George Lucas: Project Happiness Interview

so last year we were approached by Randi and she asked us if we were if we'd be interested in creating a curriculum for kids based on the dalai lama's book ethics for the new millennium we were interested in little did we know that we'd end up in India and March spending time with students from Nigeria and from Tibet and meeting His Holiness the Dalai Lama a lot of what what we've been doing is sending our experiences back via a blog that we've been keeping and ultimately we hope to end up with a guidebook to have our for happiness to help students find their own definition and discover happiness lasting happiness and also a some kind of web component that's interactive and and compelling to students so we can jump right into questions I think the coming-of-age archetype I've noticed is really prevalent in your films I was wondering why is this important to you well one of the greatest decisions you can make in your life is what you're gonna do with it and obviously coming of age at that point where you're transitioning from being taken care of to taking care of yourself and where you are beginning to become responsible for your own actions so it's a crucial period and it's a period where if you make a mistake it's gonna haunt you for the rest of your life hi I'm Luke and Atmel Madonna we put on a production of the Ramona every year and we've been doing it for about 30 years now so it's quite a long time and when we're on stage we can kind of put our own spirituality into the characters because they're so archetypical and I was just wondering how did you put your own spirituality into your films and even did you put your own spirituality or was it just something that came to you creatively well creatively or spiritually or intellectually you are your work which is it's very hard to separate the artist from what he does no matter who it is or what they're doing because the you know your creativity is so interconnected with your intervene that it reflects you as a person so if you want to know a person of filmmakers or even in any kind of artist really but especially a filmmaker you can sort of understand a lot about them just by looking at their work and you can understand what kind of a person they are thank you hi I'm Madeleine in project happiness we are explain the difference between short and long term happiness what do you think other things which most contribute to long-term happiness well my theory of short and long-term happiness is a broader definition which has to do with pleasure and joy happiness is the result of a combination of pleasure and joy short term happiness which you could call pleasure and then long term happiness which you can call joy short term happiness which is pleasure is a self-centered it's all about getting something it's all about getting pleasure and so it's by its very nature short term and it's by its very nature it's additive which means that if you do something once say you buy a car the first car you buy is fantastic it's amazing experience you get this thing the second time you buy a car it's not so amazing so you have to buy a bigger fancier car in order to get the same experiences when you bought your first car and it just keeps going down until you have you know six yachts 12 airplanes and 50 cars and even then that experience with those will not equal the first experience you had so trying to extend pleasure into a long-term relationship thing won't work it just can't pleasure cannot by its very nature be long-term short-term and you know it's a little spike that goes to your life and it makes things better there's nothing wrong with pleasure good meal you know whatever but joy is is different joy once you have joy at last forever it doesn't hit as high on the scale as pleasure does pleasurable way up there but only for a few minutes or maybe for a few hours or maybe for a few days but joy goes on a lower scale but it will last forever and joy is as the opposite of the passion of the self-centeredness of pleasure is compassion giving helping other people the issue of joy really has to do with taking care of other people and doing things for other present for yourself whereas joy is all for yourself and not for others and that's and those two things combined make happiness which is also a mental state which you can either decide you're happier or not so but the biological reality is that you have these two components pleasure and joy hi Nina in the filmmaking industry you're truly a revolutionary your films have young people rebelling against Authority and asserting their independence I was wondering when we would sure and get older and successful in life how do we maintain a healthy spirit of newness and avoid becoming the things that we struggled against that's a big challenge you you are fighting upstream when you're trying to you know break away and when you're trying to you know create your own identity and when you're trying to do two things no matter how you do it eventually if you're successful you find yourself part of the establishment and you find yourself becoming the very thing you've been fighting against then your real challenge is to keep your ideals so that you can actually change the system once you're successful like you've been trying to do as you work your way up through the system but you'll find that generally speaking when you're young and idealistic and you see wrongs and you see things that don't work and you see endless stupidity which will come across it is a good and a good thing to fight it and you'll find if you find it you do good at what you do and if you do good at what you do then you'll become successful I guess probably the oddest thing you would find is that when I got involved in film I didn't know anything about film and I just got involved and I fell in love with it I loved it and I wanted to create stories and do things and I never had any intention really of becoming successful or making money or doing anything I wanted to make movies so all my decisions were about making my movies not becoming successful I became successful primarily because I wanted to control the content of my movies and I didn't want other people who tell me how to make movies