George Lucas on the impact of Star Wars with Christopher Nolan

good evening and welcome to the Directors Guild of America tonight we proudly present our first in the game-changer series of events celebrating our 75th anniversary here at the DGA tonight we're focusing on films that have been not necessarily blockbusters but films that actually change the way people think about this medium how a kid from a small farming community in the San Joaquin Valley became the transformative visionary for several generations of filmmakers is a fascinating story but before we begin I'd like to turn the stage over to Michael Apted the chairman of our 75th anniversary Michael so to discuss these influences with George wanted to find someone from that next generation of filmmakers that George is influenced and I'm I'm proud to welcome Christopher Nolan who in a short few years and seven movies has established himself as a young giant of modern cinema so ladies and gentlemen please welcome George Lucas [Music] so much has been written and talked about about stalls we're not gonna worry about any spoilers here I'm just gonna assume that everybody in the crowd knows what happens at the end of the film but for people of my age you know I'm 40 there are movies before Star Wars and then they're Star Wars and it changed absolutely everything for us since what was around at the time that made you think that there was some context for this to be very there was no context other than 2001 which was really science fiction and Kubrick did that you know sort of first quality enough time enough money to do it however he wanted and he was a genius and you know I didn't think that anybody was gonna make a better science fiction film than that so I sort of went and began to focus on space opera which wasn't really space offer what I'd done is I had gone through I'd love Saturday matinee serials when I was a kid they were on television these sort of all out action picture you know I had a cliffhanger after 15 minutes and then they you know each show each one was 15 minutes long and then it was a circle eyes thing and I really wanted to do something in that genre well the original emphasis was being an angry young college student ended thx and thx is based on the fact that if you tell people we live in a miserable world this is a parable about the way we live and we're all screwed up the country screwed up our society is screwed up that people will jump up and throw down the timer as well obviously didn't happen nobody went to see the movie so that didn't have much of an effect on anybody American Graffiti was really done as a bet with jibt with Francis who we had because of thx American zoetrope went bankrupt and we were all forced to go out and get real jobs and well Francis was anyway because I couldn't get a real job because I didn't I was just a film student and I'd made one movie that was you know basically you're hopeless you know weird thing and so he went off to do the Godfather and he said I dare you to go out and make something completely different you know something like a comedy do a comedy no more robots no more of this cool artistic BS do something that's just just a thing well as close as I could get to that was this film about my wasted youth and the only thing that really excited me about was the music track and so you know I had crazy ideas about how I wanted to put this together and make it one night and tell all these characters everything so the studio is all simple it's just too weird it's too much experimental it's not gonna work it's you know we don't want it so years and years went by trying to sell this damn thing finally Francis got done with The Godfather and came back and said well I'll put my name on it not old so which isn't the way it got made and then when it finished the studio wouldn't release it they said it was terrible it's incomprehensible it wasn't fit to show an audience maybe we'll put it on as a movie of the week but we're certainly not gonna release it before that I had this idea of doing a kind of space so I actually had two films that were very much the same one was about an archaeologist which was a Saturday matinee on cereal and the other one was a space offering and I had picked the space offer because I wanted to take I'd start out in college as an anthropologist but I'd always wanted to take mythology and take the psychological underpinnings of and motifs of mythology from all around the world and boil it down and two things seem to resonate everywhere in the world and I said I can take that concept of the psychological underpinnings of mythology combine it with the exciting action adventure of a Saturday matinee serial and that would be kind of a cool movie and so I went to Flash Gordon rather than done was a little the Navy where all these other things and I when I went to get a deal for American Graffiti which I couldn't and I said I finally got David picker you know an artist to say well okay well we'll finance this script I mean I do have the advantage of being a writer so and you do too but it's like to me it's like okay I can just you know so they paid me the giant sum of $10,000 to write a screenplay when I wrote it they said we don't want it I took it around to everybody nobody wanted it and finally I say when Francis attaches name to it I got it done at Universal but it was a real struggle and I didn't get paid much so by the time I finished that I was ready for a job I had no money it whatsoever so the my primary thing was to actually make some money so I could get a thing so I had this other project the other thing about Mara graffiti was that I finished it like in February the studio wouldn't release it they said it was terrible so what we did was every time somebody from the studio the TV department to see if they could put in television the marketing department to see if they could figure out a way that they you know marketing and everybody whenever they'd have a screening at Universal instead of letting them the three executives sit in a little room they got little rooms or seat about twelve people we said no no and we put them in a room this size and we invited everybody at the studio anybody who had friends anybody anybody to see it so everybody they always saw it with a full house and of course the screenings we had were all you know sensational everybody just went screaming yelling and went crazy yeah because if anyone doesn't know it's not actually a terrible movie thank you forgive me but it so Alan Ladd jr. was one of the he got invited this he was the head of production over Fox he saw it and he was one of the most logical and visionary studio executives I've ever met and he simply said look I love that movie he said what do you got well I got a thing of course when I'd gone and made the deal with David picker to do American