George Lucas: Mr Emperor strikes back
Star Wars made George Lucas a fortune and transformed an industry. Now he brings us The Clone Wars, an animated film with a host of familiar faces
Will Lawrence
Just because I’m not Britney Spears, it doesn’t mean that I’m a recluse.” Sitting in his headquarters at Skywalker Ranch, George Lucas is engaged in a bout of myth-busting. Given the rarefied nature of a Lucas interview, the creator of Star Wars is often cast as something of a loner, a professional Han Solo, dismissing the outside world while sitting astride his empire, Lucasfilm, which is buried in the heart of Lucas Valley, in northern California. (The locale, inciden-tally, boasted the name long before the film-maker arrived.) “Honestly, everyone feels you have to talk about yourself all the time,” he says. “They say I’m introverted because I don’t give many interviews. But I don’t give many interviews because I don’t make many films.”
Lucas concedes that he can find interviews uncomfortable. “They’re hard work,” he says, “but this is part of the film-making process. It’s hard for you, I realise that, but it’s hard for us, too.” Truth be told, much of the mystery that surrounds him stems from the fact that journalists often treat him with extreme deference. While his film-making peers, from Spielberg to Scorsese, have all attained iconic status, Lucas is set apart in the pantheon: he created Star Wars and, for many, that elevates him to a different plane. In consequence, interviewers rarely inquire into his private life, his 1983 divorce from Marcia (his wife of 14 years and a close professional collaborator) and the fact that he went on to raise three children as a single parent. Yet surely these events must have had a profound effect on his work?
“Probably,” he concedes. “If I’ve directed fewer movies than I might have, it was a combination of things. But I think the most outstanding thing was that, back then, I was financially devastated and I had to get myself back on my feet. And, at the same time, I had a daughter to raise. These two things together changed my focus. I decided to spend time building up the company and doing things I could do a few hours a day.
The rest of the time I could spend raising my daughter.” He smiles. “And, at that point, it wasn’t realistic to think I could move off and start making esoteric movies. I simply didn’t have the resources to do that.”
Working amid stories that his wife had run off with a Lucasfilm employee, Lucas devoted himself to developing his business and raising his adopted daughter, Amanda, who is now in her mid-twenties. Beavering away through his forties, he adopted twice more, taking in Katie (born in 1988) and Jett (1993), and says that, for all his cinematic success, raising a family is his proudest achievement. Indeed, at 64, Lucas looks the perfect picture of a family man, a wholesome American patriarch, wrapped in his almost-trademark attire – blue plaid shirt, jeans and trainers (suits are for special occasions) – his thick crop of hair and perennial whiskers now a blanket of white. His patronage extends beyond his immediate family into the world of industry.
“I am the father of our Star Wars movie world – the filmed entertainment, the features and now the animated film and television series,” he says. “And I’m going to do a live-action television series. Those are all things I am very involved in: I set them up and I train the people and I go through them all. I’m the father; that’s my work. Then we have the licensing group, which does the games, toys and books, and all that other stuff. I call that the son – and the son does pretty much what he wants.” He laughs. “Once in a while, they ask a question like ‘Can we kill off Yoda?’, things like that, but it’s very loose.
“Then we have the third group, the holy ghost, which is the bloggers and fans. They have created their own world. I worry about the father’s world. The son and holy ghost can go their own way.”
The father’s world has proved extremely bountiful. The six Star Wars films alone have earned billions in box-office receipts and, at the same time, an extended family of film-makers has benefited from the advances in digital technology forged by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), a subsidiary of Lucasfilm, formed in 1975 to create the special effects for Star Wars. From Jurassic Park through Harry Potter and Transformers, all have borrowed the expertise gathered by Lucas for his business empire. Yet his firm’s intention is not to register huge profits for the emperor’s money box; rather, everything earned is ploughed back into the technology. As Gordon Radley, who retired as Lucasfilm president two years ago, notes: “This was never a business strategy, in that you don’t go into a business like ILM to get rich. If George had invested his profits in, say, pork bellies, he’d have made a lot more money.”
The tale of how Lucas earned his fortune is almost as celebrated as the Skywalker saga itself – when the young film-maker came up with the idea for Darth Vader and his evil minions, he struck a deal with 20th Century Fox that saw him retain the Star Wars merchandising rights. Each time one of the stiff-limbed action figures appeared in a child’s toy box, Lucas earned a few more cents. He is now worth an estimated $3 billion, which isn’t too shabby for a small-town slacker whose giddy dreams drew short shrift from George Lucas Sr, a conservative father. Born and raised on a walnut farm in Modesto, California, George Jr was expected to enter the family stationery business after finishing his studies.
“Right at the beginning, I wanted to be an illustrator,” he explains. “Then I wanted to go to art school, to an arts centre in Los Angeles. My father said, ‘No way – you are not going to be an artist. Artists don’t make any money, and I won’t pay for that.’ Knowing I was a lazy underachiever then, he knew I wasn’t going to pursue that seriously. It was hard, but I do believe that, in the end, if I had gone to the arts centre and started to be an illustrator, I would probably have drifted into animation, and would probably have moved into Star Wars, just like I did.
