George Lucas quotes of every kind

There is a Lucas interview where he states that he wanted audiences watching Star Wars to really feel like they’ve been thrust into an alternate universe, to confuse them with foreign events and terminology, but still be able to follow the movie through the visuals and context, like Lucas’ own experience watching Kurosawa films for the first time. I think it was an early prequel era interview. If anyone has it, please post away.

In the meantime:

(From The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi)

“Lucas: If the Emperor does pull out a secret weapon and the weapon is working, and they wipe out half the fleet, it becomes even more intense. Then Vader knocks the Emperor into the gun and he is killed by his own gun, and in the process the gun blows up in a big explosion. Luke is all right, Vader is coming apart. I think it’d be great for Luke to try to help Vader while the thing is blowing up. And then Vader gets his cape caught in the door and says, “Leave without me” and Luke takes his mask off. The mask is the very last thing—and then Luke puts it on and says, “Now I am Vader.” Surprise! The ultimate twist. “Now I will go and kill the fleet and I will rule the universe.”

Kasdan: That’s what I think should happen.

Lucas: No, no, no. Come on, this is for kids.”


One of the best trolls I’ve ever read.

Do you mean this? (From the opening post)

Before giving my thoughts about the quote, which I find interesting when talking about storytelling, let's talk about the answers of this tweet, just like with the "a special effect without a story is a very boring thing" or "People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians", people see the quote and see George as a like a hypocrite who did that very same thing with the prequels so they can justify ther dislike toward the movies, without undestanding what he really means.

I know George contradictes himself sometimes, but if you want to use a quote to make him look bad, at least you must undestand what the quote is really about.

if I'm not mistaken, in this quete he basically says that is not good spending a lot of time in a movie with the worldbuilding before starting the actual story to the points it consumes tons of the movie length to see a fictional history lesson without really happening anything.

I don't see any of the prequel movies spending tons of lenght to explaining the world and how it works, and if it do is to put a context or is part of the actual story, a lot of people thinks that the prequels are just about the fall of Anakin to the darks said, when they are also about the fall of the republic and the jedi order and the rise of the sith.

In other worlds,the key to do worldbuilfnig is making it flowing alongside the story. George uses the special effects fob backgrounds to make the world feel alive wand relaistic while the actual story is happening, like, there are things happening in the world(in this case the galaxy) besides what we are following with the main characters.

Maybe I'm getting the quote wrong too, what do you think?

First things first, the quote is slightly truncated (as the ellipses rightly indicate). This is the full quote derived from "From Star Wars to Jedi: The Making of a Saga":




A very dapper-looking George Lucas here, I must say, sporting a healthy, luxurious mane of hair, with the first tufts of grey sprouting through. A George Lucas, in a way, very sure of himself, three pictures in (well, five, actually), even as his personal life was crumbling and he and his wife Marcia were about to divorce. 

Isn't it clear? Lucas has always been married to his work. As he says to Lesley Stahl at the start of "The Beginning":




Lucas has always been committed to telling a story (or, indeed, a plenitude of stories) since embarking on his Star Wars journey. He wrote no less than four drafts of the first film and pilfered from a pre-existing story framework -- the aforementioned "The Hidden Fortress" (itself a remake of sorts) -- in order to create a solid spine for his epic tale.

As he told American Cinematographer right after his record-breaking film was released:


He was never thinking solely of visual effects or showing off environments to people -- to think in this way says a lot more about the people who say it than it does George Lucas. Lucas clearly sees himself as a storyteller and treats that as a serious vocation; albeit one with space for artisanal, experimental impulses and characteristics.

Yes, he's a boundary-pushing genius, and certainly knows his way around a special effect, but you know what? The greatest special effect in Star Wars is the story itself; or how it is told. Like any masterful storyteller, the genius is in the telling.


Indeed, they don't take the time to understand anything he says, because they are operating from confirmation bias. Any sense of contextual nuance is lost on them. 


Right. Lucas' filmmaking philosophy is based around life and movement. He once said that films are basically "A mass of objects moving across a large surface". Note, too, how many times he uses the word "life" in the quote above. Indeed, his first student film was called "Look at Life", and it won a ton of awards. Interestingly, at the start of TPM, Qui-Gon also counsels Obi-Wan (and the audience) to "Be mindful of the Living Force".

In "The Beginning", in fact, there's a brief scene of Ben Burtt and George Lucas working on a scene together in the editing room, and it all boils down to Lucas wanting to improve the pace of the scene (begins at 45:40). With a touch of bewilderment and sardonic amazement, Burtt remarks (46:33), "You're resyncing both flanking actors -- okay", eliciting a big chuckle from Lucas. A bit more work is done to the scene and then Lucas comments:


All that finicky "cyber directing" (46:38), as Burtt calls it, to fine-tune the film's pace in a relatively short and innocuous scene, essentially designed to convey the fact that the Jedi are heading with Amidala to Tatooine. 

Lucas likes to put a point across and then move on. Neither navel-gazing nor copious amounts of worldbuilding (or worldwowing) have ever been his thing. Of course, the prequels are far more grandiose and environmentally-richer than the OT, but his philosophy while working on them remained the same. A viewer is never drowned in detail at the expense of the plot. If it's on-screen, it has a meaning -- i.e., something it is adding to the plot.

After all, the plots of the prequels are intimately bound up with the circumstances that the characters find themselves in, and the characters' environments shape their circumstances. Thus, Lucas doesn't shy away from exhibiting extensive world detail, but most of this goes by in a flash and is never dwelled upon for its own sake. On the other hand, it is nice when the films take a momentary breather, with various transit sequences (e.g., landing scenes) functioning like scene-setting overtures and interludes. But the plot remains ever at work and constantly gets bulked up and articulated with the architectural sinews Lucas wants it to have.