repeat he said what else you got I said well I got this kind of space hopper thing I call sarpy know what we'll take that too and of course so then it was it it United Artists of course then when I went to get American feet I did it Universal they said well okay we're gonna make out a three-picture deal we've make more but we don't think that legally we can get away with more so we'll just take three pictures from you the seven years of your life so he said I don't understand what you're talking about but I think you're talented so whatever you want to do is fine with me now how many heard that you know I trust the talent not the script I mean it's just those were the days and they weren't really but there was a there was a little thin thread of rationality that came through the film industry in the 70s really I mean it was amazing and everybody talks about how it happened but mostly was because all the moguls had died off the corporation's bought the studios and everything was in chaos so you had odd people being hired to run things and they didn't know about power yet and all that kind of stuff because they weren't getting stock options so to make a long story even longer that was the context in which I actually started writing the film it took me two years of research with basically mythology and a lot of things I had taken a lot of mythology when I was in college because of my major so I've distilled it down or if I wrote a giant script the original film was basically subtitled the tragedy of Darth Vader and in the beginning Darth Vader comes in and kills everybody and in the middle you find out that this kid is actually the son of Darth Vader and in the end the son validates vindicates and allows the father to be so that was the movie but of course I wrote it was like 250 pages and I said well that's not gonna happen so even before I turned it into Fox he say did you ever show them that I never showed him that I knew enough to know look the budget the budget of the film at that point was three million dollars so I knew that that wasn't gonna happen so I said well I'll take the first act and I'll make that into a movie but I swear I will make the other two movies I'll make this whole thing I accidentally opened a hornet's nest but I am actually gonna see it all the way through the end I mean I was sitting there writing this with one movie that made you know less than three or four hundred thousand dollars another movie that was so bad that it wouldn't even be released and so I was struggling away writing the screenplay because I was getting paid more actually to write that screenplay that I got to do everything on American feet so how did they say when you gave him the script then you had your first date I gave him the script lad he said look I don't understand this dog's flying spaceships what are you talking about this is ridiculous but you're a really talented guy go ahead and make it and then they treated no notes none of the no no DNA I got very lucky I came out of film school Frances and I moved to San Francisco we never really got involved with the studio system at all Frances had been involved in he said this is enough after Finian's Rainbow God I'm never doing this again and then after I sort of sunk American zoetrope you had to come back and work for Paramount to do Godfather which was really to be honest with you one of the most horrific experiences that I've ever seen a director go through in terms of you know people trying to you know getting kicked off the picture all the time studio executives that were just involved in everything he had to fight every single day you know they hated the cast they hated the music they had it the story that everything he did they hated and so he was fighting this huge uphill battle and it took a while while he did that I wrote star wars and then when I turned it in they said they didn't understand that but and I said well you know the budget we started putting it together and figuring out where we ran how we were gonna do it everything the one thing they were worried about was the fact that this involved a lot of special effects and there were no special effects departments at the studios anymore there were some matte painters there were exactly three matte painters in the world and that was and they were all you know in their sixties and seventies and Kubrick had built his own unit which then turned around and disbanded when he finished and Doug Trumbull was one of those guys and he started a little production company that did a lot of commercials and did you know and he was trying to get his own little science fiction movie off but it just wasn't any special effect so this video is saying well how are you gonna make this when I did thx this dude asked me the same thing well there's something science fiction film how in the world you're gonna do this you know what are you gonna what Keeks so I came up with a thing called rotary cam photography I said I'm gonna do it with rotary cam photography it's very new it's gonna be special they look great so I took that idea and I told Fox I said don't worry I didn't know what there was Behrman I started out in film school as an animator so I knew a little bit about this stuff and and I said you know we'll we'll do it so I took all of the the money I'd made out of Marin graffiti and I invested in a special effects company ILM and hired all these guys one was a cameraman that worked for Doug home Trumbull John Dykstra and a bunch of guys that did commercials and did none of them endeavor really made a feature film before they you know and none of it actually done real special effects except on commercials so you had to do that with you earn money outside the budget of the film oh well I used it to start the company right and then obviously ended up building it back to them Francis taught me how to do that absolutely he said the first thing you do when you start a movies you buy a camera and then you rent the camera back to the company now unfortunately all the cameramen have learned this trick and the sound men and practically everybody have learned it so you're gonna find when you hire somebody they're gonna be they're gonna be buying it you're gonna be running all the equipment from the people who are making more money running you the equipment that they get paid so in terms of how you explain to them what you were gonna do one of the things I wanted to ask you about is one of the techniques has become extremely common for directors showing the city what the film is gonna be is conceptual artwork paintings that kind of thing yes my understanding is you know when you found Ralph McQuarrie and you had him do this paintings I mean I don't think any one other when they done that before so my question would be well yeah I it had been done before I've done in the studio's they