The Dark Side of George Lucas

Rocket Surgeon said:

Wow.

Does dressing like a Nazi make you a Nazi?!

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JuniorJones said:

...the tumbleweed floats by on what is an excellent thread...eagerly awaiting the next section...

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A long time ago in a galaxy far far away... is the beginning of every Star Wars story. Lucas says, Star Wars movies are basically entertainment. You go, you eat your popcorn, you have 2 hours of entertainment, you feel good, and you go home. But he adds that there is a lot in them that never gets talked about. The Star Wars movies are just fairy tails, but fairy tales aren't just silly old made up stories . There is a lot going on in them that makes them work. At the same time, though, they're not done with a capital A for art or S for significance.

Lucas read myths and fairy tales the entire time he was writing the scripts for Star Wars, I consciously went into it wanting to make a fairy tale, and I studied a lot of fairy tales. He read Joseph Campbell; Bruno Bettleheim, Grimm's Fairy Tales; Greek, Islamic, and Indian mythology. He also read Carlos Castaneda's Tales of Power. He read CS Lewis, and JRR Tolkien, as well as popular science fiction like Frank Herbert's Dune Trilogy and E E "Doc" Smith's Lensman Saga. Lucas read C G Jung , Edgar Rice Burroughs and Frazier's The Golden Bough. He read a lot but doesn't admit to any one particular influence . He says, yes I've done a fair amount of reading, but a lot of Star Wars just came intuitively. The reading gave me feelings for motifs and themes, but ultimately most of Star Wars is just personal.

If I ever consciously used anything that I read, it was to make the story more consistent with traditional fairy tales. For example, if there was a part in which Luke had 2 trials, I would try to make it 3 because 3 is more consistent with hero myths.But if adding a third trial jeopardized the story, I wouldn't do it. I can't give any specific examples. I just don't remember, and the scripts changed a lot. It is hard to go back without studying. It becomes academic, and when I was doing it, it wasn't academic. Also, you're talking about 10 years and a lot of work. The basic things are "quest of the knight", "father and son", "good versus evil", "renewal of faith", "test of becoming a man or Knight" , "primitive versus technological", "man versus machine". A life spirit is stronger than what a machine can create. That's all it really comes down to, a large technological force that tries to destroy the human spirit is ultimately very vulnerable because it's a machine and all you have to do is unplug it. But it's always dangerous to analyze these things. It's always better to let people watch and decide for themselves what something is about. I don't like to get too intellectual about it. I'd much rather have people think of Star Wars as entertaining little movies. The thing stands on its own, it is what it is.

There is more of me in Star Wars then I care to admit. For better or for worse, a lot of it is very unconscious. Very personal. You can't get away from that. It comes out of you. It's not something that is done by the numbers, it's very personal. Luke more or less is my alter ego. He can't not be. You can't write a main character and not have him be part of you and not be able to identify with him. I identify with a lot of the characters, and you have to in order to write it . Han Solo and Luke are like twin brothers, the spiritual brother and the warrior brother with the devil may care attitude . A lot of people have said Han Solo is a composite of an old friend I used to race cars with and screenwriter John Milius . Who knows where the characters come from? I didn't base Han Solo on any person.

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Rocket Surgeon said:

Wow.

Does dressing like a Nazi make you a Nazi?!

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The idea of the force evolved. It has evolved all during my life. I have always pondered it and been fascinated by it. I've always asked the questions and looked for the answers. I don't know if I am any further along now then when I was 5 years old. I continue to look. If I know anything, it is that we just don't know what's going on. To deny things that don't fit into our sense of reality, like levitating a chair, to say this doesn't exist, and to close ones reality into a rigid mindset is not the most productive way to try to figure out what the world is all about. The force is a way of saying that all things are possible. Because you don't understand it, because it doesn't fit into your belief system, you shouldn't reject it. In Empire, when Yoda levitates a spaceship, Luke says, I don't believe it. That, answers Yoda, is why you fail. Lucas says, in order to make something work, you have to have an absolute belief in it. But at the same time one cannot just believe things out of hand. As Luke goes on, he gets more skeptical. If you can keep an open mind and be receptive and skeptical, you might be able to get a smattering of truth somewhere. As I said the only thing I know is that we don't know. The film has one foot in psychology and 1 foot in philosophy. These are large and complicated issues. Behind each smidgen of surface is a whole treatise on the power of belief systems, the relationship between a person's belief system and what he's able to accomplish. But Star Wars is not meant to be an essay in philosophy. it's just a sketch in a primary concept that also serves a plot force . The movie never stops to have a philosophical discussion.

