George Lucas on the ‘Star Wars’ Franchise’s Longevity, AI, the Streaming Services and More
George Lucas recently did an interview with Brut. around the same time as his appearance at Cannes. In it, he talks about how he knew that Star Wars was going to be more than just a movie, and why he believes that the franchise has resonated with so many people.
When asked about what he thinks spoke to generations about Star Wars, he stated that the young and young-at-heart were who he made the movie for:
“It’s designed as a film for twelve-year olds to say ‘You’re going through puberty, you’re very confused, you don’t know what’s going on, who am I, what am I doing here, what should I do, where should I go, what’s my life gonna be?’ – so I wanted to make a movie for them, and I wanted to make it entertaining. And when I was that age, I liked to watch Flash Gordon and Republic Serials and that sort of thing, and so I said ‘I’ll base it on that, and I’ll plug all this other stuff into it.’ And that’s really what I think. When I did it, everyone said ‘Oh, spaceships! Let’s just put spaceships in a movie!’ and I said, ‘That’s not what it is at all!’ So it’s much more than just an action-adventure film.”
George Lucas explained that he began to understand that Star Wars was going to be something much bigger than a Flash Gordon tribute movie was when he finally got a chance to show it to audiences:
“Well, that was when I finished it – the other two films [I made] were not well-liked by the studios, they didn’t even want to release American Graffiti – and the board of directors at Fox [were] having some financial problems, they didn’t like it, they say ‘Oh, this, they’re not gonna see this.’ [But audiences did.] Same thing with American Graffiti, they loved it. But finally, we convinced the studio to release it [as a film] – they were going to release it as a television show! And I said ‘No, people actually liked this movie!’ Star Wars was really designed that way, but the board of directors didn’t like it – but I had, y’know, Alan Ladd Jr., and some of the top executives there were very much on my side, so that helped me a lot.”
More directly, he recalled being a bit skeptical the rush of the opening weekend being much more than a flash in the pan, and he realized just how big a deal his nascent franchise was about to become while on vacation:
“When it came out, people [lined up] around the block. I said to Alan Ladd Jr., who was president of the studio, ‘Look, all science-fiction films do well in the first week. That’s just the way it is. Let’s not worry about lines around the block in the first week. They just like science-fiction films.’ And then I went off on Hawaii to be on the beach, and Steven Spielberg and I sat around and made sandcastles and things, and then some of my friends from the United States called and said, ‘Turn on Walter Cronkite tonight, turn on the news!’ I turned it on, and he did a whole thing about what a phenomenon it was, and that’s when I finally realized that it was a phenomenon.”
The interviewer, who noted that he saw the original Star Wars movies on VHS and then the prequels in theaters asked George Lucas about if, had all factors been the same, he would have released his movies on streaming. His answer indicated that the rise of streaming actually factored into his decision to retire:
“Uh, I dunno. Streaming is very powerful and it’s great – it’s really upped the movie business, because we could see the problems of [the theatrical movie] business and it was not good, so everybody was looking at streaming to save it, but nobody knew that it would. And that’s when Netflix took off, but at that point, I just said ‘Look, I don’t know what this is gonna be. There’s gonna be a giant transition in the business; I don’t know much about it.’ And I sold the company and I retired, basically.”
He also spoke about AI and how it might affect the future of the business when it came to the creation of visual effects and audio effects:
“We’ve been using it for 25 years. It’s not AI, but we used all the digital technology, because we helped pioneer a lot of that. Especially at ILM, because for a while, they were the only place that was doing digital. The thing of it is, it’s inevitable. It’s like saying ‘I don’t think these cars are gonna work. Let’s just stick with the horses, stick with the horses!’ And you can say that, but that isn’t the way the world works.”
When asked about the future of cinema, George Lucas said that he expects things to be a lot like they are now, with movies being pitched as reimaginings of existing films. In the process, he stated that this is specifically why he had Ralph McQuarrie present art of the worlds that he described in his Star Wars scripts:
“Big studios [just] want something that’s like something they’ve seen, because they don’t have the imagination to see something that isn’t there. I mean, I got Star Wars done mainly because at the same time I was writing the script, I hired an artist to draw pictures of what I was doing, because I knew that I couldn’t describe what it was – it was impossible! But when you see the pictures, you say ‘Oh, I get it!’ and that was really what sold [the movie].”
Lastly, when asked about the infamous debate on whether or not superhero movies are cinema – which began with fellow “New Hollywood” director Martin Scorsese making a comment about how he appreciated Marvel Cinematic Universe movies for their craft but didn’t consider them real movies – George Lucas (who worked on the infamous film adaptation of Howard the Duck) weighed in:
“Look – cinema is the art of the moving image, so if the image moves, then it’s cinema. And I think Marty’s kind of changed his mind a little bit.”
George Lucas received over the weekend the Honorary Palme d’Or for a lifetime of achievement in film and has been mostly retired since the release of the animated film Strange Magic in 2015, the last movie that he produced. He has indicated that he does not have any more plans to make feature films.