had done it like I've gone with the wind and stuff uh-huh William Cameron Menzies had done paintings of what the special effects shots were gonna look like and what the grandeur the big scenes he painted the big scene so it was a it wasn't unheard of but again I had to do it out of my own money I mean you know I didn't paid that much and I had a little company that basically just represented me I develop my own little mixing room I had my own editing room I had you know but it all San Francisco I was all real funky we did show them that the one thing that we did break through on that film is I had all these really big action set pieces I couldn't really explain what I wanted to do with storyboards I didn't really believe in the storyboards because for birds are great if you're doing map paintings they're static and you'd say well this was the shot and sometimes in animation back in those days you know it was just everything was on a proscenium so you just did it you painted the picture and say that's what it is you didn't have to do extremely complex things so what I did on star wars that I took a lot of old documentary films of air battles from or - and I cut them into the sequences of this is gonna be the trench run this is gonna be the attack on the fully shows darkness before I shot any before I even finish the script Wow when I started film school I was a dyed-in-the-wool cinematic purist I said and I went to school and they you know I had to go into screenwriting and I got into huge fights in the middle classes with the screen with the screenwriting professor saying you know character is [ __ ] you know story doesn't mean anything this that's for the that's for the theater that's for that's for books that's not for cinema cinema is the art of the moving image you know you are Visser rating this whole art form whether you're kind of reproducing other mediums and other art forms so I was really not a real fan of writing which is ironic that mostly what I do now is write but so when it got to that part of it I knew that I couldn't write what I wanted and I knew still drawings couldn't tell me what I wanted because what I had to do it in terms of motion and I knew that the secret behind what I was doing in terms of visual effects by that time the one thing I grabbed on to was that as opposed to Stanley Kubrick who has got you know 1/2 minute shops in his film but the thing just sits there and the but you can see every detail on that and it's perfect so I said I'm not gonna do that what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do shots that are only about you know 12 frames 32 frames at the most and it'll not move by so fast that you won't see the map lines and you won't see you know how its put together it'll just be a razzle dazzle of visual fantasy what it means because one of my eye I asked my my boys you know have any questions even one of the questions was how do you do the spaceships flying and and I thought well it's the obvious question off you watched on was because for those of you seeing it for the first time as kids it was completely mind-blowing and exciting and I guess did you have any films you could point to other than 2001 was extremely slow through the frame mind well you you know you know and I was a big Kurosawa fan so I would say seven seven samurai had actually more of an effect even though the idea of telling the story from the point of view of the lowliest servants came from hidden fortress but the actual there were there were you know bullet there were a lot of movies from that period that was a movie that was at that period that was very exciting very fast you know very and so I had become obsessed with a kinetic nature of film and most of my student films were very kinetic they're a lot of very fast cutting and that's one thing and I went on really to be an editor and I started working as an editor so my whole focus was on entity and so I figured I just trick everybody and we would make this really fast stuff and if a shot didn't work or something we just put a big boom there and big blink their eyes they would go away you know it's you could take it which is what basically I did me and then we had to in order to do that we also had we had no technology to do what we were doing and so I started as an animator I really started the camera ones that I'm wearing went to film school I started as an animator and we came up with this idea basically taking an animation stand and hooking it on rails and on a camera and putting a model there and using it just like a animation standard but an animation stand relies on precision specifically machined parts so that everything is exactly the same so it really became a thing of of metalworking and you know making a precision thing that would move down a track and we could repeat the same move every time and also link it to computers which was the first time we sort of they were just starting to put computers on animation cameras and so we just said well we'll just do it that way and without that we could never have done it because it literally was old it was like it was like 800 very very short shops right and it was basically a model on a stick with the camera moving past it and then doing the same thing on the starfield and then matching those things together so even though it's really simple now it was a big head scratcher at the time yeah and everything depended on it you know I was I mean there's you know the inevitable reality you get it doesn't happen that much anymore we says some people don't use rlm but some people you come and I had this horrendous unit see what was it like anything well it was unbelievably miserable which americorps feat was unbelievably miserable thx was fun but as soon as I you know I started getting bigger and I started pushing the envelope I started getting myself into the real trouble when you're in real trouble then you're in miserable lonely even though the studio's never bothered me I never had a problem until I showed the film this video said we gotta we gotta cut five minutes out I said we'll we'll get to that yeah but on this one it was it was literally that I came back from shooting having a miserable experience and ILM hadn't shot one shot they had spent half the budget it was six months later we only had six months to go before the film was gonna be released we had 800 shots yeah and there wasn't one that I had accepted Wow and I was stopped tense I thought this was not going to work right I had walked out and stood up and realize that I'd painted myself in a corner I didn't know what to do so all the island stuff got put into place as you were going into production or even before yeah as soon as I started writing and as soon as they said okay we you know they'd accepted the script so as soon as I started pre-production that I started ILM so they were