or to have to sort of work very hard on somebody else's message so everything I did I did really to gain control over my work but as a result of that my ideas about what constituted a good movie and the messages that I wanted to send out there and those sort of things became very popular and there's a little I became very successful but if I had gone down another road and just been a work-for-hire at a studio I probably would never been successful you know if I'd had just sold out and there was points in my life where I was absolute broke in debt offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to work in Hollywood and refused to do it so having come back from India and working on this curriculum we feel like we have a story to tell and we have a message to share and throughout your career we've noticed that you've had some stories to tell and some messages to share and I'm curious what obstacles you've run into and how you've overcome overcome them well I've run into hundreds and hundreds of obstacles and you overcome them with just sheer persistence and belief in yourself it's not much else to it you work hard to be as capable as possible you work to exploit your talent that we all have part of that is knowing yourself and knowing what you're talented at I was very very very fortunate in that I discovered my talent by happenstance I was interested in being an illustrator I liked building things I want to race cars for a lot of time I built cars and I wanted to be an architect I wanted to be an anthropologist I studied anthropology for a long time and I liked photography and all those things came together when I discovered that there was actually a place where you could go to make movies and I didn't really intend I was going to the University of Southern California I just sort of picked that major because it was something I was interested in otherwise I was going to go to San Francisco State and actually become study anthropology and so it was just a flute that got me there when I got there there was nobody in the film schools which was I think one of the reasons I got in because it were extremely small extremely unpopular the people who went there were the sort of antique version of geeks and they were all bearded and strange and weird and so everybody's in Wired becoming a cinema major you can't get a job because you can't there was absolutely no way to get a job if you went to film school nobody had ever gone from solo school and actually gotten a job you could be a ticket taker at Disneyland maybe we could do some educational films maybe work for Boeing or somebody like that doing industrial films but you wouldn't get into the actual film business so when I went in and I discovered that I love this I said well okay I don't really want to go into the the theatrical film business anyway I wanna be a doctor venturi filmmaker although there was absolutely no documentary filmmaking in this country there was no place to show documentary films on television or anywhere else so that was a pretty hopeless exercise and but I decided that I loved it so much and everybody there at school they were only about maybe 150 of us loved it that's the only reason over there we love to film that's all we ever wanted to do as it turned out and everything was stacked against us and but I just went ahead we went ahead anyway because we did what we loved we didn't say you know my friend was a business major another friend that was in law school and I my brother-in-law was a doctor they graduated from there they were all you know you're gonna have no future and so we just kept going and it just happened that like everything in life things change all the time and the industry grew it just happened that that particular time when I was graduating from college which was you know in the 60s all the people who were in the film business and it started out in 1910 we're now retiring not just one or two but all of them and they were the ones that held the keys and they were the ones that only left their relatives in and they were the ones so corporations bought up the studio's corporations and said what we have to get people to run these things so we'll hire people that are schooled in this sort of thing and so fortunately we got you know I got sort of roped into it even though that wasn't really where I was intending to go life is fluid we were always given opportunities and choices generally speaking no choice I mean no decision is the worst decision because you always have these decisions to make and you know if you go with your heart and do what you think is right generally we'll take you in the right place because they say then you'll be doing things you love and even if you're doing something that is you know you decide to be a gardener and that's really what you want to do and that's what gives you pleasure and be a gardener even though your father and your friends may say why aren't you a lawyer because you can't be a lawyer you got accepted to law school why you want to be a gardener say well I like this you know you'll find that you'll be much happier because you know when money can't buy you happiness that's been proven a million times it can buy you pleasure but it's not going everybody for happiness and overtime not you can't make enough money to buy you pleasure anymore because you need so much to keep you going so it's better to get in there with joy because it doesn't cost you anything we've read that you grew up Methodist but now that you know you're a Methodist Buddhist is that correct well that's what I tell my kids how you came to identify with the Buddhist religion and also what the similarities are between the two of Methodism men well when I was very young I don't know about 8 or 10 years old somewhere in there I can distinctly remember asking my mother if there's one God why are there so many religions and of course she couldn't answer that and but I think that question has always been very relevant to my life because obviously if there's one God then everybody's worshiping the same God then everybody should be sort of the Word of God if there is a word of God would be the same but if you find there's you know hundreds of different interpretations of everything which