George Lucas Will Never Own up to Han Solo Shooting Greedo First

 Lucasfilm
 Lucasfilm

God damn you, George Lucas, you cold-blooded killer of good cinema. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, the man behind Star Wars defended the choice of re-editing A New Hope and making Greedo shoot Han first. 

First of all, let's set the scene for the weirdos out there who've never seen Star Wars before. 

It all starts at the Mos Eisley Cantina where a bunch of beige aliens are playing an incredibly entertaining song on what look like French clarinets. Greedo comes out of the shadows and pulls a gun on Han Solo. After sitting him down, the green-skinned goon demands money from Solo that supposedly belongs to Jabba the Hutt. Han, of course, says he doesn't have the money on him, to which Greedo responds that he looks forward to killing him. "I'll bet you have," says Solo, as he shoots Greedo.

That's what happened in the original 1977 version, but George Lucas made the decision to edit the scene for the 1997 special edition re-release to make it look like Greedo shot first and Solo simply shot back in self-defense. 

The Atlantic publicly uncovered the change with the article "The Star Wars George Lucas Doesn't Want You To See," in which they report "...it’s clear that Han Solo pulled out his gun and shot the bounty hunter Greedo. In the 1997 version, Greedo shoots first. In the 2004 version, they shoot at the same time."

What kind of shit is that? Lucas tells EW that the act of shooting Greedo first would essentially go against Han's core principles. "Han Solo was going to marry Leia," says Lucas, "...and you look back and say, ‘Should he be a cold-blooded killer?' Because I was thinking mythologically — should he be a cowboy, should he be John Wayne? And I said, ‘Yeah, he should be John Wayne.’ And when you’re John Wayne, you don’t shoot people [first] — you let them have the first shot." 

Lucas has historically been shady about the scene, says Rolling Stone, who uncovered a 2012 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, where the filmmaker suggests Greedo had always been the one who shot first: "It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom.'"

Lol sure.

Harrison Ford, on the other hand, offered up this little nugget of wisdom on the matter during his 2014 Reddit AMA: