Foulness hath issued from your mouth, sir. That name is an abomination in my
household.
Said Kakese Dibinga <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Tuesday, Mar. 14, 2006
A Conversation with George Lucas
TIME's Film Critic Richard Corliss talks with Lucas about his âretirementâ
and the future of digital filmmaking
By RICHARD CORLISS
Movie history can be divided, without much forcing of the issue, into two
eras: before Star Wars and after. The landscape before the first Star Wars
film, in 1977, was a very different terrain. The best Hollywood directors,
freed from censorship and the nagging sense that they were cranking out movies
while their European brethren were hand-crafting films, had begun to forge a
distinctive adult American cinema. Few thought in terms of box office
megamillions. The idea was to earn enough to entice someone into financing your
next picture. (Jean-Luc Godard had done this successfully in France in the 60s;
Robert Altman adopted that model for his pioneering 70s works.) Most films by
the most gifted Americans were present-day dramas that picked at some social
scab until, in the last reel, it burst.
In the larger marketplace, the most popular films were the ones that were
made for everyone, and that everyone wanted to see once: you, your kids, your
mom. Thatâs the broad, if thin, constituency that made blockbusters out of
The Love Bug, Airport, The Poseidon Adventure, The Godfather, The Stingâand
Jaws, by Lucasâ contemporary Steven Spielberg. The majority of these pictures
made their money slowly, playing first runs, then gradually reaching the
smaller towns and theaters; the theatrical life of one of these crowd-pleasers
might be a full year. There were genre movies, of course, but not many
science-fiction films. Those were kidsâ stuff; movies of the 70s were for
adults. Besides, special effects werenât sophisticated enough to open
viewersâ eyes to the fantasy worlds its makers might be dreaming. Even Jaws,
which broke a few rules by opening in a thousand or so theaters, and by
reviving the monster-from-the-deep subgenre of Atomic Age s-f, was bound to
rely for
its special effects on a hydraulically operated shark that kept
short-circuiting off the coast of Martha's Vineyard waters.
Star Wars changed everything. It quickly became the top-grossing movie in the
65-year history of feature films (replacing The Sound of Music, if you need
evidence of how much things had changed). With its then-wizardly special
effects, and the cheerleading use to which they were put, it cued a revival of
the s-f genre, which had been a B-movie fad in the 50s. Back then, the kids who
gorged on s-f were a Saturday matinee minority. Star Wars arrived just as teen
culture was taking over movies. Lucasâ film proved that a movie could be a
smash by creating a textural density that lured a part of the audience back
through the wickets a dozen times. This wasnât your uncleâs, and auntâs,
hit movie; but if they didnât get it, who cared? The kids (mostly boys) were
pouring all their disposable income into return visits. Thus Star Wars became
the first cult-movie megahit.
and the first live-action movie to franchise its popularity into
merchandising at a level that equaled, and then surpassed, the Disney cartoon
features. (That revenue, not Lucas' share of the film's take, was what made him
a billionaire.) and the first Hollywood epic, at least so far as I know, that
was conceived as a trilogyâproof of Lucasâ capacious vision and audacious
entrepreneurial reach. AND, as Lucas mentioned in an interview I had with him
two weeks ago in preparation for this weekâs TIME story on the future of
movies, Star Wars was one of the hits whose profits, shared by the theater
owners, financed the multiplexing of America.
The light-saber epic changed Lucas too. A graduate of the USC film school who
also felt a kinship with Bruce Conner, Scott Bartlett and other members of San
Franciscoâs vital avant-garde scene, he had made two features before Star
Wars. In 1971 he hatched the stainless-steel-cool, THX138 âa project received
by its sponsors at Warner Bros. with so much bafflement and meddling that it
stirred in Lucas a resolve to be a truly independent filmmaker. In 1973 he
moved to the middle with American Graffiti, a feel-good blast of
instant-nostalgia (it re-imagined a California car culture only a decade in the
past). The two works were, respectively, boldly European-ish and familiarly
humanist. They hardly hinted at the Empire Lucas would create on film, or the
empire he would build in Marin County.
Out of Star Wars came Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), his computerized
effects company, and THX, the advanced sound system for theaters, and a little
studio, specializing in digital animation, that became Pixar. (Lucas sold that
one to fellow visionary capitalist Steve Jobs.) The filmâs triumph also
allowed him to become his own mogul, essentially renting later episodes to 20th
Century Fox, rather than working for hire. Most surprising, perhaps, was
Lucasâ fidelity to the fantasy world heâd dreamed up. He could have gone
back, or on, to making the gnarly little independent movies he has talked
about, to increasingly incredulous listeners, for 35 years. Yet he has extended
the original Star Wars trilogy not just to the three episodes he made in the
past decade but to an Ewoks TV show and, now, a Star Wars cartoon series for
cable TV and a rerelease of all six chapters in 3D. He is a father who feels
obliged to raise the children he sired. Luke and Anakin...
