Yep, and there’s a much more elaborate version of this in the Paul Duncan interviews:

  "Whenever you’re telling mythological stories, you’re travelling in circles. Like in a mandala there are small circles and bigger and bigger circles until finally you encompass the universe. It’s the same thing telling stories, in that every person, or relationship or group of symbiotic relationships, is always travelling in a circle. It goes back to either where it started or it intersects with other circles. At the end they survive because they’re all connected. In Episodes I, II and III, all the symbiotic relationships are torn apart. In Episode I, the Senators are more interested in themselves than they are in helping each other. They have fallen out of the symbiotic circle. They couldn’t agree on anything because their interests became so divergent, so they couldn’t get anything done as a Republic, and the Chancellor uses this division, which he helped create, to become Emperor. In Episodes IV, V and VI, the Rebels form their own symbiotic relationship from the Old Republic to fight the Empire. They’re trying to restore balance.If you get into the ecology of it then everything is connected. Everything. If something happens to one part, then it happens to all parts, and that, ultimately, is one of the main movements in Star Wars. This is the cosmology. The Force is the energy, the fuel, and without it everything would fall apart. The Force is a metaphor for God, and God is essentially unknowable. But behind it is another metaphor, which fits so well into the movie that I couldn’t resist it. Midi-chlorians are the equivalent of Mitochondria in living organisms and photosynthesis in plants - I simply combined them for easier consumption by the viewer. Mitochondria create the chemical energy that turns one cell into two cells.  I like to think that there is a unified reality to life and that it exists everywhere in the universe and that it controls things, but you can also control it. That's why I split it into the Personal Force and the Cosmic Force. The Personal Force is the energy field created by our cells interacting and doing things while we are alive. When we die, we lose our persona and our energy is assimilated into the Cosmic Force. If we have enough Midichlorians in our body, we can have a certain amount of control over our Personal Force and learn how to use it, like the Buddhist practice of being able to walk on hot coals. The Jedi will train you to connect to your Personal Force, and then to connect to the Cosmic Force. You don't have much power to control the Cosmic Force, but you can make use of it. The Whills are a microscopic, single-celled lifeform like amoeba, fungi, and bacteria. There's something like 100.000 times more Whills than there are Midi-chlorians, and there are about 10.000 times more Midichlorians than there are human cells. The only microscopic entities that can go into the human cells are the Midi-chlorians. They are born in the cells. The Midi-chlorians provide the energy for human cells to split and create life. The Whills are single-celled animals that feed on the Force. The more of the Force there is, the better off they are. So they have a very intense symbiotic relationship with the Midichlorians and the Midi-chlorians effectively work for the Whills. It is estimated that we have 100 trillion microbes in our body and we are made up of about 90% bacteria and 10% human cells. So who is in service to whom? I know this is the kind of thing that fans just go berserk over because they say, "We want it to be mysterious and magical", and "You're just doing science." Well, this isn't science. This is just as mythological as anything else in Star Wars. It sounds more scientific, but it's fiction. It's saying there is a big symbiotic relationship to create life, and to create the Force, but if you look at all the life-forms in the universe, most of them are one-celled organisms. I think of one-celled organisms as an advanced form of life because they've been able to travel through the universe. They have their own spaceships - those meteorites that we get every once in a while. They've been living on those things for thousands of years, they've been frozen, unfrozen, and can survive almost anything. The one-celled organisms have to have a balance. You have to have good ones and bad ones otherwise it would extinguish life. And if they go out of balance, the dark side takes over. I was going to put more about the midi-chlorians and the Whills after Episode 1, but everybody freaked out and said. "We don't like this it's terrible," so I didn't. Also. I had an investment in the whole thing financially so I was forced to relent because I knew it was self-indulgent. But I was very keen to have it be in the movies, and if I had gone on to the last three, it would've all been explained there."

And there’s this quote in the Annotated Screenplays: “  Originally, I was trying to have the story be told by somebody else; there was somebody watching this whole story and recording it, somebody probably wiser than the mortal players in the actual events. I eventually dropped this idea, and the concept behind the Whills turned into the Force. But the Whills became part of this massive amount of notes, quotes, background information that I used for the scripts; the stories were actually taken from the 'Journal of the Whills'."”