Lucas discussed his career in work in a wide-ranging chat in Cannes, where he was awarded an honorary Palm d’Or.
Speaking to a throng of admirers at a crowded Debussy theater in Cannes on Friday afternoon, Star Wars creator George Lucas summed up the secret to his success as “I’m a stubborn guy and I didn’t want people to tell me how to make my movies.”
The audience, a far younger group than is typically present at these events, whooped and yelled as George Lucas took the stage at the 77th Cannes Festival, where he was receiving a Palme d’Or for his contributions to cinema. As he settled down for a lengthy conversation on his life in the film industry, they were riveted.
Representing his first picture, THX-1138, at the Directors’ Fortnight in 1971, Lucas said he felt “nostalgic” to be back in Cannes. While Lucas was in the audience, his co-writer and sound designer Walter Murch from THX-1138 related how Warner Bros. refused to send the two to France for the premiere, so they had to scrape together the funds themselves. They were forced to sneak in because they were unable to obtain tickets for the showing.
Nevertheless, Lucas recalled his early career, “We weren’t that interested in making money, we were interested in making movies.” He talked about working with Francis Ford Coppola, whose most recent epic, Megalopolis, debuted at Cannes this year, on the 1968 film Finian’s Rainbow and then assisting Coppola in founding the independent studio American Zoetrope. He described how he battled Universal Artists, the studio, to get American Graffiti filmed for a meager $750,000 and then again to get the film into theatres. Before a series of test screenings in front of yelling audiences—”It was like a rock concert,” Lucas remembers—convinced studio executives to give the picture, which starred a crowd of then-unknowns including Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Richard Dreyfus, and Harrison Ford, a try on theater, they wanted to dump it on TV. The movie made $115 million domestically after opening in a small number of theaters.
Backend residuals off the net box office of the movie were part of Lucas’ agreement but usually meant nothing. The net was almost like fool’s gold, the director claimed, because they would keep adding things to the budget so it never got paid off. But American Graffiti was becoming so popular so quickly that I was able to profit handsomely from it. Nobody had ever made money on the internet before.
The director stated that Allan Ladd Jr., then chief of production at Fox, approached Lucas following a screening and asked, “You got any other movies?” And I responded, “Well, I have this crazy 1930s-style science fiction fantasy movie with dogs driving spaceships.” And he declared, “I’ll handle it.” I’ll follow your instructions whatever. and he hired me, and the rest is kind of history.
Most people in the audience came to hear Lucas talk about Star Wars, and he did not disappoint. He spoke about obtaining, at the time, unheard-of licensing and merchandising rights for the first movie. “The studios didn’t have licensing departments… it took longer to design a toy than it did to make a movie,” he said. He also described how, partly due to Fox’s bankruptcy at the time, he obtained control of the sequel rights. “They didn’t believe in the film,” Lucas declared. “They had a lot of films already and were desperate; the studio was going bankrupt anyhow.”
Lucas defended the detractors of his Star Wars prequel movies by saying that viewers had forgotten that the franchise was never intended to be a mature picture. “It was meant to be a kid’s movie for 12-year-olds going through puberty who are asking all the important questions: What should I be worried about? What matters most in life, he asked. And Star Wars contains all of those things. You understand it, especially if you’re young, even though they’re buried in there.
Lucas maintained that “critics and fans who had been 10 years old when they saw the first one” were to blame for the unfavorable reception to his Star Wars prequels since they were not interested in seeing a kid-friendly movie. Lucas was reminded of the original reaction to C-3PO by the public debacle of Jar Jar Binks, one of the first figures to be canceled on the then-nascent internet. “Everyone agreed that 3-PO was obnoxious and that we ought to get rid of him,” stated Lucas. “The Ewoks said, ‘Those are miniature teddy bears,’ as I finished the third. We don’t want to see a kids’ film, and this is one. “It’s a kid’s movie,” I said. It has always been a family film.
Lucas also defended his decision to use cutting-edge digital technology to “clean up” his original trilogy and give it the appearance he always wanted.
“I think that a filmmaker, writer, or director should be able to make his film any way he chooses,” says Lucas. Hopes for a 4K repaired version of the original 1977 Star Wars film should be dashed.
When we did release the first one on laserdisc, many were incensed, saying, “It looks terrible.” I replied, “Yeah, I know it did,” Lucas remarked. It looked like that.
Talking about the Star Wars sequels created after he sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012 (for $4.05 billion), Lucas claimed the new corporate executives made several mistakes.
With all there is to this universe, I was the one who truly understood what Star Wars was. For instance, nobody comprehended the Force,” he declared. “When they started other ones after I sold the company, a lot of the ideas that were in [the original] sort of got lost. But that’s the way it is. You give it up, you give it up.”