...and Indiana Jones, another Saturday matinee hero, the icon of the
three-film collaboration with Spielberg that promises another installment one
of these years. Heâs also preparing a DVD release of the Young Indiana Jones
TV series, with a one-hour documentary on the subject of each episode.
At 61, a man with so much past could be pardoned for not paying much
attention to the future. Lucas refers to himself as "retired"âmeaning, he
explains, he has no more Star Wars movies to make. Yet, as these excerpts from
our two-hour phone conversation indicate, he has thought a lot about where the
medium is going, or where it ought to go. He wants the movie industry to move
at the pace his mind does: warp speed.
Iâm a 19th century guy when it comes to technology, so before plugging a
tape recorder into my office phone I asked Lynne Hale, Lucasâ indefatigably
cheerful and helpful Director of Communications, to record the interview on her
end too. It happened that, on both sides, a few minutes were lost. Iâm amused
that neither the worldâs largest media company nor the galaxyâs preeminent
group of movie futurists could pull off recording the entire conversation. But,
as youâll see, there was enough left on the tape to give you a peek into the
mind of Lucas Skywalker. :R..C.
HOW BIG MOVIES MAKE LITTLE MOVIES
Richard Corliss: Letâs talk about the effect Star Wars had on movie studios
and theater ownersâhow a big hit can create low-budget hits.
George Lucas: It was the money from Star Wars and Jaws that allowed the
theaters to build their multiplexes, which allowed an opening up of screens.
The money that Star Wars made, half of it goes to the theater owners. The
theater owners said, "Letâs do some expansion. Letâs build this idea of a
multiplex," which was sort of floating around. So they started building
multiplexes, they had all these screens, they needed to fill them. So all the
little Miramaxes came up and said, âWeâll help you fill those.â And they
started doing that. And those companies were able to start making some money,
and so then more people were doing it, and then the studios were saying, âGee
if we can get a movie for ten million, itâs not a big investment, letâs
start a little company that does nothing but distribute little movies.â
THE DOYEN OF DIGITAL
R.C. The cost of making movies is going to go way way way down because of
digital. It allows more people to get into the process, which makes cinema more
democratic. Itâs more like literature or painting, where anybody can do it if
they have the talentâitâs not this huge impossible economic barrier.
G.L. The problem is, Making a big movie, a Harry Potter or a Spider-man,
youâre spending $20 to $30 million for the prints, just to strike them and
ship them to the theaters. Smaller movies have to spend a huge part of their
budgets on prints. Now, if you donât have to spend any money on prints, and
all you have to do is spend some money on advertising, and youâre willing to
look at different alternative ways of advertising, like The Blair Witch Project
did, then you have access. You can go directly to the theater and say âHey I
got a movie. Will you book this for three weeks?â And the theater doesnât
have any costs involved.
R.C. You had an idea for sharing the cost of conversion to digital
distribution with the exhibitors...
G.L. It costs about $1,200 for a print and about $200 for a digital print. So
what you do is charge the distributor the same $1,200 they would ordinarily be
charged, and $1,000 of it goes into a pot that eventually pays for all the
projectors and everything. In about five years you would basically reconvert
the entire industry.
R.L. And who bought in?
G.L. No oneâs bought in yet. But they will. Itâs just a matter of time.
R.C. But the switchover would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. [More
like $4 billion, actually.]
G.L. But thatâs like: the Internetâs been invented, now Iâm not going
to use it until I can figure out how I can own it. Well, you canât. It
doesnât work that way. This is a new world; it doesnât work the way the old
world worked.
Theyâre trying to work it out. But now itâs a matter of greed and
control, whoâs going to control this. One of the real problems has been that
everybodyâs trying to figure out a way to control everything. And theyâre
afraid that some outsider is going to come in and try to control it. And it has
nothing to do with making movies or showing movies or anything. It has to do
with trying to be greedy and control it.
R.C. And who will get rich making the projectors?
G.L. Everybody. Thereâs a whole group of people that make the projectors.
R.C. The makers of the equipment are not the ones who are complaining.
G.L. No, itâs the studios and the theater owners. Each one is vying to see
if they can better their position with each other. And they shouldnât. What
they should be doing is saying how can we make this a better process for
everybody, and especially for the audience. How can we streamline it so we all
win. But no, they want toâitâs one of the problems we have in this system
weâve created called win at all costs. And the idea of cooperating and
everybody wins is not in the cards.
