George Lucas Enjoys Directing Films

Lucas directing the opening scene to Star Wars: Episode IV- A New Hope.

Now, you may wonder why I'm making a blog about George Lucas liking directing. The guy's retired from directing major studio type films, in other words Franchise films, and will make more artistic films. Why woudn't he like to direct films? The thing that sprung this was a video I saw not too long ago. A live stream where someone was talking about various films and Star Wars and George Lucas came up and the guy went on about how George Lucas always hated directing, accept for American Graffiti. That was the only film he liked making, due to it being the most personal film he ever made. And with that, I'm gonna just say that George Lucas likes directing. In fact, he loves directing films. What people around him say about Lucas disliking directing say isn’t exactly accurate. The main reason is because he enjoys creating films. He loves making films. I’ve never seen or read an interview with Lucas saying he dislikes or hates directing. This is something people have made up overtime due to authors of various articles and blogs find some stuff from some actors and other people who worked with Lucas behind the scenes and find certain quotes that are with the narrative they want to create so then these quotes are taken out of context, so it does fit with the narrative of the writers intention when presenting a article or blog about something negative about Lucas, so people will read these and not look at the original sources and just take on face value that George Lucas did not like the position of directing.

 This is something I’ve seen constantly when reading people and talking to people about Lucas directing films later on in life, and then other people will say how he always hated directing and just parrot what they read or heard people say without looking into this themselves. The most sited source of this is an interview with Ron Howard when talking about working with George Lucas on American Graffiti and how he talked to him about going to film school and to direct himself. From this interview, what I see is often re-quoted is a remark that Lucas said to him, which is "If you're going to be a director, make animated films. That way you don't have to deal with actors." With this, it seems conclusive. But here's the thing: we don't really get the full context. I've never seen Howard ever repeat this in an interview and I only saw it in an article the first time years ago. I think this quote has been taken out of context so much that whatever the original quote was and what context it was made in may not resurface, not anytime soon at least. 

With all that said, pretty much all the actors to work with George Lucas have nothing but good things to say about him. I know Jake Lloyd has said negative things about Lucas in recent years with not giving him good direction in The Phantom Menace, but Lucas didn't really have experience working with child actors before Lloyd. I mean you could mention Mackenzie Phillips in American Graffiti, but she was 12 years old when she worked with Lucas, where Lloyd was 9 when he worked with Lucas. Phillips being a bit older than Lloyd may have helped the character that was written in terms of her performance. And while Lloyd made films before Star Wars, I don't exactly think he was one of the best child actors ever. That said, he did act like a kid in Episode I, which I think was the point of that role for that film, but that could be just me. Another reason for him saying negative things to Lucas was he would do 60 interviews every day until the film came out, and he was bullied at school after the film came out. With the interviews, I don't believe Lucas set those up. The distributing studio, 20th Century Fox, would have done such things, due to the fact Fox was distributing the film for Lucas worldwide. That wasn't Lucas's fault. And the bullying wasn't Lucas's fault either. That was the fault of asshole kids who would make lightsaber noises whenever he was around. It's sad Lloyd got bullied, but I just fail to see this was George Lucas’s fault at all. But Lloyd’s comments aside, all the other actors haven't said anything truly negative about him. He's basically described as somebody that's great to work with.

 The thing Lucas has often said he disliked when it came to film-making is screenwriting. He wanted to make documentaries where you don’t need to really write anything, just make a film about a topic and interview people. To Lucas this was how he wanted to make movies. But then he changed to making narrative type films, he wanted them to be abstract-like, which you then get films like THX-1138. Films that just really required a story, some characters and let the visuals tell everything with little dialogue required. George Lucas is a great visual director. I’d say one of the best visual directors ever. To him, he liked making films. Liked directing, producing, editing, but always disliked writing, but acknowledged the irony is what he mostly does now is write when he talked to Christopher Nolan during an interview/discussion about Star Wars when they screened Episode IV for people in 2011. The only thing he liked about writing was the creation of worlds, characters and the overall story. He’d rather have someone else take the pages he wrote for a story and write the script for him or collaborate with him in writing the script.

 Now with Star Wars V and VI, the reason he didn’t direct those films was because of how stressful it was for him directing Star Wars IV and also doing his best to establish his company and to have it flourish and produce different films than just the films Lucas made, basically what American Zoetrope was originally created for. As a result, he was still involved in making Empire and Jedi, by showing up on set time to time and offering his insight and advice to the directors of the films, yet he was going to make sure the effects team were on schedule and make sure the films were afloat financially. He then wrote stories and produced Indiana Jones, Willow and other films but he took a break from directing. He wanted to get back to directing by the 90s, but it was either make the prequels to the Star Wars trilogy, or create new and artistic type films sort of like THX-1138, and abandon Star Wars forever, because he said if he did go down that road, nobody would see anything new regarding Star Wars. But ever since he created a bit of back story for Star Wars from the original, unseen 300 page script that Lucas has talked about on occasion, which is essentially the story of the original trilogy, as well as taking inspiration from the various original drafts of the Episode IV script and from what he added to the back story with V and VI, he began to write the prequels and finally released them. 

But then when people began to not like them over time, as people enjoyed them initially, people didn’t just hate the films, but George himself. And while there are people who dislike him not releasing the original trilogy unaltered properly, George Lucas believes those are inferior versions and would be a waste of time to have them get a Blu-Ray release. Now, I would like to have the option of viewing the original Star Wars trilogy unaltered and the other special editions on Blu-Ray, but to Lucas he doesn’t get why people like the, in his eyes, incomplete theatrical versions of the films, rather than the special edition versions available on Blu-Ray and DVD. To him, those versions of the films shouldn’t have even been released in the first place. The technology with how he envisioned the films didn’t exist yet. The versions we have now are what people in the 70s and 80s were supposed to see. These versions were the visions of those films that were in his head when he crafted the story and made them after writing them and then he kept adding things to them over the years, whether people like the special editions or not is another story. Thing is, George Lucas has  OCD. He has OCD to the point that he kept reworking the effects and shots in the special editions of Star Wars all the way until he sold Lucasfilm to Disney.

 And to wrap this up with the George Lucas quit making films due to the hate, there is truth to it. Lucas himself said around 2009/2010 or so when asked when Episode VII would come out, “Never. Why would I make any more when people keep saying what a horrible person you are for making them?” The bashing of George Lucas is a reason for why we will never see any new film he directs. He said in 2012 that he will now be directing small, artistic independent films about topics nobody wants to see, but he will only show them to his friends and family. Nobody on the outside will get to see a new film directed by George Lucas. So it’s a combination of the hate he got online and how the films he wants to make now, are of topics and themes that he believes people won’t want to see. Now I could go on, but this is already long enough. Point is, George still likes directing and the people that constantly bashed him online did have a effect on him. And it’s sad that people don’t care about how much hate the dude has gotten over the years, as a lot of it is for the fact he made the prequels. I personally love the prequels, but I get that there are people who dislike them. But there’s no reason to keep hating the guy who made them. He is a nice guy after all. He made some films you didn’t like, is that really enough to hate someone?