With season 5 of The Clone Wars now released on Blu-Ray, the official StarWars.com blog is starting a new interview series with Dave Filoni, where he looks back at all the big events that happened this past season on The Clone Wars. The first part of this interview series was just recently posted, and here’s a small portion of that interview:

[blockquote cite=]StarWars.com: I know that George Lucas was heavily involved in the story creation of the show. Is there anything this season that he gave specific instructions on?

Dave Filoni: Not particularly. I mean, I would say that the origin of the idea, Darth Maul will face Darth Sidious, is a George idea. “I want them to fight.” When it comes down to the directing of where they’re going to fight, the staging of the fight, that’s all what I do and bring to the table. So we go over the broad story beats of something, and he just trusts myself and the writers and the rest of the team to really bring it to the screen. I think that freedom and trust from him is what in some ways makes this show. We’re challenging more boundaries and not reciting things so much. We’re developing more and experimenting more and I think the results are all part of that collaboration.

StarWars.com: Is there anything, conversely, that he might have resisted that you had to push for?

Dave Filoni: I don’t know about “resisted,” because when George doesn’t want something to happen, it’s probably not gonna happen. [Laughs] But there are several things this season… Bo-Katan, for instance, wasn’t a character that was pitched in a story meeting. She was a character that I created last season; she was just “Death Watch lieutenant” in the script, and I wanted to make a strong female Mandalorian character, so I just made her that character and then brought her back into this season. There were a lot of things that I’ve just learned from George over the years that I thought, “This would be a beneficial plot point.” Making Bo-Katan and Satine sisters was not in the original pitch, either. So there were a lot of things like that that we put into the stories that I hope made the stories stronger overall. I don’t know that they were ever hotly debated as much as they were ideas that came much later in the situation. The idea for Savage to revert back to his natural form, you just come up with that stuff on the fly. Everything that I [did] creatively is really based on the initial discussions that I have with George, and taking tons of notes and making visual drawing notes. If you look at the original drawings that I do in the room on the day, they’re very close to what ends up onscreen visually.[/blockquote]

You can check out the full interview over at the official StarWars.com Blog, and stay tuned for part 2 of Dave Filoni looking back on season 5.