working and but we had to build the whole thing and we had to build the cameras from scratch and we had to build you know and I'd hired a couple of those guys before that just to start figuring out the technology how we would do it and I had Ralph McQuarrie doing drawings of what I wanted everything to look like because again you can't read the script and understand what I'm talking about it has to be a picture because just I mean what does a wookie look like what does a spate what are the spaceship look like yeah all that stuff had to be figured out ahead of time there was a lot of design work that had to be done but also I deliberately wrote Star Wars to be within the realm of technology and within the realm of how I could make it read a reasonable price so I was pushing the envelope with one thing which is how to make spaceships move fast in the space and pan with them because I was really obsessed with the kinetic energy of a pan I said if I could just put a pan in a spaceship it'll really make this thing jump but obviously it was at that point impossible so that I had to accomplish but everything else I knew I could do and it's designed for no costumes for no costume changes but there's a lot of tricks in that movie that are done you know so I so you know to cut costs way down and I wrote it with all that stuff in mind so there was like oh yeah we can you know I'll see you on costume for doing this and really doesn't play like a movie that somebody's decided to shrink when you really look at the thing it really is it takes place in the desert and it takes place on a Death Star that's it you know and it's like real easy well then his way okay here's my question if given that pragmatism given that okay now we're gonna get make this film whether you've got a desert you're a desktop why did you start in the desert like why did you the first time I think c-3po please cost you mom you're in the middle of 110 degree heat into this year and we just seems a very very difficult way to stop whatever you ever thought of a movie director that has enough common sense to get out of the rain or the heat all crews know that my movie is everything you know eyes are dying out well the things I wanted to do I wanted it to be shot on location I put it I tried to find an environment that I could make a look Spacey and unreal and I decided a desert would be a good thing that I could actually shoot on location so it looked realistic because I was very keen to have it have a patina of immaculate realism which is which is something I learned from from Kurosawa which was to say even though this is a ridiculous story and it's obviously has no reality in it whatsoever I wanted to make a world that looked like it had been lived in that had logic on every level that every cultural artifact every set piece had a reason for being there wasn't just sort of willy-nilly and there you know obviously everything had to be designed and of course a lot of it in that one was sort of designed around things we could get our hold of and find so a lot of those are a lot of found design you know we were using there you know things like egg beaters for ray guns and stuff like that so there's a lot of cheating going on in that movie I mean there's a lot of texture there's a little me remember that when the the droids are first in the in the sand core and you see that dark greasy sort of worn away stuff a lot of filmmakers I mean really Scott I've read about you know him talking about how much he was influenced by that one of them went to do alien and Blade Runner just the idea and it seems in retrospect a simple idea that things were aged in science fiction as opposed to being perfect but I don't think it had ever been done before I don't I'm pretty sure it hadn't it was pretty shocking when I did it because you know everybody thought space you know science fiction it's all clean and perfect you know but even when I did thx it was used and dirty and there was water running marks down the walls and all kinds of details robots it didn't work you know for whatever reason my relationship with technology has always been a little bit and I started out building cars so it all comes from the from the point of view of working in a in a car sir you know in a garage where you work on broken cars can I tell my son how lucky is now but in those days when you drove you know to the next town if I lived in desktop I drove to San Francisco there was a pretty much like a 25% chance that you wouldn't make it you know that the car would break somewhere along the line or you get a flat tire but you just basically wouldn't get there and you'd have to stop and call three a or fix the car yourself or do what everybody now you know cars are almost invincible you know but in those days cars were sort of like computers aren't they well you know they don't always do what you're tell them to do so did the whole the did the crew you know John Barry the designer noise did they embrace that philosophy did you have to convince them was the John Barry and the art department John Barry was a really fantastic art director a really really great guy he put together in our department prop guys in the whole little group they were completely a hundred percent on my side and very very supportive of me in every possible way and no matter how wacky I got they would go along with it and they came up with other things you know they actually contributed a lot by bringing things in even because again it's one of those things where the design work in Star Wars and especially as it goes on to all the other ones is huge and it's beyond anything that anybody can imagine it takes at least three years and seven or eight guys now I mean I have a permanent the design department just does nothing but design stuff we had to do that much work and then while I was writing the script I had the designers working designing stuff even when I was that wasn't the first people I put on it was I like the broth McCrory and then we put on more guys Joe Johnston and people and I had designers working the whole time I was writing the script for those two years and that's why you'd never see it you know it's like yeah maybe Lord of the Rings but we kind of know there's forests and whatnot but it's very there very few movies that involves the level of design work that's something like Star Wars because there's nothing in it to relate to you know you can't say well we'll work on these three little things and this is a car and this is a building and this is a boat well you know what those are you know this is a fork you know what that is yeah and you can just sort of figure it out but with this everything was open the culture of her opened the people these aliens were opening that was a very hard part of it but that that film is as much visually done and there was much visual work