In fact, Lucas himself was once faced with the task of finding an actor to play a young Han Solo. By 2002, Lucas was already two-thirds of the way through the task of writing and directing his Star Wars Prequel Trilogy. For better or worse, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones were finished and released. Critical responses varied, to say the least, but it was difficult to argue with their performance at the box-office.

So it was that Lucas faced the final challenge of his Prequel saga: he had to sit down and write the third chapter, Revenge of the Sith. Everything in the earlier movies built up to this final act: Anakin’s fall from grace. We’d finally see how Obi-Wan’s good friend became twisted into the masked, thoroughly evil Darth Vader.

Lucas had called it his “epic of fathers and sons.” He said, before he put pen to paper, that Episode III would be the most fun to write. Except that wasn’t how it panned out. Where Lucas had tripped through the writing process of Attack of the Clones with relative ease, he found himself struggling with Revenge of the Sith.

Filming on Episode III was scheduled to begin in June 2003. In March of that year, Lucas was still battling through the writing of the first draft. He had much to wrestle with: he originally envisioned an epic opening with battles taking place across seven planets. He had numerous plot strands from Attack of the Clones that he wanted to slip in. And most of all, he had to decide, once and for all, just what it was that precipitated Anakin’s turn to the Dark Side.

In those smaller plot strands, many of them thrown in to foreshadow events in the Original Trilogy, Lucas wanted to show how Boba Fett attempted to avenge the unceremonious death of his father in Attack of the Clones. He wanted to show how Padme laid the foundations for the Rebel Alliance. Then there was the peculiar cameo from a young Han Solo: just 10 years old, wandering around on Chewbacca’s home planet, Kashyyyk.