DAY AND DATE
R.C. Thereâs been a lot of talk about day-and-date: releasing a movie on
DVD or in video stores at the same time it opens in theaters. Do you think
audiences will go to theaters if they can buy the movie for the same price and
play it at home with a half-dozen friends?
G.L. Itâs supply and demand. Itâs not going to work that way, itâs
simply going to be, the theaterâs going to have to do a lot of work and spend
a lot of money, theyâre going to be competing with day and date, and thatâs
inevitable. It doesnât have anything to do with DVDs, it has to do with
online. So eventually itâll all be online, eventually itâll all just be
downloaded into a server, and it will be cheap so that they can compete
withâthatâs the only way youâre going to beat pirates, that is the only
way because you can already download anything you want and it goes to the
pirates instantly. The day itâs released.
R.C. So why will people go to the movies?
G.L. Because itâs a social experience. Sure, you can see a movie at home,
the way can read a book. You can do it at home on your little laptop. But a lot
of people go because itâs a social experience. Itâs like watching a
football game. Who in the world would go out in 20-below weather, and sit there
and watch a football game where you can barely see the players? Football games
are on TV, and it doesnât effect stadium attendance at all. Itâs the same
with movies. People who really love movies and like to go out on a Saturday
night will go to the movie theater. If you havenât built a fan-base or
youâre not selling something that people want, then the attendance is going
to drop. But if you have a good product that youâre putting into the theater,
then theyâre going to always go there.
BIG SCREEN, LITTLE SCREEN
R.C. Movies are seen in theaters, on big and small screens at home and, now,
on iPods. How do you compose a frame when you know that the image might be seen
on a 60-foot screen or a three-inch screen?
G.L.I compose it for the big screen, I donât worry about the little screen.
Even when we did our TV series (Young Indiana Jones), I said, 'Make this as if
it were going into a big theater', because I knew that eventually the screens
would be rather large. And movies work great on television. Yeah, itâs a
smaller screen. Yeah, you donât get the full scope of Lawrence of Arabia on a
small screen. But you still understand it. And itâs still just as emotional.
Eventually, screens are going to get much bigger at home, and then Lawrence of
Arabia will have that effect. It wonât have the effect of sitting around in a
theater, where itâs just overwhelmingâbut thatâs why people are going to
go to movies. Because thereâs that kind of experience that they can get in
the movie theaters that theyâll never be able to get at home, no matter how
big they make the screens for the home.
I am a giant proponent of giant screens. But I accept the fact that most of
my movies are going to be seen on phones. Because thatâs whatâs going to
happen. People can get whatever they want out of it on a phone. If they do,
then thatâs great. I donât recommend it, but I certainly donât say
donât do that. Because people have a right to do whatever they want to do,
and see it under whatever conditions. But if you really love films, and you
really want to get the full impact, thereâs a huge difference between
watching something on a small screen with a mediocre sound system and watching
it on a giant screen in a giant theater with a huge beautiful sound system. I
mean the difference is electric.
2D, 3D
R.C.Do you think audiences are so technically sophisticated now that they
know the difference between formats? Virtually every CGI animated feature has
been a much bigger hit than any non-CGI over the last ten years. Is that just a
coincidence or a better story?
G.L.What happened with Pixar is they made brilliantly creative movies, but
they looked different. They had a different quality about them than on
television, than Rugrats. When you see a 3D movie, you assume itâs a
higher-quality movie and itâs something you donât see on television. Now
the television show Iâm working on, the Star Wars television show, is 3D.
R.C.When you said you were going to do Star Wars in 3D, do you mean in the
old-fashioned 3D?
G.L.Yeah, with glasses and everything.
R.C.Did you think of this when you were making the movies?
G.L.No, no, no. I had no idea. And thatâs what makes it great. Thereâs a
difference, because it used to be a cheap trick, which is you had a 3D movie.
Now itâs a movie, but it happens to be in 3D. Itâs just a 3-Dimensional way
of looking at a movie that doesnât call attention to itself, it just works.
And the quality is higher. I was very much against 3D until I saw this new
process and said, hey, this actually works in a way that it should work, which
is it doesnât call attention to itself, you forget that youâre watching in
3D, itâs just a nicer process.
R.C. I have to say that when I saw Spy Kids 3D, the glasses kept slipping
down my nose.
G.L.Well, now theyâve got better glasses.