as written work well and even though you know you're saying the very few costume changes and that was restrained through the costumes are extraordinary in the film in Darth Vader the storm truth isn't there are so many iconic things that how much of that came from original the original conceptual work we read the script how much was John Marlowe you know even in normal pre-production phase when you're there sort of trying to do fittings and things what usually happens in this case and it happened in that case too is I work with the designers and we just design what we want or what I wore now just go don't make it like this make it like combine those two things like I said I get a design that I like and so that's where the designs basically came from then I turn it over to the costume designer which is something like John tomorrow okay I think okay now make these figure out how to do that and in that case it was make it for no money yeah so it was very hard and we were constantly sort of you know finessing things to make it look like what the drawings were how did they make this to improve the costumes are they molded plastic they're molded platinum that was again John Berry who and again some of the stuff is like really new you know molding plastic you know was like a new thing vacu for me really getting a vacuform machine was like a big deal yeah we got like the only one in England came from some I know what factory but we just grabbed it and we also did another kind of vacuum forming which in John designed the sets I mean Ralph kind of designed what they look like but then John took those designs and made him into panels so he made four by eight panels which is kind of like sheets of plywood and they were you know they were made out of some kind of fiberglass mold thing that he they had created but they and he but they were vacuum formed and you know they had all this work on him you know deaths and things because they were about that thick but there was just basically a piece of molded fiberglass really and he built all the stuff out of this stuff it was just he just made thousands of them and they build a set they just saying okay they did put up a little wood frame and they lay all this stuff to it and we build a set it was amazing but you really had to think that way even though even the spaceships were done that way you know the opening spaceship is all vacuum formed you know it's all there it's it was a whole different approach to building sets yeah and that was one of the ways we got it done you know really was by figured out new ways to accomplish things and new you're just operational things that we could get away with so we didn't have to spend and the whole thing depended on as I said look I'm gonna pan around so I'll never see this stuff so just you know build it to stand up for a minute and we'll shoot it and if it doesn't look that good we'll just throw it on a focus was definitely that the irony of that movie was it was designed to be seen once on a big screen and that way I could get away with everything I had no idea there would be things called DVDs I had no idea there would be you know I don't think he's even DVDs I mean I I saw stones and movies at 12 times yeah and I would there was nothing unusual I mean when it came out every birthday party for two years you all went to see Star Wars you know that was just every literally but I'll say what there was one thing which is also part of it was that I made it a very rich environment very rich frame there's a lot of detail and a frame a lot of busy stuff and by doing that one it's distracting but I did it because I said look I'm going to assume that we've been here this is just like you know shooting Batman no you know what new ok fine cars whatever we've been there before we know what doesn't like so I didn't stop for anything and I didn't hold on my map paintings right you know I I said you know Death Star we've all seen dust where there's this door don't have to linger on it yeah we would just as if it were the Empire State Building okay but they used to you know map painting cost so much money that it's inevitable the studio and the director everybody wants to put it on there for a long time and I said no no and everybody went crazy did you put all that money in a matte painting and you literally let it be on there for 32 seconds I mean 32 frames that's crazy but it works because that's where a lot of people went back and because I couldn't get it all the first time everything my gosh that's so fast the pace is so fast you can't you know if you look at that movie well you're gonna see it tonight it's not fast in those days it was so fast and it was fast because you didn't know what anything was right so you were busy trying to take it all in again and you didn't have time to do it now you do know what all that stuff is you're very familiar whether you grew up with it just like the Empire State Building so the movie is kind of normal kind of I wouldn't say lackadaisical pace but it's a normal pace of a movie what I think it's about me because movies have changed since it I mean I think editing rhythms have been greatly influenced by and people having more faith in audiences being able to take in things very quickly with quickcast but I wanted to just just go back to costumes for a second because one other thing one of the other questions I was asked by my voice to ask is is is darth vader half human half robot and that made me think about okay the first time you come to see Star Wars in 1977 how is it that we know that see three pairs of robot stormtrooper is a human being a Darth Vader is whatever he is they're all you know actors performers in you know molded small and the film never in any way sort of attempts to explain anything somebody's a robot somebody's not so so how is it we we know that how did you have the confidence that audiences would just picking it up again part of this also comes from Kurosawa which is when I first saw Seven Samurai was in film school I you know I come from a very small town in the middle of California I'd never seen a Japanese film for and from for that matter and I wasn't interested in movies you know I got like sort of fell into film when I got to film school I didn't even know there was such a thing as going to college so we're gonna make movies when they seem like completely absurd to me but the idea of being an anthropology professor I was interested in thing but I was more wanted to go to art center and be in the illustrator or something but this is like combined all that stuff I love photography so I said okay I'll do that the Kurosawa thing is I saw Kurosawa zones there for the first time my friend John Milius was a Kurosawa freak and he would and he showed me a lot of Kurosawa films and I saw Seven Samurai and that was a first feudal Japanese film