George Lucas defends one of Star Wars’ most controversial scenes

It's one of the most debated scenes in Star Wars history — who shot first? While just about all evidence points to Han Solo being the one to shoot first in the iconic cantina scene with bounty hunter Greedo, the re-released "special edition" of Star Wars: A New Hope offered an altered version of the same scene in which Greedy first shoots at Han.

It has become one of the most controversial edits in Star Wars history, and finally director George Lucas has explained his reasoning behind the change.

“Han Solo was going to marry Leia, and you look back and say, ‘Should he be a cold-blooded killer?’ ” Lucas said in an interview with The Washington Post. “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. It’s a mythological reality that we hope our society pays attention to.”

In a 2012 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Lucas had suggested that Greedo had always been the one to shoot first, but it was obscurbed by the way the shot was framed.

"The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t," he said at the time. "It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down."

The scene has been altered quite a few times since the original, but the video belows shows a side-by-side of the original 1977 cut, which shows a cloudy explosion followed by Greedo collapsing, and an altered version, which shows Greedo shoot and miss first before Solo returns fire.

For his part, Harrison Ford made his stance on the whole debate clear in a 2014 Reddit AMA when he responded: "I don't know and I don't care."