Pay Attention You Must: George Lucas Explains Why Yoda Talks Like That

George Lucas broke down the origins of Yoda’s “very distinctive way of talking” at a 45th anniversary screening of The Empire Strikes Back at the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival last week.

Lucas was asked about Yoda’s particular patter, which often found the character doing away with typical sentence structure and essentially delivering his heady insights and mighty koans backwards. For example: “Luminous beings are we”; “Anger, fear, aggression — the Dark Side are they”; and, “Wars not make one great.”

All of that was done intentionally, Lucas said, to make sure audiences were paying attention. “If you were speaking regular English, people don’t listen that much,” Lucas said. “But if you have an accent, or it’s really hard to understand what he’s saying, they focus on what he’s saying.”

The Star Wars creator continued, “He was basically the philosopher of the movie, so he was talking about all the things. I had to figure out a way to get people to actually listen, especially 12 year olds.”

Yoda first appearance in the Star Wars universe came in The Empire Strikes Back, when Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) seeks out the Jedi Master to learn the ways of the Force. Yoda was voiced and “portrayed” (or controlled) by the legendary puppeteer and actor Frank Oz, who reprised the role in Return of the Jedi and continued to voice Yoda in the Star Wars prequel and sequel movies.

In a 2021 interview with Rolling Stone, Oz spoke about playing Yoda, and all the different creatives who helped build the character. “It was really George [Lucas] and Larry [Kasdan] who wrote it. And [designer/make-up artist] Stuart [Freeborn] made it,” Oz said. “Jim [Henson] helped to a degree, and other people. But at the end of the day, what I did was put it together as a living, breathing thing. But I couldn’t have done it without those people. I’m the only one who’s ever done Yoda. So I feel good about that.”