George Lucas： Heroes, Myths, and Magic PBS American Masters 1993

The Force will be with you, always. The Force will be with you next on George Lucas, Heroes, Myths & Magic. Major funding for this program was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. And by annual financial support from viewers like you. Additional funding was provided by the Marilyn M. Simpson Charitable Trust, Jack Rudin, the Andre and Elizabeth Kertesz Foundation and Rosalind P. Walter. Dangerous time for you. And you will be tempted by the dark side. I'll never tend to the dark side. There's no simple way to describe Star Wars. It is part old-fashioned folktale, part space fantasy, part modern myth. It is primal conflict played out in alien galaxies. It is the struggle between man and machine. It is the belief that in each of us, there is potential. There is goodness. There is the Force. You're dealing in an art form. You're, whether it's a novel or anything else, you're trying to figure out what we are, what life is and what are some of the truths that lie beyond the surface. Why didn't you tell me? You told me Vader betrayed and murdered my father. Your father was seduced by the dark side of the Force. He ceased to be Anakin Skywalker and became Darth Vader. When that happened, the good man who was your father was destroyed. So what I told you was true from a certain point of view. George Lucas was using standard mythological figures and what all the myths have to deal with is transformation of consciousness. That you're thinking in this way and you have now to think in that way. This one a long time have I watched all his life as he looked away to the future to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. What he was doing adventure excitement Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless. I won't fail you. I'm not afraid. You will be you will be that is the basic motif of the hero journey leaving one condition finding the source of life to bring you forth in a richer or more mature or other condition. He is sacrificing himself for something. It is you and your abilities. The Emperor wants that is why your friends are made to suffer. That's why I have to go. The moral objective is that of saving a people are saving a person or saving an idea use the Force Luke. Let go. The Force is strong with this one. Luke trust me. It's the edge the interface between what can be known and what is the mystery transcendent of all human research. Remember Force will be with you always a lot of the material that George's worked on does not lend itself to certain kinds of nuance and subtlety, but what you get instead is very powerful because you're talking about images and characters who reach deep into sort of our mythic closet. What Luke is doing in the beginning of Star Wars is defining his own responsibility for his place in the world. He is spotting along his everyday life and his ultimate responsibility is much larger than that because it deals with much larger base of Humanity larger more cosmic issues. So it's that awakening. First of all, that is performed by the insider magic of Obi-Wan that sends him on the path to self-discovery. What is it your father's lightsaber? This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster. An elegant weapon for the more civilized age. The Force is strong with him. He has the talent. He has to recognize the talent in himself and then he has to work very hard to nourish that talent in order to be able to use it in the real world. That is one of the central issues at work in the series. We have only begun to discover your power. Join me and I will complete your training with our combined strength. We can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy. I'll never join you. If you only knew the power of the dark side. Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father. He told me enough. Told me you killed him. I am your father. Father figures play a very important role in all of mythology and obviously in all of our lives and most of psychology and what school you're adherent to but you can't write something. You can't create something without your experience being a very central role in what you're creating. It's impossible not to really. And so obviously my relationship to my father plays a very big role in my movies. I think that the Star Wars is a valid mythological perspective and the problem of is the machine and the state is a machine is the machine going to crush humanity or serve humanity and humanity comes not from the machine but from the heart. Help me take this mask off. But you'll die. I think it was in the Return of the Jedi when Skywalker unmasks his father. The father had been playing one of these machine roles a state role. He was the uniform and the removal of that mask was an undeveloped man that there's kind of a word by being executive of system one is not developing one's humanity. Find a film that demanded a certain kind of effects. They would have to be sort of reinvented in order to make it happen. But if I could reinvent it then I could open up a whole new world of creative flexibility in terms of telling stories. One of the main reason I did Star Wars was to work on a George Lucas film to see what what this director is like what this guy is like. I discovered that he had a very clear vision of what of all that was needed to tell a story on the film a signature of all the Star Wars Star Wars movies where it looked for the viewer. It looked real because it wasn't like crisp and clean and shiny and and you know outer space looking. It looked like oh yeah, this is really the way it is. He's looking for things that that have got a life to him. They've got an age to him that have like, you know can tell a story in themselves objects can tell a story and how they've been used. Everything has got a weight to it history. What a piece of junk to make 0.5 past light speed may not look like much but she's got it where it counts kid. I've made a lot of special modifications myself up to that point special effects have been very static and ships would sort of move through the shots very carefully and I wanted to create something where there was always movement. The camera was moving the ships were moving and there was lots of pans and so it was out of that that we had to create this whole new technology of you know computer-controlled cameras and and blue screening backgrounds onto onto ships and that sort of thing and it gave it a whole different kind of dynamic in Star Wars the shots don't aren't on the screen more than two seconds. Some of them only seven or eight frames and in that way it moves so fast that you think things are going on when they really aren't because it's more of a cinematic trick. I took footage from documentaries of real aerial dog fights and that sort of thing cut it together and made a moving storyboard out of it. I did this because in the final battle. I wanted to give a sense of realism just to draw a storyboard in the abstract and try to conceive of the shots in the abstract was pretty much impossible because what I was thinking about is more of a cinematic experience that existed only in motion not necessarily in still frames. Star Wars started out with at the time seemed like a huge number of shots and I guess it must have been 300 or so maybe about eight or nine hundred separate scenes we put together but an Empire had to have been double or triple that which was unbelievably horrifying to manage and to shoot all that stuff and