Nearly everything we know about what George Lucas had planned for a third Star Wars trilogy (a.k.a. Episode VII, Episode VIII, and Episode IX) has come from second-hand sources. The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams revealed that Disney wanted “to start from scratch and tell a story that was the continuum.” Also, in The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, we learned that in Lucas’ vision, Luke would have required a more significant role in The Force Awakens, one that would’ve seen would’ve seen him train a “new disciple named Kira (later renamed Rey).” Mark Hamill also divulged that in the “vastly different” outline for the trilogy, “George didn’t kill Luke until the end of [Episode IX], after he trained Leia.”
Lucas has been reluctant to reveal anything about Star Wars since the Disney merger, minus some unfortunate phrasing, but he gave a hint of where he was heading in the companion book to James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction TV show.
“[The next three Star Wars films] were going to get into a microbiotic world. There’s this world of creatures that operate differently than we do. I call them the Whills. And the Whills are the ones who actually control the universe. They feed off the Force… If I’d held onto the company I could have done it, and then it would have been done. Of course, a lot of the fans would have hated it, just like they did Phantom Menace and everything, but at least the whole story from beginning to end would be told.”
In bringing up The Phantom Menace, Lucas is alluding to the widely despised midichlorians. But now that the movie’s been out for nearly 20 years, it’s time to finally accept that “microscopic life-form[s] that resides within all living cells” isn’t any crazier than the Force being magical energy that “surrounds us and binds us.” Lucas later told Cameron that humans and aliens and walrus-men are just “vehicles for the Whills to travel around in… And the conduit is the midichlorians. The midichlorians are the ones that communicate with the Whills. The Whills, in a general sense, they are the Force.” (Whills still exist within the Star Wars canon — Donnie Yen’s Chirrut Îmwe, from Rogue One, is a Guardian of the Whills.) For what it’s worth, Cameron thinks his buddy George’s films “had more innovative visual imagination” than Abrams’ The Force Awakens.
As far as I've seen, these are the first specifics George Lucas has shared about what his vision of Episodes 7-9 would have been. This comes from @insighteditions awesome companion book to "James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction series" on AMC: pic.twitter.com/Wtlw8zlrqv
— Livio Ramondelli (@LivioRamondelli) June 12, 2018
(Via IndieWire)