Irvin Kershner video interviews on The Empire Strikes Back

AT the time it must have seemed like an odd choice, when George Lucas asked Irvin Kershner to direct The Empire Strikes Back.

After all, Star Wars had just redefined what sci-fi movies could be on a scale no-one could have predicted or even seen before, and given the number of hot-shot directors who must have been desperate for the gig, why go for the quietly spoken guy in his mid-50s?

Kershner goes some way to answering that in these videos below, interviews he did with the Colorado Film School which went up six months ago.

The answer is vision – with Lucas realising Kershner’s emphasis on character and emotion, that he had first seen as a young student during film-making classes back in the 1960s, would lend his creation real depth and weight.

It was an inspired decision, with Empire being the greatest Star Wars film and quite possibly the greatest sequel of all time, as well as being a massively influential measuring post against which all future sequels are now measured.