RENEGADE AND RETRO
R.C.Try this one on: Star Wars was pioneering in its technology but retro in
its content. In the movies that you and I saw when we were growing up, movies
were trying to be adult. And one of the things that Star Wars did was validate
the Saturday-matinee impulse in filmmakersâwhich meant that there were a lot
fewer exciting films by the best filmmakers that were made for adults.
G.L. Well, I donât agree with that. Because if you look at the Academy
Awards, and the top ten lists of the critics, every single year there are some
amazing, artistic adult movies. And theyâve always been that way ever since
the very beginning.
R.C. I mean that Godard, Bergman, Fellini, they were stretching film form.
Adult movies now are adult in content: the equivalent of the Elia Kazan movies
of the 50s.
G.L. Well, I would consider Kazan movies adult. And the movies up for Academy
Awards this year, I would consider those adult.
R.C.They're adult in content. The idea of pioneering form is not so
important.
G.L. The experimental side of things, the experiment in form, happened in the
20s with Eisenstein and the other Russians did a lot of experimenting. In the
60s, you did get a lot of experimentation, especially here in San Francisco
with Bruce Connor and all those guys. But it was too far out of the mainstream.
And in the end the foreign film industries wanted to do what America was doing.
They wanted to have their movies seen all over the world, they wanted audiences
to love them. And to do that, you canât be too experimental, because most
people arenât going to be attracted to that. Theyâre going to be attracted
to storytellingâstorytelling in a way that theyâre used to. Today, some of
the experimentation comes in music videos and commercials and TV show. But that
will eventually spill over into movies.
The area Iâm interested in now is to go do some form-experimentingâto try
and figure out different ways of telling movies. I grew up in the Godard,
Fellini world and all that. To me thatâs where my heart is. But I realize
thatâs not commercial. Thatâs why I can say I managed to do something that
everybody wants to doâall those guys wanted to doâwhich was to get a pile
of money so I can sort of waste it, burn through it. Itâs like a government
subsidy, which is what (the Europeans) were able to deal with. I have my own
little government subsidy that Iâve built myself, and now I can go and do
stupid things with it. I mean, Iâm old enough and Iâm kind of retired...
R.C. What do you mean, youâre kind of retired?
G.L. In that I donât have to do Star Wars anymore. I donât have to make
money any more. I can just waste it. I call it hobby filmmaking, where you just
get to do what you want to do, and you donât have to worry about what anyone
thinks about it.
R.C. So youâre finally going to make good on your promise to do your own
little movies?
G.L. Yeah, after the TV series, Iâm going to do my own little movies. The
stuff Iâm thinking about it has to do with pushing the vocabulary in the
medium. Basically, you have to accept the fact that itâs going to be the land
of THX (the movie), and worse.
R.C. But having an idea, making a movieâgoing from notion to release in a
couple of monthsâthat simply doesnât happen any more, right? You canât
follow that kind of impulse.
G.L. Iâm not saying Iâm going to make these features fast, I mean, I
ruminate a lot and sit around. Iâm one of these guys that come back and paint
a little and then go back and paint a little bit more and come back a month
later and paint a little bit more. I donât do things particularly quickly. I
do when thereâs money involved, because I just canât afford to spend the
money. And I will probably try to get this money to last as long as I possibly
can, which means these are going to be reasonably low-budget movies. But I can
try ideas out that I wanted to try out when I started. Iâm more interested in
the avant-garde underground kind of moviemakingâwhere you go to your uncle or
somebody and ask for the money. They were making movies for $2,000.
R.C.You have a few dollars.
G.L. Yeah, I have a few dollars, but when youâre getting up to the point
where the average movie costs $80 million, anything under $20 million is pretty
cheap. Anything under $10 million is almost impossible. And anything under $5
million is Roger Corman.
INDY 4
R.C. If youâre retired, I guess youâll be less involved with an Indiana
Jones 4 than you were in the first three?
G.L. Well, Iâve been working on Indy 4 for ten years. So Iâve been more
involved, so no matter how you count it on this one Ill be more involved than
Ill have ever been on the other three put together. Itâs taken forever to get
a script of it. Thatâs my part of it.
R.C. Isnât Harrison Ford now older than Sean Connery was when he played his
father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade?
G.L. Uhh, yeah. But the thing is designed for that. And I think itâs funny,
itâs exciting. You know the problem there, which is not a problem, is that we
donât have to make that movie. All we can do is hurt ourselves, all itâs
going to do is get criticized. I mean itâs basically Phantom Menace weâre
making. No matter how you do it, no matter what you do, it wonât be what the
other ones were in terms of the impact or the way people remember them.