I'd ever seen I had no idea what I was looking at I mean it was completely incomprehensible to me I just had never seen that period of Japan in my life I missed that and so I was soon saying what in the hell is going on why are they doing they're talking about all kinds of things I would didn't have any idea what they were talking I mean it was in Japanese but at the same time even in English it didn't make any sense you know because there were all these you know traditions and things that I just you know and I said this is so fascinating just on the watching a strange culture that you'd have no idea what it is just the fascinating part of it which is probably anthropology part which does go strange places and watch people you know indigenous people things you know what isn't why so I decided to take that concept and put it in the Star Wars I said hey I could watch something somewhere I didn't know what I was looking at but I enjoyed it mmm even though I didn't know what they were doing so I said this you know and I will give enough clues to you know make it obvious you know if you saw the whole three movies all put together in one piece and it was only two hours a lot of that would make sense because everything would be revealed but because it took nine years to do it when people first saw Darth Vader they didn't know what he was they is he a monster is there a guy in there as a robot as a they didn't know who he was you've just the villain he was the villain and he was such an iconic doing what you can you know at the time I didn't have any idea that any of this would work or that it would have the impact that it did you just don't think that way you just do your best job and it comes out and that more than anything in the end maybe do the first three movies because I have this whole backstory because I wanted to start with Episode four because I wanted to be like a serum you come in haven't seen the first again same idea you're coming in it's like a television surgery all right 24 you know I don't know what happened before I know what's going on who are these people and you know if you don't come in in the first episode you come in in the fifth episode right sorry what did that kind of throw you right into the middle of something you don't have any idea about but then later on I realize that the tragedy got lost in that and if I told the backstory which was obviously written before the actual film that it would make more sense yeah you thought I was a nice little kid and he actually what is the nice guy and he would turn bad and shut the whole film in England the stage that what led you to England I said well I would like to make one big movie you know you'd shoot on the sound stages like a real movie because I was a guy shot on the street for you know a few hundred thousand dollars and that's where I was and and I said well I'm gonna go back to doing these abstract art films but before I do that I'd like to I sort of got myself wrapped into this you know regular traditional movie thing I want a scholarship to go work at Warner Brothers for six months you as an observer there's a a little look here but I'll just look I shouldn't see what it's all about this Hollywood thing and then I got mixed up with Francis and then we fled Hollywood and I was kind of on the fringes but I was kind of making you know regular movies I want to make one that has you know big cameras and sound stages and awesome but I live in San Francisco we didn't have any of the you know there's a huge infrastructure you need to do that well the beaver down here the studio's mostly are filled with television so it's very hard to get you know I needed like 11 sound stages and it's like they didn't have 11 stones they've just done here despair they were all television but London had great talent they had great actors they had you know a plaster shop you know what you don't see everywhere they had good carpenters they had you know do a film like this is really hard so you needed to all the craftsmen and England other than Hollywood it was the only place that really had you know first-rate craftsmen and their industry was basically falling apart and so the studios were sort of crumbling and they were selling him and they sold L Street which is where I was and they turned it over from having a staff to having independent guys come in and work and as a result I was able to get you know a great deal save a lot of money and basic gets always been my philosophy is just to simply go anywhere in the world I can go where and get the lowest price because my first three films first two were under a million and this one was you know we did the budget came out to 13 million laddy said the board will never approve this we can't do it it has to be under 10 I said I can't do it under 10 this is not a negotiated thing this is like whatever everybody come through you know this is actually what it's cost you know this was actually the the price you know we worked it out but they're so used to producers and people sort of ripping them off they don't believe that there's actually a real thing behind it there's actually that guy gets paid that much an hour he's got to work that many days and that's what it's gonna cost you and I can't make it any less we gave a budget for nine million nine ninety nine thousand dollars and ninety nine cents and I said I don't think it would come in at that but we did anyway I came up 14 million dollars you know because that was what it actually cost to do it right working in England I mean one of things you know I made films in England and my experience there was very much the cruise when you're starting out there they're very suspicious they're very simply okay let's let's see what you can do to see who you are there's not a sort of there's that there's a bit of that wait and see you know what have you gone kind of thing for it for a director over there and I would imagine going there with these crazy costumes and this crazy set so would have been a lot of skepticism frankly well it was I have one question for you did you have an English accent when you went over there no I picked up very quickly because yes you sound like an Englishman of course they wouldn't say oh yeah we were you dressed like an Englishman I dress sound like English wit it doesn't help at all oh it's about what had he done before what do you know well there's a very sort of like okay you can imagine what I went through I had long hair I had a beard I was 29 years old and their industry was sort of crumbling a little bit and I walked in there and I had this really crazy script which they all you know the entire crew was 100% against me except for the art department they were the only guys that stuck by me through the whole movie and it was horrible horrible they in those days they you worked really from 8:00 in the