights because I’m going to make those movies no matter what happens to this one.”

He also asked for something that would change his life forever: the licensing rights.

“I said, ‘besides that, I’d like licensing.’ They went, ‘What’s licensing?’” Lucas said. The studio thought there was no money in toys or merchandise, so they agreed.

Because he wasn’t happy with how Fox promoted Star Wars, Lucas decided to promote it himself. “I got the kids walking around Disneyland and the Comic Cons and all that kind of stuff to advertise the movie,” he said. “And that’s why Fox was so shocked when the first day the lines were all around the block.”

At the end of the talk, Mankiewicz asked Lucas which new Empire character he liked better: Yoda or Lando Calrissian. Lucas wouldn’t choose.

“If you have 12 kids, which one do you like the most?” Lucas said.

The conversation ended a little quickly, but the crowd still loved seeing Lucas in person. At 80 years old, he doesn’t appear in public very often, so it was a special night — even if Lucas made everyone wait for the parts they wanted to hear.

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