Director George Lucas has openly said that making Star Wars films simply isn't fun. There is far too much pressure and there's no room for experimentation, which is one of the reasons he left the series. Another reason for him ultimately removing himself from the upcoming expansion in the series, The Force Awakens, is that Disney decided to go in a different direction than he wanted.
Lucas looked at Star Wars as a 'family soap opera,' not a film about spaceships. Disney's take on The Force Awakens is that the film needs to be 'for the fans.'
"The issue was ultimately, they looked at the stories and they said, 'We want to make something for the fans,'" Lucas said to CBS News. "I said, 'All I wanted to do was tell a story of what happened–it started here and it went there. It's all about generations and the issues of fathers and sons and grandfathers.'
"It's a family soap opera," continued Lucas. "People don't realize it's actually a soap opera and it's all about family problems–it's not about spaceships. So they decided they didn't want to use those stories; they decided they were going to do their own thing so I decided, 'Fine.'"
It's interesting that Lucas once again refers to the new film as being about 'spaceships.' A previous interview had him telling JJ Abrams (the director of The Force Awakens) that "there's more to it [Star Wars] than just making space ships."
One could extrapolate that Lucas feels as though the new films are too focused on spaceships and less on the family story.
