Is the answer "unappreciated and extensive labour by the film editor who saved the first movie from its borderline-incompetent director in the editing bay then was effectively written out of the history of Star Wars by her vindictive soon-to-be-ex husband who directed the movie and who only got more vindictive when she won an Oscar for her editing work on it but he didn't get an Oscar for anything"?
https://youtu.be/olqVGz6mOVE?si=wyVvuCOso24IZHso
TL;DR: Marcia Lucas didn't do anything editors don't do on every film ever, and the "saved in the edit" video is garbage.
"People will tell you that the success of Star Wars had nothing to do with its visual effects, and it was all down to its great story," Nolan continued. "But, I mean, clearly, that's not the case. It is indeed a great story, but it's also an incredible visual and aural experience. So this willful denial of what movies actually are has set in."
Who’s saying this? Pretty much everyone knows the first movie’s story was a basic hero’s journey drawing heavily from Kurosawa and Flash Gordon. What made it successful was the spectacle.
The Empire Strikes Back was the only movie of the original trilogy with a truly great story.
Oh so he's become a "disney killed star wars" youtuber now?
Sounds like he's trying to articulate a thought made much clearer by others before him. Tarkovsky was big on approaching the medium of film on its own terms and pushing the boundaries unique to it. Tarkovsky was highly critical of films that he thought conformed to constraints and conventions of other media, such as the stage and the page. But yeah, not sure what Nolan is really getting at except questioning the primacy of the script, which I agree with, setting aside my criticisms of Nolan as a filmmaker.
I think Nolan wants to critique the lack of artistry in Hollywod but is unwilling to meaningfully criticize profit hungry executives (whether purposefully or just through ignorance). Profit motive is ruining film/tv as everything must be perfectly engineered to maximize profits. A certain degree of mass appeal is fine but a lot of movies and TV are just hollow. Hollywood has always had a tension between the commercial and the artistic but lately the artistic has increasingly been losing out, and this has almost certainly been intensified in the past few years due to fears of the lack of profitably of streaming sites. It'll be curious to see how the strikes end up playing out. If they go poorly, it may lead to the creation of a new independent filmmaking scene/institution by the displaced workers.