“It would have been the same thing with anthropology, which was my first major at college. I’d have made documentaries and eventually features, then done exactly what I did. If you take all the things I love – art, anthropology and making movies – what I do pulls them all together.”
If Lucas feels there is a sense of destiny at play, it would be apt. While every Star Wars acolyte knows that the series as an entirety deals with the redemption of Anakin Skywalker (aka Darth Vader), and that the first trilogy borrowed from Eisenstein, the Flash Gordon series and the ideas proffered by the mythologist Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, many still read the first film, 1977′s Episode IV: A New Hope, as a reflection of the young Lucas’s dreams.
Just as Luke Skywalker was raised in the galactic backwater of Tatooine, working for a family member who poured scorn on his dreams of becoming a pilot, so the young Lucas was reared in lonely Modesto, his father eager to see him ply the family trade rather than entertaining dreams of car racing. Then, just as a benevolent savant, Obi-Wan Kenobi, assisted Luke in his battle against his father, so Lucas met the cinematic sage Francis Ford Coppola, who helped him to make his first feature in 1971: an adaptation of one of his student works, THX 1138. Finally, just as Luke achieved his dreams at the end of the first picture, so, too, did Lucas, who fulfilled the pledge he had made to his father more than a decade before: that he would be a millionaire before he hit 30. Honestly, though, did any of those thoughts enter Lucas’s mind when he was writing the film?
“I don’t read the reviews, that’s for sure, so I’m not so familiar with all the theories,” he smiles. “But, psychologically, as with every writer or work of art, it comes from himself. It doesn’t come from some magical place. It filters through his own brain, and it’s reflective of an artist’s own sensibility. That’s a given. It would be someone who can divorce themselves from their work, because it’s a creative medium. You have to drag it out of yourself, unless you copy something or somebody else tells you what to do. If you are writing the screenplay, and doing the whole thing yourself, it’s 100% you.”
Lucas has now finished with the live- action films, although the wider Star Wars universe remains very much alive. In terms of fresh storytelling, Lucas has overseen production on The Clone Wars, a 3-D animated movie, out here next month, which will launch an animated television show on the Cartoon Network this autumn; and he has already started work on a live-action Star Wars television series, which will go into production in 2009.
“It’s completely separate from the Star Wars films,” he explains. “The Clone Wars has all of the characters everybody knows — from Yoda to Anakin to Mace Windu to Obi-Wan — they’re all there. The live-action series, meanwhile, has nobody there, because it’s after Episode III, so everybody’s dead, basically, or hiding somewhere. You hear about the emperor, just like you do in Episode IV, but it’s mostly about a whole different world. I mean, there are a million stories in the big city — you’ve only seen one of them.”
Lucas is also considering what to do about the fifth instalment in the Indiana Jones franchise, which he has produced from the outset. The most recent film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, has taken almost $750m (£375m) at the international box office, and the whip-snapping archeologist remains in high demand, even though his own days as a whippersnapper are behind him (Harrison Ford is two years older than Lucas).
“We were hoping for box-office figures like that, which is, ultimately, with inflation, what the others have done, within 10%,” Lucas explains. “So, we squeaked up there. Really, though, it was a challenge getting the story together and getting everybody to agree on it. Indiana Jones only becomes complicated when you have another two people saying ‘I want it this way’ and ‘I want it that way’, whereas, when I first did Jones, I just said, ‘We’ll do it this way’ — and that was much easier. But now I have to accommodate everybody, because they are all big, successful guys, too, so it’s a little hard on a practical level.
“If I can come up with another idea that they like, we’ll do another. Really, with the last one, Steven wasn’t that enthusiastic. I was trying to persuade him. But now Steve is more amenable to doing another one. Yet we still have the issues about the direction we’d like to take. I’m in the future; Steven’s in the past. He’s trying to drag it back to the way they were, I’m trying to push it to a whole different place. So, still we have a sort of tension. This recent one came out of that. It’s kind of a hybrid of our own two ideas, so we’ll see where we are able to take the next one.”
In the meantime, Lucas is set to start production on Red Tails, which tells the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, an important subject for the film-maker. They might sound like distant relatives of Star Wars’ Tusken Raiders, but they were a real-life USAF squadron, the first black pilots to fight in the second world war. “I’ve had a hard time putting it together — 18 years, it’s taken me,” he concedes. Why so long? “Because the story is so great, so fantastic, but so big. There’s also an element of personal responsibility to those involved.
“I’m only going to produce Red Tails — we have a black director — but then I think I am going to direct some more, make some esoteric films that have a personal significance.” And what might they be?
“I can’t say yet, but they’ll be personal. n fact, I’d sooner just make them and not even release them, just put them on the shelf, like ships in a bottle — ‘Oh, look, let me show you my collection.’ Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Films are a very expensive hobby. And you have to get people to want to go and see them.”
When Lucas does embark on his more personal, esoteric films, the chances are he’ll talk more to promote them through the press. Although don’t expect a media deluge. After all, this is George Lucas, not Britney Spears.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars opens on August 15
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