Do I try to live the way of the force? What is the way of the force? I try to have some kind of relationship with God, and I hope in the future I'll be able to spend more time articulating that. My feelings in that area are very personal. There aren't any really obvious manifestations of how I deal with my spiritual life. I don't meditate. I don't go to church. I don't do est. I've developed my own relationship, which I haven't had too much time for. I'm not drawn to any particular religion. I think they are all equally interesting. the force is also more or less intuitive. I wanted to move beyond folk gods and make an elemental God, something that people could relate to without getting hung up on a specific religion. I was trying to move beyond religion into a relationship with God. I wanted to deal with it in a very simple and straightforward way. I didn't want the force to be specific I wanted it to be general. You know, people love to say, Oh, George believes in the force. I believe in God. The force is a label you put on something; it doesn't mean anything. I believe in God, and I also believe there is an elemental God that is reflected in all religions. it's like the blind man and the elephant: all the religions are trying to describe the same thing, it's just that they are describing different aspects of it.

These ideas are in philosophical and mystical areas so obscure that you can't really discuss them in anything as glib as a movie or focus them in anything as cumbersome as a 50 volume work. All I was trying to say very simple and straightforward way, knowing that the film was going to be seen by a young audience, is that there is a God and there is a good side and a bad side. You have a choice to make: the good side or the bad side. The world works better if you're on the good side. I wasn't trying to preach, but I did want to try to, say, influence kids in the direction of “find your God and try to be good.” I sort of took a moral approach to the movie. Lucas’ wife, Marcia, says she thinks her husband is very spiritual, not necessarily religious. George says he doesn't believe in the force, because he thinks people would consider him a freak if he does. But deep down part of his unconscious, believes in it, I think.

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Lucas writing room is what Marcia calls a tree house environment, which used to serve as their mansion?s carriage house. Marcia decorated the suite of rooms - a writing nook and desk built into a windowed wall a few steps up from a large living room, a bathroom and a tiny kitchen - with red wood paneling and forest green fabrics. As you enter, there is a green couch in front of a fireplace and a stack of wood. There are bookshelves around the room and a TV and stereo system on one wall. The carpet is beige. Lucas? desk is stained red wood, and on it are a Mickey Mouse phone, a Wookie pencil holder, a telescope, and several books: Joseph Campbell's A Hero with 1000 Faces, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, Webster's Dictionary, Harpers Bible Dictionary, The Foundations of Screenwriting by Sid Field , and Roget?s Thesaurus, opened to a page that has the word imagination at the top. There is a little Sony television to the right of the desk, and five 3 ring notebooks containing Lucas's notes and sketches for the entire Star Wars epic, past, present, and future. There's also a picture of Marcia and the baby. When he is writing, Lucas pens about 8 hours a day in his tree house, with a short break for lunch. If I spend 8 hours writing, he says, I probably spend 3 hours writing and the rest of the time thinking.

It took Lucas two and a half to three years to write Star Wars. While struggling, he snipped bits of his hair off with scissors. He used number 2 standard pencils, and wrote only in longhand, on blue and green lined paper. When I sit down to write, it takes me a long time and it takes a lot of work. I don't just sit down and have all these things pop out of my head. They get dragged out kicking and screaming with a lot of pain. It's a wonder it all comes together in the end. Filmmakers have unlimited options, yet after a while a script becomes its own animal, partly because of its own personality, partly because of fate. You only have limited control over it. You're not making it in a vacuum.

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Denise Worrell said:

a Mickey Mouse phone

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Denise Worrell said:

Filmmakers have unlimited options, yet after a while a script becomes its own animal, partly because of its own personality, partly because of fate. You only have limited control over it.

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Denise Worrell said:

...a Mickey Mouse phone...

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Montana Smith said:

The hotline to Disney was already installed?

To another Mouse Phone on Comissioner Eisner's Desk...