morning until 5:30 at night and that was it you could not unless the crew voted you could not work past 5:30 and but you couldn't take what they call the quarter so if you were in the middle of a shot you could actually finish that shot they give you 15 minutes in the quarter to finish the trial and then if you didn't get it done they give you another 15 minutes whatever but they would know I was our studio they would basically fire and they'd shut off it was run on generators and that was the end of it and you you had to get the crew to vote well the ad was Whitley against me the cameraman was away against me and when and every time they would say no no matter how the vote went they'd always look to them first they'd say no and then everybody would vote no except the art department vote yes but of course they were outnumbered so I had to get it done at 5:30 every night it was you know and that was the least of it but that was you know they just had no idea and they were very you know they they basically thought the film was stupid which you know if you read it sort of leaves kind of stupid and you know and we had this big seven-foot thing walking around the set and you know it guys killing green guys and long snouts and you know they thought it was a very bad version of Doctor Who so when you go to elevator without James old Joey Jones's voice so you've got I just a house doing the dog through hell well be not the same in fact that was one of those things where ya know he had a very north north northern England accent which is almost caught me it's just you know very very thick and ridiculous form and he you know I I hired him cuz it's big I just needed a big guy and he was in Clockwork Orange was just giant guy and I said what on earth doesn't work I needed somebody was like you know close to like six foot seven eight nine there and I'd always gonna replace this void I'm gonna replace Anthony Daniels voice I all the people that you didn't see I was gonna replace their voices over here with Americans look is again that was making an American film in England and most of my actor for English right so except for the key people that brought over and of course the the union wouldn't let them come in the country and if we did get him reasonably easily easy on that movie but when I go back to do Empire they wouldn't let him in at all I said this is a sequel these are people are in the other movie very hard they are there's only three American actors coming in on a movie with 250 actors you're gonna have not have this movie come here because of that well it got done and so then you go back to the States and you see your won no shots from Ireland are three years were and half the budget presumably you panic a little bit more try not to well it was worse than that I had shot the film at the very end the only thing lad he ever did do was at the very end of shooting I was two weeks over schedule and I was going to go another two weeks to finish it cuz I had to finish the whole beginning of the movie you know when they come into the ship and Darth Vader comes in does all that stuff and I had to shoot that and with our two three people at home and he said look you gotta finish it you gotta finish it in one week and I said but the whole they never even finished building the set yet he said well you've got to finish it in one way I said you know I'll I can do it but it means everybody goes on over time to build the set and to shoot it and I'm gonna have to have five crews I mean five four second units mmm and that's gonna cost you twice as much as you just give me the extra two weeks and you said I don't care you got to get it done and this is where the reality of making movies comes in which is later on literally after I finished the movie and I started talking to members of the board and stuff that I realized that the board had given him an ultimatum that he'd have to go and face the board this was in with Fox he was the head of the studio but he basically this the the board of directors was making every single decision like I say were stockbrokers some people didn't know anything about movies and they had given multiple you and he was not gonna cut he said you will not come back here to the board meeting which is on Monday I was gonna be finished on Friday he said you will not come back here and I have that movie still shooting so he said look just get it done so you know but then I was cutting it together I had a editor who I respected he done some great movies he'd worked for Richard Lester who I admired and and I was an editor and I was looking at this I'm doing such a terrible job the stuff is not going together it's not working that's terrible what in the world is going on here this is just it's bad so I went in on a weekend and I started recutting the movie myself and I started looking I said well and I could see that every cut I was making was like 12 frames off every a lot of the angles and a lot of the performances were off and I said well this isn't gonna work so I fired the editor and this was about a halfway through shooting I said well I'll just finish it when I get back it's like I'm not gonna be able to hire another editor now and I only got another you know six weeks and let's just get it over with came back here I had no editors I had to read I immediately hired two assistants to put the whole movie back together in dailies just completely take the old work put the trim nothing to add nothing so I came back I had dailies I had no special effects it was August the movie was coming out in May it sent me to the hospital but so did you I mean we don't I let me went down there you started going down twice a week and you know I'd spend three days up north two days in LA flying back and forth all the times that was when the airline was PSA which I don't have a hard time they had you know PSA was an airline that flew like every half hour it was like a train you know it was literally you see the poster stay still if you do a period film put a PSA poster they had girls and miniskirts but it was 1395 to get from San Francisco to LA both of these now I I read somewhere I don't know whether this is true that ultimately with the visual effects as they went in even at the end of everything you were somewhat this fast but dissatisfied so they're just curious about it because to those of us watching it you know and as everyone will see in a minute you know tonight it's unbelievably mind-blowing how great the visual effects are well I told you actually in the end I fooled myself because now that you can see it frame by frame and everybody you know you can go on the internet and they'll be a whole website better devoted to one frame of the movie which has been analyzed six ways from Sunday and I realized that it wasn't as bad as I thought it was and when I went you know to do the