obviously means that that in my mind is not really the Word of God that's the word of man and if you go beyond all the religions because they're all similar you know they're all I like to think of them as the blind men and the elephant blind man goes up to the elephant one of the leg and says it's a tree the other does the the ear it says it's a leaf and the other one says it's a trunk and it's a snake and you know but they're all describing the same things what you do is try to look for the unifying factors in all religions and so I became good friends with Joe Campbell who was also you know looking at things from the anthropological said I got involved with him in my first introduction to was in anthropology in a class of mythology and he tries to you know comparative mythology which is to take all the mythology and trying to find those similar factors that fall through and why people part of that is psychology or the way you know I think event politic of Mythology is sort of a a form of psychological archaeology you can go back and see what people were thinking 2,000 3,000 years ago and what they were struggling with in terms of trying to form cultural boundaries in which the form of civilization and try to explain the mysteries that they find around them man has a very unique capacity in his imagination and desire to know everything which is you know God gave us a brain that's our that's our stinger that's our camouflage that's our 800 pounds that we can use to survive with and the thing we need to do is to use that brain and the more we use it the more we learn things the more we test those things than what we you use those things in our daily life and pass them on to the next generation the more we advance and and are able to survive so when you look at the roots of everything and you look at what's kind of psychological and then what's the mystery man has always put the mystery to say you know the way you explain everything as you say well we know this this is I know this came from a tree but I don't know this over here who will just say well that that's God so in the beginning there was a lot of God and not much knowledge and now we have a tiny bit more knowledge and we can go for another two or three million years probably before we even get a hint but whether if there is any intelligent design or anything behind what happened but we won't know for a long time and what we it's very good that we take everything we don't understand put it in that category and it's our job or it's God's will for us to learn these things learn the rules learn the intelligent design that's why we're here if we're you know made in His image then the idea is that we have to learn everything he knows even though it takes millions of years and we're just stumbling along one step at a time in star wars there's a very obvious theme of the apprentice and the mentor and we know that for that movie you're in some sense mentored by Joseph Campbell and in this project we really have an opportunity to pass on what we think is important to other kids our age what ideas do you think it's important that we pass on to children going into adulthood well the core thing to pass on is you know in talking about religion is you know all religions say one thing basically which is love is a secret to the universe which is compassion which is love others take care of others help each other well that's about all it comes down to it it's not very hard it's hard to live by but it's not very hard to know and it's not very hard to realize that every single prophet every single religion always comes down to the same thing you know you can take all the other things out of it because that's ultimately what it all comes down to is compassion quick thing about that was the Jedi liked the idea of the Jedi based on compassion or love or yeah it's based on compassion and I mean again the the force the religion and everything is based on all religions it's not just based on one I mean obviously they're heavy overtones in Eastern religion but you know it's half Methodists a Buddhist and or you know half Christian Judeo Islamic Christian which is one religion Buddha which is in a different category but when you go back that's all the same anyways so it's the the one of the core value is one of the big problems of the struggle and Star Wars is about passion against compassion which is greed against giving and giving up primarily and the whole issue is the flipside of greed is fear of losing so you're either trying to get things or you're afraid of losing the things that you've got and the idea is that to let go of those things in to because once you start down that path of fear then you're trying to protect things and you're willing to fight for things and you're willing to and the Jedi is basic job in the beginning which we never get to see too much of because we start really during the war they were like marshals in the Old West and then they would go from town to town and they would you know help solve the problems and and you know in a lot of cases the marshals and the judges were pretty much the same thing and they would just travel and they would bring justice and solve problems for people which is kind of what Jedi are and they're negotiators they're not fighters only their negotiators sort of like the Mafia they're compassionate negotiators with a very big laser sword which they don't like to use but if somebody you know doesn't want to solve the problem then they'll solve them for them so to speak which it's an incentive for people to solve their problems without fighting okay but that's where all that comes from earlier you said that you can see a lot about a person in their art and I was wondering when you're working in a project like for someone who has a greater vision how do you keep your individuality in your art well I believe in the artist so like right now I'm working on Indiana Jones for West East Gilbert but I'm letting Steve pretty much make his movie I mean I've worked on it for 14 years to develop it and to get it going but then I turn it over to him and we discuss changes and things and we have this relation because he's also producer he also has the same situation and when we have a difference of opinion