Lucas: "We... already signed Mark and Carrie and Harrison"

In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek George Lucas let slip what a lot of people have already suspected: that the Big Three of the "Star Wars" universe were already under contract to appear in "Episode VII" before LucasFilm was bought by Disney several months ago. Lucas didn't seem to remember that he was supposed to keep it under wraps and allow Disney to make their own announcement at a later date when he said:

“We had already signed Mark and Carrie and Harrison—or we were pretty much in final stages of negotiation. So I called them to say, ‘Look, this is what’s going on.’ Maybe I’m not supposed to say that. I think they want to announce that with some big whoop-de-do, but we were negotiating with them. I won’t say whether the negotiations were successful or not.”

Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford

While Lucas doesn't have any direct role in the production of the upcoming third trilogy he is acting as a kind of cultural advisor and describes his role this way:

“I mostly say, ‘You can’t do this. You can do that,’ You know, ‘The cars don’t have wheels. They fly with antigravity.’ There’s a million little pieces. Or I can say, ‘He doesn’t have the power to do that, or he has to do this.’ I know all that stuff.”

While its exciting to contemplate the return of Luke, Leia and Han to the franchise there's one more bit of advice I'd like to hear Lucas deliver to Disney: "You can't make another crappy trilogy like I did with I, II and III." Now that's advice worth heading.

Read the interview with Lucas here.