I've just found out that Lucas approached Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard and Robert Zemeckis to direct The Phantom Menace, but each of the three declined, finding the project 'too daunting' and telling him to direct it himself. So, what-if time: What would be an Episode 1 directed by each of these directors like?
He also asked James Cameron.
Ron Howard and James Cameron are both really geared towards tight, no-nonsense productions. They can certainly helm big and flashy productions, but they (thankfully) don't have this annoying tendency to show off how very "clever" they are (as people like Rian Johnson very much do, thus ruining their films, by janking many audience members out of the immersion).
A big difference would be that Howard wouldn't ask to be co-writer, while Cameron absolutely would. (I think he's only ever directed one film he didn't have a writing credit on.) TPM as directed by Howard would probably look a bit better than the one we got, but would otherwise be much the same. Directed by Cameron, it'd be a different film. I could see Lucas just giving Cameron his notes and letting Cameron do most of the writing. But I could also see them getting into a big tug-of-war over it, with very different visions for the film, and ultimately ending their friendship over it.
Spielberg is hard to call, since he can visually go in many directions, when it comes to films. Either way, this would mean no
The Lost World, no
Amistad, and no
Saving Private Ryan. At least not released when we saw them. TPM would be the first big film released by DreamWorks (just co-founded by Spielberg), and it may well initiate a lasting LucasFilm/DreamWorks partnership. If we're unlucky, the film ends up being a lot like
A.I. Artificial Intelligence. It'll be Haley Joel Osment stepping into the place of Jake Lloyd. If we're lucky, Spielberg manages to channel the impressive adventure spectacle of
Jurassic Park with some of the staggering battlefield visuals of
Saving Private Ryan (albeit less bloody).
Zemeckis may actually go further in the direction Lucas actually did. This guy was obsessed with the possibilities of CGI at the time. Even more so than Lucas. This led him to eventually create
The Polar Express,
Beowulf and
A Christmas Carol. It took him three films to finally get that the tech wasn't ready, and that the wider public didn't much like dead-eyed 3D models stuck in uncanny valley. With LucasFilm and ILM to back him up in the late '90s, and Lucas totally supporting all leaps into CGI, this could cause Zemeckis to make a pretty poorly-received version of TPM. It wouldn't be "we may have gone to far in a few places" (dixit Lucas in OTL), but rather "we went way too far, and all across the board".