George Lucas Interview (page: 7 / 9) Creator of "Star Wars"	Print Interview

You've enabled other directors to exploit new technology and have more control over sound and the moving image. What drives you to keep pushing the envelope of technology?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. George Lucas: People look at technology as sometimes an end to things, and it isn't an end in certain cases. In the movie business, the act of creating in the art form of movies, the craft of movies is completely technical, and that's all it is. It's a big technical thing, as opposed to writing a book or something, which is partially technical. I mean, the writing part, using the different pens, the different papers, that was all a big deal. As you went back, the first printing press, binding books, paperback books, cheap books for a lot of people, that's all technology that allows the writer to reach a better audience. And sometimes, in the case of painters as opposed to writers, express themselves more clearly. A lot of painters, Michelangelo, a lot of painters in the past were very adept at mixing colors, and coming up with new colors, so that they could express things in new ways. The technology of brushes and all those things were very important to how they applied their craft. Same thing in movies, only it's a hundredfold. The first movies, they just put up a camera and had a train come into a train station, and everybody was amazed. That was sort of all technology. "Look at the technology!" But as it grew, it grew into more of an art form, much more sophisticated than that. What we've been doing ever since then, whether we add sound, or whether we add color, or whether we use digital technology, is simply a way of broadening the canvas, so that we have more colors to work with. As it started out, it was cave paintings, and they were very beautiful and very significant. But as you get along, the technology of using canvas, or of sculpting in different kinds of material, and suddenly it all advances to a point where it gets very sophisticated. You can tell much more interesting stories and you can express yourself more clearly. That's what's happening today, and that's why all artists are constantly pushing the technology in their medium -- to be able to widen the range that they can use their imagination.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The area that has the most range at this point is probably literature, and it always has, because it's a key to the mind and it's very direct. And there, it's just the pen and paper, and how you manage to use your words. But, theatre, Shakespeare, most of Shakespeare was written around the technology of the day. Things are staged in a certain way, and written in a certain way in order to deal with the limitations of the stage, of the flickering candlelight, and of the rowdy audiences, and how do you get people off the stage, and get new people on the stage if you don't have a curtain, and those kinds of things. So in a lot of ways, the artist is restricted a great deal by the technology of the medium that he's working in. And in film, because the nature of it is so technological, the artist has been the most restricted in what he can do. Digital technology allows and the new kinds of things we're working with today that we're pushing forward allows you to tell a bigger story and use more imagination than you were able to do in the past.

What are your dreams right now for the next ten or 20 years?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. George Lucas: My life is making movies. I like storytelling, and I've got a lot of stories that are stored up in my head that I hope to get out before my time is up. So for me looking at it, it's just a matter of "How can I get through all the stories in the amount of time I have left?" My dream is that I get to do it.

That was my dream when I was younger, too. "Will I get to make the movies? Will I get to do what I want?" I've spent a fair amount of time doing what I want, and I "serendipitied" into starting companies, and building technology, and doing a lot of other things that are related to me getting to make the movies that I want to make. I've always just followed my own course, whatever I found the most interesting to me at the moment. I've never had a real plan of, "I want to get from here to there, and I've got to do this." The underlying plan to everything is, "I've got a bunch of movies to tell, and this is the one I'm going to do now, and this is the one I'm going to do next." And then I focus on the one at hand.

What does the American Dream mean to you?

George Lucas: I don't know what to say about that. It's a very, very complex question.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I would like to see our society mature, and become more rational and more knowledge-based, less emotion-based. I'd like to see education play a larger role in our daily lives, have people come to a larger understanding -- a "bigger picture" understanding -- of how we fit into the world, and how we fit into the universe. Not necessarily thinking of ourselves, but thinking of others.

Whether we're going to accomplish this, I'm not sure. Obviously, people have a lot of different dreams of where America should be, and where it should fit into things. Obviously, very few of them are compatible, and very few of them are very compatible with the laws of nature. Human nature means battling constantly between being completely self-absorbed and trying to be a communal creature. Nature makes you a communal creature. The ultimate single-minded, self-centered creature is a cancer cell. And mostly, we're not made up of cancer cells.

If you put that notion on a larger scale, you have to understand that it's a very cooperative world, not only with the environment, with but our fellow human beings. If you do not cooperate, if you do not work together to keep the entire organism going, the whole thing dies, and everybody dies with it. That's a law of nature, and it's existed forever. We're one of the very few creatures that has a choice, and can intellectualize the process.

Most organisms either adapt and become part of the system, or get wiped out. The only thing we have to adapt to the system with is our brain. If we don't use it, and we don't adapt fast enough, we won't survive.

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