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Star Wars is not a fantasy Lucas had when he was a boy. He started writing it in 1973, and the ideas evolved. He says, there are 4 or 5 scripts for Star Wars, and you can see as you flip through them where certain ideas germinated and how the story developed. There was never a script completed that had the entire story as it exists now. But by the time I finished the first Star Wars, the basic ideas and plots for Empire and Jedi were also done. As the stories unfolded, I would take certain ideas and save them; I'd put them aside in notebooks. As I was writing Star Wars, I kept taking out all the good parts, and I just kept telling myself I would make other movies someday. It was a mind trip I laid on myself to get me through the script. I just kept taking stuff out, and finally with Star Wars I felt I had one little incident that introduced the characters. So for the last 6 years I've been trying to get rid of all the ideas I generated and felt so bad about throwing out in the first place. The truth of it is, I'm not sitting here with one chapter of a book, which is what I had after Star Wars, and saying, the book is incomplete.
If Lucas does ever decide to take the story further, he will start by going back to a time before Star Wars began. Then he would make a sequel to the Star Wars trilogy. Lucas can describe the stories, the plots, and who does what to whom in the 3 movies of what he calls the prequel to Star Wars. But he has only a vague notion of what will happen in the 3 films of the sequel. Lucas? notebooks are full of ideas but no diagrams or mythological maps. The prequel is about the breakdown of the fictional Galactic Republic and the emergence of the Empire, of the governing body. Everyone including Obi Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, and the Emperor (the bad Yoda), starts out as a normal person, just 40 years younger. Yoda is also present. The story explains how all the characters got to be where they were in Star Wars. Luke Skywalker is born in episode 3. Lucas says, the prequel has more plot and less action than in Star Wars, and it's more like a soap opera, really Machiavellian, with lots of political intrigue. I had to create a whole back plot in order to get to Star Wars. How did Anakin Skywalker get to be Darth Vader? Who is Luke's mother? I knew at the final draft of Star Wars that Leia and Luke we're sister and brother, but the story started out with 2 brothers and a father. Everything evolved.

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Denise Worrell/George Lucas said:

Lucas says, the prequel... it's more like a soap opera...

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Denise Worrell/George Lucas said:

I knew at the final draft of Star Wars that Leia and Luke were sister and brother,

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In the sequel Luke would be a 60 year old Jedi knight, Han Solo and Leia would be together, although Lucas says, they might be married or not. We have never actually discussed marriage in this galaxy. I don't even know if it exists yet. Who knows what relationship they will have? I mean, they?re together, let's put it that way. The sequel focuses mainly on Luke, and Lucas says mark Hamel has the first crack at the part if he is old enough. If the first trilogy is social and political and talks about how society evolves, Lucas says Star Wars is more about personal growth and self realization, and the third deals with moral and philosophical problems. In Star Wars there is a very clear line drawn between good and evil. Eventually you have to face the fact that good and evil aren't that clear cut and the real issue is trying to understand the difference. The sequel is about Jedi knighthood, justice, confrontation, and passing on what you have learned.

The onscreen world of Star Wars is a sliver of Lucas' imaginary universe. Lucas constructed back stories not only for his main characters but for his creatures as well. He is particularly fond of Chewbacca and has concocted a cultural and anthropological history of the Wookie race: they come from a damp jungle planet and dwell in wood and bamboo donut shaped houses wrapped around the trunks of giant trees 100 feet above the ground. They are mammals, eat meat and vegetables, and live to be 350 years old. The 6 breasted females deliver their offspring in litters. The society is a primitive patriarchy with a complicated lineage structure and initiation rites. Their religion rejects materialism. They have their own version of the force ? a natural empathy with plant life and the ecology of their planet. After an Imperial invasion the Wookies are rounded up by slave traders and sold throughout the empire. Han Solo rescues a group of prisoners that includes Chewbacca, and the tweo become inseparable.

Lawrence Kasdan, who collaborated with Lucas in writing Empire and Jedi, says, George is very much in tune with his entire history from the time he was very young, and in a way that is useful to him and his work. He is able to draw on those feelings. That kind of openness to your past, and influences on you, is a very special gift. George has been able to hook into some basic, universal images. He is able to show that someone very small, like a child or Luke, can face someone very big, like a Darth Vader or an Empire or Death Star. The central image of the whole trilogy I think comes in Star Wars when Luke, against all odds, gets through this tiny little crack and fires 1 little rocket into exactly the right spot to bring down this enormous opponent. That is the most powerful feeling: Oh, it's not hopeless, I can be like David and kill the giant Goliath with a slingshot. In Empire when Han Solo is maneuvering the Millennium Falcon through the meteoroid field - that's a fantasy every kid has had of avoiding arrows or rocks or an avalanche. In Jedi, as the flames chase the Falcon out of the Death Star, that is an image everybody has had: Oh, if only I could just beat by a few steps the monster or the mugger or the dog that's on my tail. And whatever feelings you have about Darth Vader, your father, or authority, how reassuring it is to think that there is something good there too. Luke's insistence on his hope that redemption is possible is very inspiring.

