George Lucas finally reveals why Yoda talks backwards: “I had to get people to actually listen”
Star Wars creator George Lucas recently appeared at a 45th anniversary screening of The Empire Strikes Back and revealed salient information about Yoda.
Lucas attended the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival’s opening night for what was reportedly a slightly uncomfortable discussion session. He spent most of the 35-minute conversation deconstructing his early relationship with longtime collaborator and friend Francis Ford Coppola and his early relationship with the studio system.
“I write like a blueprint,” Lucas told the moderator Ben Mankiewicz. “It’s not got a lot of detail on it. And when I got the script [for ‘Star Wars’] done, there was 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,” he explained.
Eventually, Lucas did reveal a piece of Star Wars lore. Mankiewicz drew his attention towards Yoda, who famously speaks in back-to-front clauses.
Lucas explained this choice to the audience: “Because if you speak regular English, people won’t listen that much.”
He continued: “But if he had an accent, or it’s really hard to understand what he’s saying, they focus on what he’s saying.”
“He was basically the philosopher of the movie,” Lucas mused. “I had to figure out a way to get people to actually listen — especially 12-year-olds.”
He also spoke of the difficulties wrangling support for the Star Wars franchise in the early days of creation. “I said, ‘I’ll do it for $50,000, to write and direct and produce… But I do want the sequels’,” he recounted. “And I wanted the rights because I’m going to make those movies no matter what happens to this one.”
Lucas knew the strength of his characters, like Yoda, from the beginning. He revealed in the discussion session that he turned to the connection he knew movie-goers would feel in an attempt to promote the sci-fi. Underwhelmed by Fox’s promotion, Lucas recounted how he “got the kids walking around Disneyland and the Comic Cons and all that kind of stuff to advertise the movie. And that’s why Fox was so shocked when the first day the lines were all around the block,” he recalled.
Though the last Star Wars feature was released in 2019, the franchise recently announced a 2027 prequel set roughly half a decade after Star Wars: Episode IX—The Rise of Skywalker. Shawn Levy will sit in the director’s seat for the upcoming offering, titled Star Wars: Starfighter. Ryan Gosling will play the lead.
Disney has set a theatrical release date of May 28th, 2027. Whether we will hear more of Yoda’s infamously riddled intonation in the movie is still to be confirmed.
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