Lucas confirms we were all greatly mistaken: Han *never* shot first

From an interview in The Hollywood Reporter:

THR: People can get fanatical about the movies — how does that make you feel? The puppet vs. CGI Yoda ruckus, and the who-shot-first, Han Solo or Greedo furor come to mind.

Lucas: Well, it’s not a religious event. I hate to tell people that. It’s a movie, just a movie. 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. 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.

Well, our mistake. Everyone who saw the movie, i.e. most people living in the free world in 1977, understood that Han had shot Greedo without provocation. But we were confused. In fact, though the film Lucas made showed us one thing that we all saw and understood the same way, something else altogether actually happened.

What Lucas seems to be saying is that a film is not the images and sound presented by the filmmaker to the public. Rather, a film is what the filmmaker later claims to have intended to have shown the public, whether he did in fact show it to the public or not. That is to say that the film has no independent existence; it lives only in George Lucas's mind.

The Hollywood Reporter: 5 Questions with George Lucas