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Denise Worrell/George Lucas said:

In the sequel Luke would be a 60 year old Jedi knight, Han Solo and Leia would be together...and Lucas says mark Hamel has the first crack at the part if he is old enough.

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Denise Worrell/George Lucas said:

In Star Wars there is a very clear line drawn between good and evil. Eventually you have to face the fact that good and evil aren't that clear cut and the real issue is trying to understand the difference.

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If Star Wars ever seemed like a comic book or TV serial, its no coincidence. Lucas grew up on them. He was born May 14th 1944, the third child of Methodist parents, George Sr and Dorothy. He has two sisters, 8 and 10 years older, and a sister Wendy, three years younger. Lucas’ mother was sickly, his father a conservative small businessman who owned a prosperous stationary and office furniture store in Modesto, a small city in the flatlands of Central California about 60 miles south of Sacramento. The Lucases lived there in a stucco house on Ramona Avenue until George was 15 and the family moved to a 13 acre walnut ranch on the outskirts of town.

George Sr raised his children on a litany of his own values; work hard, be frugal, don't waste your money; don't stop until your job is done; be true to yourself; early to bed, early to rise. But he didn't think his only son heard a word: He never listened to me. He was his mothers pet. If he wanted a camera, or this or that, he got it. He was hard to understand. He was always dreaming of things. George, a scrawny little devil, according to his father, was taunted by local bullies who threw his shoes into sprinklers. Wendy would come to his rescue. Wendy also was there when George, a dreadful student, needed help with homework. Sometimes she would get up at 5 o'clock in the morning to correct misspellings in his English papers.

Wendy and George used to pool their allowances to buy comic books - Batman and Robin, Scrooge McDuck, Superman - and then hurry to read them in the shed behind the house on Ramona. When Lucas was in college, he gave about two car loads of comic books to his elder sister's children, but has since repossessed them all. In the scene near the beginning of Jedi when the bounty hunter brings Chewbacca to the throne room of Jabba the Hut, Jabba speaks in Huttese, but the subtitles under a close up of the monster read, This bounty hunter is my kind of scum, fearless and inventive. A million villains could have said that, any villain in an action comic.

When George Lucas was about 10, George Sr bought the family a TV set, and George would spend hours watching serials and cartoons, his black cat Dinky draped over his shoulders. When I was a kid, I used to love the old Flash Gordon serials on television, Lucas recalls. They were a primary influence on me. The way I see things, the way I interpret things, is influenced by television. Visual conception, fast paced, quick cuts. I can't help it. I'm a product of the television age.

In his teens, Lucas started listening to rock and roll, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry. At 15 he got his first car, a Fiat, and loved the thrill of speeding down Modesto's flat roads. He spent time rebuilding cars and working with pit crews at races. Just about every day after school, Lucas says, I’d go to the Foreign Car Service and work on the Fiat to beef it up. For nearly 4 years of my life, I spend almost every weekday between 3 in the afternoon and 1 in the morning cruising up and down the streets, stopping only at the Foreign Car Service and for dinner. I use to grease back my hair with Vaseline, put taps on my pointed black shoes, and wear one grimy pair of jeans. I was friends with the gang that wore blue felt car coats. We hung out.

Lucas’s days and nights of endless cruising resulted in the hugely popular American Graffiti, but his dreams of a racing career were smashed when he was nearly killed in a car accident just before high school graduation. Lucas was hit broadside and thrown free just before his Fiat wrapped itself around a walnut tree. He recuperated for 4 months. It shook me up quite a bit he says. That is a transitional age to begin with, and since I have a tendency to favor determinism…I don't want to get too specific, but by deterministic I mean a belief in destiny and that one is put in a place for a reason. I do think an individual has choices, and if you're on a path you can go up the path quickly if you want. You aren’t a victim of some cosmic force, but there are unknown elements at work. Whatever religion or philosophy you choose, they all focus on the same thing: that there is some sort of logical movement of forces that you have a relationship to. Trying to figure out where the forces are coming from and how things are determined has always been one of the great mysteries. After the accident Lucas took up filming auto races with an 8 millimeter camera. He attended Modesto Junior College for 2 years, majoring in the social sciences with an emphasis in anthropology and sociology.

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