I'm probably the only outside producer that's ever done films with Steven except on jaws he had outside producers but since he's you know since Indiana Jones he hasn't had outside producers and but when there's a disagreement I just say look Steve do it your way it's your movie and you'll say no no no it's your movie we'll do it your way so with that we're able to reach a compromise and ultimately what we decide is what is best what is the best thing for the movie and it just so happens that we agree we have similar tastes we have similar ideas about what works and what doesn't and there's a little area we don't disagree and you know we kind of bounce against each other and try to reach a compromise and hopefully out of that comes the best possible movie when you're talking about this idea of pleasure and kids it seemed almost like an addiction when you when you get the car and you can't get back to it just maybe and then you would just talk about the dark side how much you start down that path you can't really like go back is that the same way for this addiction to pledge is is it is there is there no way of getting out of that dark side and it's not how do you get back pleasure is addictive a joint could be dicta too I mean it's not you know I mean again it's a biological response you know I put on the pleasure pedal and that's great and I say the choice you have is to be on the pleasure pedal full-bore with joy and toot along at 35 miles an hour but you're going to be able to go around the world a hundred times or go on the nitrous-oxide pleasure pedal and push it as hard as you can and you can go 300 miles an hour but you're only gonna go about a half a mile so if you say oh I'm going to go around the world several times on the pleasure pedal because I'm addicted to that hi I love that well the reality is it's not possible it's just it's it's like saying I'm gonna stop the Sun from setting hey just you can't do that I mean you can pretend to do it and you can you say you once you get that addiction that you're you're on a treadmill you can't win on I mean just like drugs I mean you have to take more you have to keep taking more your functionality goes down and you basically end up losing no matter how you do it you lose and it's the same thing buying cars or eating or any other pleasure if you say I have to keep that pleasure level that high and I'm addicted to it and people are addicted to it people get addicted to it one thing or another there are addiction of gambling or I say eating or you know buying things or you know there's a million things you have pleasurable things you get addicted to that just means that you're lost sight of reality that you don't really lost sight of the fact this this is a nice moment and then I have to learn to let it go but if I'm afraid of letting it go so I can't let it go then you're going to the dark side because your fear is that you can't have any and that has to do with relationships that has to do with your ultimate with your life you sort of say I want to do this and and but you have to get self disciplined enough to be able to say that is not a good idea that is not good for me that isn't gonna work I'll enjoy the pleasure when it comes I'll let it go when it's over and I'll look forward to the next time I'm gonna have some pleasure but if you help somebody the greatest thing you can ever do is have kids there's an interesting reality of why we're here like one of the greatest pleasures is making kids one of the greatest joys or the greatest joy is raising kids you will end kids kids I say children but children teach you compassion it's an amazing thing about life which is they come out there half an hour old and they're already wiser than you are and what they know how to teach you is how to be have unconditional love how to be completely absorbed with another human being and devoted to that human being and the joy you get from that and if you say gee if I did this to everybody if I treated everybody the way I treat my little six week old baby then I would have a lot of joy and you don't have to have babies to do it you could be sister Teresa but you know that's the hard way and you really have to have a lot of strength to be able to do something like that the easy way is to have kids because they don't you don't have a choice you know you have to love them because they're very cute until they turn into teenagers and then this other this other miracle happens where when they're ready to leave and say I'm out of here I want to be independent you know they get all cocky and pimply and overly they're not cute anymore so the parents are just as willing to say okay go on have your life but that's a true miracle I mean how could you do that wear a chain like when their children are their worst like a - about two years old they're breaking away from you emotionally they're really difficult they're really terrible twos but you know that's also the time by some miracle that the cutest they are you know two and three-year-olds are absolutely adorable and when you have kids you'll understand what I'm talking about because you'll want to throttle him but you won't because you know you love them too much and they're too cute but when they turn into teenagers they do the same thing you sort of aren't going to throttle them but you're gonna say well yeah if you really want to go do that go off go to college you know go that's fine I'm not gonna hold you back all right that was a very long answer you you

Channel: Mount Madonna School Values in World Thought

Views: 34,362

Keywords: mms, mount madonna school, watsonville, california, george lucas, star wars, director, interview, education, students, teacher, values, in world thought, ward mailliard, project happiness, randy taran, hhdl, his holiness, dalai lama, happiness, lasting, meaningful, life, films

Id: 2TdGd0MlmvI

Length: 32min 30sec (1950 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 19 2016

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[u/BlindManBaldwin]

I want to thank you for sharing this on Discord last night. I love it so much. George is so peaceful in this.

[u/JediKnightress_]

Joy is different, joy last forever. This is very, very true. Kudos George! 👏👏👏