A Look Back in Wonder

By Richard Schickel

After nearly three decades, George Lucas has finished his culture-changing saga of a fallen father and the son who redeems him. The director seems as surprised as anyone at what he has done. He sat down with TIME's Richard Schickel, who has known him since shortly after the original Star Wars came out in 1977, to talk about how he works, his fear of failure and the sort of movies he really wants to make.

TIME Now that you've finished the entire saga, what do you feel? Sad? Glad? Half mad?

LUCAS Well, I'm still stunned at this point. Yesterday was the first day I saw it, actually sat back and looked at it with an audience. I'm very happy with it. I think it turned out as well as I could have hoped, and at the same time I'm very glad that I finished it. It was desperate just to get the first one made. But the idea of actually doing the other two was this huge Mount Everest. And then the concept of going beyond Mount Everest was completely unthinkable. I expected this to be one movie. I expected it to take me a year, year and a half to make, and then I expected to move on to other things. Especially in the storytelling sense, it was very stylized, very much in opposition to what my natural inclinations are. It was a kind of whim which turned into my life.

TIME Is that why, after the first three Star Wars episodes, it took you 16 years to come back and do these last three films?

LUCAS Star Wars was written very carefully around the limits of technology. I had one big technological leap that I had to make, and that was to be able to pan the spaceships. I thought I knew enough about animation that I could make that happen. Everything else was written for what I knew I could get away with, given the fact that I had a limited budget, limited resources. But in terms of having creatures? I could barely get the cantina scene done. I had a couple of really stupid rubber masks. I had to go back and beg another $10,000 so I could go down to a garage and have a friend of mine make some better masks that actually moved their mouths. It took every ounce of energy to create Chewbacca. But then Jurassic Park inspired me. I didn't have to use rubber masks. I could build digital characters that can act and perform and walk around and interact with actors. I can use digital sets. I can paint reality. In essence, it means that cinema has gone from being a photographic medium to a painterly one.

Now just having made it to the end of the river is a relief. All the pieces are together, and I was able to buff up the older ones. I can put it together in a six-part DVD and be very proud of the way the story gets told. On the other hand, I have a feeling this one is going to be sort of like the last one in terms of some people like it, some people hate it. And like everyone who makes movies, I'm always convinced the next one will be a flop. So right now I'm thinking it probably won't make any money and will be considered a failure.

TIME I think you've probably heard people say, "George doesn't really like directing actors. George doesn't really like being on the set and having the rub and scratch of egos and all that." Is there any truth to that? Is it easier for you to paint them on a computer?

LUCAS No, no, no, it's not. People don't remember that every time you have a digital character, you have an actor. There's an actor doing the voice, or there's an actor on the set doing the performance with the other actors. He takes the place of the digital character. But you're still dealing with another human being, you're still trying to get a performance out of him, you're still doing that part of directing. I work with actors. I've always worked with actors. Francis Coppola taught me how to work with actors. Now, Francis takes them home to dinner. He lives with them. I'm a different kind of guy.

But I know a lot of directors who are far less communicative than I am. Am I less comfortable on set working with actors than I am in the editing room trying to put it all together? Yes, I would say that's probably true. Am I by nature a shy person? Yes. Have I kind of overcome my shyness to do things that a shy person shouldn't be able to do? Yes, of course I have. But people think of me as a sort of pathological, Howard Hughes-type guy sitting in a hotel room, which is definitely not so. I mean, you've known me for years. It ain't even close to that.

TIME No, but everybody says, "Well, he's up there on the mountaintop, and he's all by himself--Mr. Mystery."

LUCAS Yeah, but there's thousands of people here. I wish I worked by myself--it would mean the overhead's much less. But part of that comes from not being in a media center. I'm not in L.A., I'm not in New York, and therefore I must be out in the wilderness, sort of sitting in the Himalayas somewhere. San Francisco is not the wilderness. We have a nice little film community here. We make movies we're very proud of. We're not alone, and we may be liberal, but we're not completely crazy.

TIME All right now, George, I've been hearing about these movies you're going to make since I first met you. In 1977 you said, "I'm gonna go off and make my little art films." What will they be?

LUCAS I've got a whole binder full of stuff. Which one I'm going to take on first, I have no idea ... I know I'm going to produce a film about the African-American fighter pilots--the Tuskegee Airmen--during WW II. I've been working on that for 15 years. I've been having a very difficult time getting a script on it.

TIME And?

LUCAS I'm going to go off in the direction that I was really interested in going off in when I was in film school--films like Koyaanisqatsi, films that are a little more abstract in nature. It's vaguely in the land of music videos, I guess, but I don't even know how to describe them. I'm going to deal with themes that have always interested me and are vaguely esoteric in nature. But I'm going to try to make them dramatic. I'm going to try to make them emotional. How they're gonna turn out, I don't know. I know they won't be mainstream movies. Fortunately, I have built my facility here to work in. I've set aside a chunk of money to do my movies--that I figure will last me for 10 years, when I'll be seventysomething and I should probably quit. I'm sure they'll be just as criticized as Star Wars films are. I'm sure some people will be just as devoted to them as the Star Wars films.

I'm also going to do some TV shows. I love television because it's not important. You get to do really great work, you really get to focus on the work, and all this megillah that goes on around it is gone. And you get to explore your interests, and it doesn't have to be that important. I want to get out of doing anything important.

TIME Except maybe one last Indiana Jones movie.

LUCAS You know, I said three's fine. And then I came up with an idea I thought was brilliant, so I told the other guys [Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford], and they kind of flipped out. It's vaguely in the realm of the supernatural. We have to accept the fact that Indiana Jones is an older man. But it's been hell getting a script out of it. Steven is committed to shooting it next year. I just got the latest script yesterday.

TIME You don't have that many watersheds left, no matter how old you live to be. So, let me revert to my first question: What does it feel like bringing the Star Wars saga to a conclusion?

LUCAS Well, I had mixed feelings about being George Star Wars Lucas. That was a hard thing, but I did finally accept the fact that there was probably nothing I was going to do with the rest of my life that was going to change that, that I might as well live with it. It's not the worst thing in the world. If that was my shot at some kind of vague little mark on history, hey, that's not so bad. That sort of led to saying, Well, if I'm already George Star Wars Lucas, then it doesn't make any difference what I do from now on. I've cleaned up the first three to the point where I am happy with them now. They may not be perfect, but they are as perfect as I can make them. I'm proud of the second three movies. People may not like them, but I'm proud of them. I never in a million years thought I could finish the whole story. In its course, I've done a lot of things I wanted to do, taking themes and stringing them different ways in different tones through different times--recurring elements twisted in different ways. And I've managed to do something that I've always kind of been fascinated with--doing something over 12 hours instead of two. What it really comes down to is, I am a happy man. What else can I tell you? o