Lucas said he had more for the other characters. He explained:
“The first script I wrote had stories for everybody, and I cut it down, and we had a script. But when we cut it together, there were still problems. Finally, I said, ‘Okay, let’s be even more hard-nosed here and take out every scene that doesn’t have anything to do with Anakin.’ But that causes you to juxtapose certain scenes that you were never contemplating juxtaposing before. And these scenes take on different qualities than before, because the scenes were never meant to be next to each other.”
The editing process is where the movie really takes shape, especially when filmmakers find juxtapositions, just as Lucas said. Sometimes holes in a story are revealed, pointing to where you may need to do reshoots. Lucas mentioned one of those helpful moments. He said:
“In one case, there was supposed to be a scene with Padmé and Bail Organa [Jimmy Smits] between two Anakin scenes, because we were following her story along with his. And when most of those scenes were cut out, suddenly all sorts of weird things started to happen that weren’t intended in the script, but in some cases it actually worked much better.”