special edition which was we were going to re-release the picture and I said we discovered there was no print though we did a three strip in order to preserve it they had talked it never bothered to strike a print cuz it was fifty thousand dollars so they never looked at it so when I went to retrieve it from the salt lines the cyan was completely out of sync with everything else there was nothing to about it was worthless so I had to go to Poland Czechoslovakia and stuff and start putting things together and then making a digital master you know that where I could clean up the the dirt and the grain and all that stuff and then and I wanted to put back some of the things that I'd never been able by that time by Star Wars I had done back to American I mean I've gone back to thx the studio cut five minutes out of the movie I said I'm putting that but I went to them when I said I want my five minutes back of course this was before VHS but I just I want the film to be the way I originally intended the film's gamer THX it really didn't make any difference I mean it's like so abstract but what difference is five minutes gonna be but American Graffiti there were some very sort of to me pivotal scenes that they cut out and just for the same reason that they cut out thx well we can do it so we will and I was furious you know of course nobody can come to your aid in a situation like that you're basically screwed and I was extremely pissed and bitter and so but when I start wars I came back and I said I want my five minutes back so I got my five minutes back in 3d so then when I was moving along to by this time I'd already done Empire stuff this was sort of between the before I decided to even do prequels mm-hmm and I was looking at the movies and said you know I needs to be kind we need to get a good print so it looked and realized there was no good print available anywhere so to preserve the film for the possibility of a reissue we started working in they said well I want to put the Jabba the Hutt scene back in because you know I basically ILM you know we had to create the Jabba the Hutt part and we just had a guy in a furry vest because at that point thought he was gonna get furry Jabba the Hutt but you know was just too much for him I mean they did no way they were gonna get that finished and you know various other little deal Matt the Matt lines I want to get rid of all in that lines because hated them at lines and digitally we can get rid of them so I said you know I'm gonna make it the way I wanted it to be right and the way I intended it to be so that's you know in the end you want the movie to be the way you intended it when I intended it I had this vision of what I wanted well from that day on it just got compromised right you know in the script and you know it's worst thing about being a writer is you can't blame anybody you're the screw-up once you get starving to shoot things that wants the camera and there was a thing and then I think a studio and you can sort of blame things on other people because you're under such a dress for the weather screw you up you know and I wrote this giant script and I couldn't you know I was having all kinds of issues and problems developing them and when I made it and with IOM and with everything else you know by the time I got done I said this is you know like 25% of what I wanted well let me ask this and because we have to wrap up now there's so many things I wanted to talk about on that time like sound and all the ground breaking about you know there's just so many but people need to see the film I don't know yeah oh yeah and I want to I want to ask one one last thing which is at what point then when you edited the film with him at what point what screening wasn't where you finally realized this was going to work this was going to be something special I never realized it really no I finished it and you know I was again I was completely exhausted three years of my life blood you know and everything was going wrong all the time and everything was sort of half of what I was hoping it would be you know it's like you finished the day you said [ __ ] that didn't go well you know and then you cut it together and you say well maybe we can save it by doing this and maybe we can do so it was all like that and I showed it a early version which still had all of the the you know World War two footage in it and everything which I showed to a bunch of my friends which I on all my movies I invited it to come and see it I mean just you know a little springing at the house and you know there was like 12 of them and you know some of them were very vocal like oh my god what have you done some of them were by their personality is in the kind of movies they're all directors and writers so you know some of them that are a little hard was saying what's all this for [ __ ] you can't make a movie like that forgot to think this is ridiculous and but he helped me you know I had a roll up at the head that was about twice as long as it like today you're never gonna make that let me help you write a new role up here so even though he was you know he makes horror movies so he he being Rhonda Tom Brian DePalma rod you know if you don't get a name name if you don't cut somebody open have blood splattering everywhere he just thinks it's on wussy film and buddy's a good friend and he really wanted it to work the only one that believed in it was Steve Spielberg he's the only one who write he's the one that said this is gonna be the biggest film in the history of movies and everybody looked at him like no I believe it I tell you and they all thought he was completely nuts and I did too actually so I didn't believe anything he said so in those days stereo and menorah or you had to do two separate mixes so I had done the stereo mix which was what it was first released on and then I was busy doing the the monaural mix I was just finishing it the night the movie came out and so I was and I was working at night over a cold one and I was you know mixing at night then ladee called me and said hey 10 o'clock at night a little bit accordingly it's a hit my god we sold out in every theater this is fantastic I said laddie you guys have done Planet of the Apes you know that's but that science fiction movies always do well in the first weekend they're all the fans everything L do it well you know it's not a hit until the fourth week you call me on the fourth week and tell me it's working [Laughter] excellent I'm sure he did we're gonna have to leave that George Lucas thank you very much for coming [Applause]

Channel: Nismaland

Views: 744,464

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Id: 7VRYKlnEP7o

Length: 57min 57sec (3477 seconds)

Published: Mon May 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/mind-360]

Nice share. keep posting such videos.

[u/renf]

.