Here's another example of Lucas' philosophy at work, this one taken from "Within a Minute", the behind-the-scenes featurette for ROTS. In this scene, Lucas is talking with concept design supervisor Ryan Church, and reminding him that the environment of Mustafar will only be shown in its full glory a handful of times for the entire duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan, so every shot needs to count:




Remember, in the completed film, the climactic duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan lasts for a little over six minutes (the complete duel sequence, intercut with Yoda and Palpatine's duel in the Senate and Yoda's narrow escape, is just shy of twelve minutes), but was probably even longer in the rough assembly stage. Ergo, Lucas is saying there's an average of no more than four beauty shots of the environment per minute of film.

However, perversely, for this sort of reason, I also think this is why people talk about the prequels being visual effects montages or ILM showreels. Lucas maximised everything to such a degree that you can be left with a deep impression of seeing oodles of fantastic, larger-than-life imagery. Which is certainly the case. But this also led to the erroneous impression that Lucas was just drowning a viewer in a sea of fancy visual effects, or was constructing fancy environments for the sake of it.
 
Now, part of the appeal of the prequels is in how epic and painterly they look; and in how elaborate their action sequences are (yet with steady camera work and solid editing all the while). But the story is like the unseen "force" that is ever-flowing through every nook and cranny of these operatic constructions. In the Mustafar duel, for example, a certain emphasis is placed on the hellish environment to underline the moral decline of the characters and the political calamity they have all helped bring about. At the same time, the environment also threatens to swallow the characters up, especially once they place themselves at the mercy of the flowing lava rapids -- leaving you with the feeling that, even for Jedi used to a range of harsh or extreme conditions, they have taken leave of their senses (especially as Padme lies unconscious "above": the main victim of their feud). The "duel" they are having is nothing of the sort: it is more like a wrestling match, or a brawl, as the world literally burns and breaks apart around them. 

Thus, Lucas always uses visual effects and even the most grandiose of action sequences to express themes and tell a story. While the environments may be varied and compelling, and almost totemic, they are never just assemblages of visual effects or Lucas flexing what his art teams or stunt coordinators can do. They are rich and glazed because Lucas knows how to make them rich and glazed -- not because he is using spectacle for its own sake, or worse: to disguise thin storytelling or poor character dynamics. Moreover, Lucas obviously thinks that spectacle is part of the fun; provided it is shaped into something well-crafted and meaningful. And life is movement.  


Right. There are lots of layers to the prequels. They are, if you like, multifarious and multivocal, to what seems (by comparison) the univocality and relatively sludgy, stolid, petrified quality of most movies. You have all these wonderful strands and they all feed into each other: all support, complement, and mesh together in an epic dialectic.

As Lucas himself once said (sounding a tad like Obi-Wan confronting Darth Vader on the Death Star):


Lots of layers, George Lucas style.


You're right. Lucas likes to have his galaxy feel alive. He was never able to quite achieve this in the Original Trilogy; but with digital technology, he could finally realise everything he originally set out to do. Even a relatively simple fix like adding windows to Cloud City, in the Special Edition release of TESB (pre-prequel), makes quite a difference to how much more "open" the environment feels. Classic Lucas. Now times that by a million for all the tricks employed on the prequels.

Then again, do you know what I hate about fan reactions like these? They obscure more subtle, abstract, and rebellious realities.

Because there is also the inverse sense in which all of a film can be constructed for one scene or a single moment that justifies the whole endeavour -- as if all else were window dressing or some elaborate melody meant to sheaf, protect, exalt, or comment upon it. Consider the droids wandering in the desert in ANH. If the whole movie is "about" that, then how greater and richer a thing the whole piece is. The rest subsequently becoming "a movie about a movie"; or that sequence itself becoming "a film within a film". Or a repeat motif -- same deal. Everything else is the support structure for that motif. The motif maketh the movie. It's like that one perfect photograph that sums up a photographer or their engagement with the world. All subjective, of course. Yet such a concept seems lost on people who want to fancy that filmmaking must conform to certain rules or templates or it is wrong. In that way, they completely miss the Passion Play commentary of TPM and the importance of characters like Qui-Gon and Jar Jar. Art isn't about respecting boundaries; it's about defying them.

George Lucas' take on mythology reminds me of Owen Barfield's view of language. To Barfield, words are fossils of human thought. As the meaning of words change over time, you can track how people were thinking throughout history. 

Subtext Mining
Here's a Boatload of Quotes from the IMDB some you may have already used.
www.imdb.com/name/nm0000184/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm#quotes

The thing about Jar Jar is that he is not badass like the Terminator, or Maul, or Vader, or Boba Fett. He doesn't provide the audience with a power fantasy.

Today I ran into a post on reddit where somoeone was expressing the desire to see a Star Wars movie about a Sith lord going around the galaxy taking everything over, and they expressed the desire for this to be done in the style of Game of Thrones or Vikings. I'm like, dear God, that is the total anti-thesis of Star Wars. That's the badass power fantasy to a tee! I feel like that kind of story would strip the soul right out of Star Wars. Star Wars is about learning to be compassionate, not getting hyped up on a power fantasy about a greedy tyrant. If they actually made such a movie Star Wars would be reduced to a skin/aesthetic that can be applied to any kind of story, no matter how horrific.

I'm assuming it would have to be if you are going to emulate the style of Thrones and Vikings.