George Lucas: “I’ve spent the last 30 years making one damn movie.”
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Just a few notes from a tiny subset of today’s speeches–Lech Walesa, Elie Wiesel, et al will have to wait until after I get some sleep.
George Lucas:
I’ve spent the last 30 years making one damn movie. I’m over 60 years old. If I could have gotten this done when I was 25 I’d be in a whole different place….
At the time I made the first Star Wars movie, Richard Nixon was talking about changing the Constitution so that he could have more than two terms as President–so that he could become President for life. I was interested in how governments switch over from democracy to tyranny, and I did a lot of research for the movie’s backstory. Basically, how it happens is that the democracy seems impotent or slow, so the government gets turned over to somebody who can get the job done. And that person usually turns out to be a tyrant.
When I made Star Wars, I was making a movie for adolescents. Before I switched to film school, I was an anthropology major. I wanted to make a move that served the purpose that storytelling did for thousands of years–to tell young people what society expected of them. Fairy tales were invented to do what mythology used to do before that…
How has our emotional intelligence changed over the past 3 or 4000 years? Or do the old stories still work? I think I’ve proved conclusively that they do work. (Cheers from audience) So my advice to mythmakers of the future would be to retell the old stories in a different form so that they apply to the generation coming up….
Yes, I do know who Anakin’s father is. No, I will not tell you who Anakin’s father is.
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Tags: Life, the universe, and everything