R.C. But thereâs also no need to complete the holes in the epic.
G.L. We donât have anything like that. We just had a great time making
those movies. And if we can have a great time doing this one and we can enjoy
ourselves, and make something thatâs entertaining to us, no matter what the
world thinks, letâs just do it.
R.C. But you also have to decide on the format, right?
G.L. In terms of what?
R.C.Do you say, "Dammit, Steven, do it in digital," and he says, "Dammit,
George, Iâm doing it on film"?
G.L. Pretty much.
R.C.Who wins?
G.L. Hell win. Heâs the director. The great thing about working with Steven
is that we donât have agendas. We want to make the best movie possible, I
want him to be happy. If he wants to shoot it on film and cut it on a
Movieola... Hey, heâs got a great editor. Michael Kahn can cut faster on a
Movieola than anybody can cut on an Avid. And I donât really care. But I do
tell him, 'This is your chance to play with this and experiment with it and
blame it all on me'âsay, "He made me do it." And then you can go back to film
if you want. But he has relented after all these years to maybe cutting it
digitally. Weâll see what happens.
FAVORITE TOYS
R.C.What's the next big thing in home gizmos?
G.L. The things theyâre going to be selling are larger servers, storage
units. That will be the next big thing you buy to put in your house. Now, with
TiVo, it goes into a mysterious server somewhere. But this is actually going to
be in your house, your server, and anything you want to download and store
there, like a safe, is just going to be stored there. Itâs just going to be
huge. Itâs not going to be like what they have now.
R.C.And a movie downloaded from such a storage unit has the same quality as a
DVD?
G.L. Itâs actually better. Thatâs where Hi-Def is going to run into
problems, Because you can download it off your hi-def internet line and you
donât have to worry about Blue Ray or all this competition that theyâre
going to be fighting over for the next few years. You can just do it. And play
it.
R.L. In the late 70s you started THX and Pixar and ILM to explore and exploit
the new technologies. Have you started new companies to follow these particular
technological dreams?
G.L. All of those things were designed really to make the process of making
films easier and at the same time make the quality higher. Stanley Kubrick was
doing that, too; he just didnât have a company. He did it himself. Itâs
better to try and do it with a company and let your friends in on it, which is
what I did. ILM was there because there were no real special effects companies
at the time. I had a special effects movie and I needed to create one from
scratch. The same thing with THX and everything else. But right now, and I
donât think there are going to be companies, I mean I donât know exactly
how weâre going to exploit this.
Right now weâre working on a Pre-Vis system, which is pre-visualization in
movies. Itâs very quick, almost like a video game: you can make movies very
quickly and shoot them and them put them together. Itâs just basically a
moving storyboard, so itâs very easy for you to figure out how your movie is
going to get made, and what itâs going to look like when it gets done. And it
doesnât cost hardly anything. Any big movie all has pre-vis, which are
computerized versions of the movie. But we can do that now without having the
technicians there to do it. And if youâre a Victorian like I am, you can
handle it. Directors can just sit down like a writer and direct their movie on
a desk.
A lot of directors are going to fight this. Theyâre going to say, "Well,
then, the studioâs going to look at my movie and say, âWe want it done this
way." But if you ignore the essential problem of the corporate overlords,
itâs actually a great way to make movies, because you can really see what
your movie is, structurally, before you go out and shoot it. Itâs a great
thing for anybody thatâs doing any kind of large movie. Because you have to
do it anyway. I come out of documentary filmmaking, so Iâm used to getting a
lot of material and putting it together that way. Steven is just the opposite.
Heâs a guy who conceptualizes and storyboards it and shoots exactly what he
needs. But I have to see it moving.
R.C. Spielberg still does storyboards?
G.L. Yes, on paper. I let him do some pre-vis on the last film, on Sith. And
he loved it, and he did it on War of the Worlds. So he has accepted that part
now because itâs so much better.
Weâre also taking a more intuitive look at digital editing. Iâm building
a digital editing system which is much simpler. And itâs got a different
interface, itâs got the kind of interface we had on edit-to-write, which is a
different kind of controller that allows the editor to not to have to think
about what heâs doing in terms of manipulating the machine, it just happens
automatically.
R.C.So thatâs the brave new world, where the computer is your
super-efficient, obedient servant.
G.L. Unfortunately, we live in a new world where all the fun things are gone.
Everything is virtual.
My gratitude to Clayton Neuman, who quickly and accurately transcribed the
long conversation. He's the Han Solo of this journalistic adventure. -R.C.
"If you could make a difference, what would you do?"...Said Kakese Dibinga
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