have it all come together. But then when we got into Jedi that was like everything was bigger. There was a shot in there with like 125 spaceships in it for one shot and you know now we're getting up into thousands of separate pieces of film that are being put together to tell the story and it just grew and that was the way those three films went which one you know tripled the previous one. Too many of them. I have a tendency to cast a little off-center. I don't like the generic LA good looks model looks. I like off-center actors. They're more interesting. All through the script was how pretty the princess was I am many things but this was not what I felt myself to be and he even did say later that was not I was hired because of my strength of character. Governor Tarkin. I should have expected to find you holding Vader's leash. I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board. Charming to the last of all the people who came in. She was the youngest who had the most presence. She's very sure of herself. Very funny. Very, you know together very worldly. I don't know who you are where you came from now on you do as I tell you. Okay. Look your worshipfulness. Let's get one thing straight. I take orders from just one person me. So one day still alive somebody get this big walking carpet out of my way. No reward is worth this Harrison's got a lot of character and he doesn't you know nail things right down the center and that it doesn't really have much to do with with you know being a hero as it does to do with being somebody who's interesting to watch. Everything's under control situation normal. What happened? It's like weapons malfunction, but everything's perfectly all right. Now. We're fine. We're all fine here now. Thank you. How are you? We're sending a squad up negative negative. We have a reactor leak here now. Give us a few minutes to lock it down largely very dangerous. Who is this? What's your operating number? Conversation anyway. I remember saying to George one day after attempting to say it'll take a few minutes for the Navicomputer to calculate the coordinates. Easy to type this but you couldn't say it take a few moments to get the coordinates from the Navicomputer. It would take you takes and takes and takes I have placed information vital to the survival of the rebellion to the memory systems of the czar to unit. My father will know how to retrieve it. I mean it's stilted is a kindness. I have placed information vital to the survival of the rebellion into the memory systems of the czar to unit. My father will know how to retrieve as a director. My style is a little bit more removed. I'm sure Harrison just said I sleep all the time and he never sees me tired. He was very tired. I remember many shots where George never said cut because he'd fallen asleep. He had two directions which were faster and more intense. What I thought was it was brilliant brilliant script and I wanted to have lunch with all the characters that I was reading and I read it out loud with a friend of mine and it just I thought if he could get these visuals approaching them and then he did it beyond that. That's what I wanted to do in the cantina didn't come off originally. I was on the stage. They couldn't create enough mass. They couldn't do it. So we basically had to put a Halloween mask on a lot of people and that was it. I wanted to have stuff that was a little bit more exotic than that and we came back later and created them creatures that are going to make the whole thing sort of snap together, but I think the entire cantina sequence in terms of the reshoot and everything was only about twelve thirteen thousand dollars the whole area of the common combining puppetry with creatures and that sort of thing hadn't really happened yet. It really wasn't until Yoda that we begin to cross the line and try to make a realistic looking character who was basically a puppet and that was Yoda was really the first of that to be done. Sometimes you get a you have to work hard for a character really find the character and sometimes it just happens and I just looked at that and just kind of it felt really right just felt really good. When I was very apprehensive about how that was going to work. Could I take a main character in a movie and use a little rubber puppet and would that I mean is it going to happen or is it just going to be a disaster and and right up until the moment where he was on film and talking it looked like it was going to be a disaster, you know little hints, but it looks pretty good Frank can do some really funny things and that sort of seems to work and is it going to happen, but then when it goes on the screen, it's magic. Jedi Master Yoda, you seek Yoda. You know him? Take it to him. I will. Yes. Yes, but now let's eat. Come. Good food. Come. I think it came from a more formal time because here he lives in this in Dagobah this this planet by himself. I'm sure he had many friends. This is this guy is probably 800 years old and he had many friends and somehow he wound up here because of the the the troubles all around the universe and he sounds silly getting this but as an actor, it's important to know so I I do remember that I felt strongly that he was it was very wise and he came from it another time more formal time and this wasn't his time. He wasn't in this. This was not his world. It just wasn't the other world. He came from was a gentler world for my ally is the force and a powerful ally. It is life creates it makes it grow. It's energy surround us and binds us luminous being so not this crude matter. You must feel the force around you here between you me the tree the rock everywhere. Yes, even between the land and the ship people would come up to me and say you ought to change my life. I'm thinking jeez. It's just a movie guy, but other people very intelligent people have said how struck they were by Yoda. To my experience that teachers have a tendency to have a more profound effect on the viewer than the hero does because the teacher is usually espousing a certain philosophy usually age old philosophy that the viewer is coming in contact with for the first time always with you. It cannot be done. Do you nothing that I say master moving stones around is one thing. This is totally different. No, no different only different in your mind. You must learn what you have to learn. I don't give it a try. No, try not to or do not. There is no try. I enjoyed growing up living in a small town like Modesto. I enjoyed the fact that there's a lot of freedom and it was very protected. It was a very pleasant happy small-town environment giant tag games and all kinds of things and was on summer nights. It's very very hot in Modesto. I'm being like a hundred and twenty degrees and at night it began to you know, 90 or a hundred. So it's like very hot nights. You had to have a very fertile imagination and a very big curiosity in order to keep yourself entertained movies didn't play a very big part in my life. The first film I can ever remember seeing is King Solomon's mind and my my grandfather took me when I was about nine years old King Solomon's mind. I remember the scary parts. It was a very exciting adventure and it was a very intense experience for a nine-year-old the kind of movies that would hit Modesto or you know, Lawrence of Arabia and attack of the 50-foot woman when I went to film school something. I've seen all kinds of film that I never seen before a lot of films that were made by the Canadian film board a lot of foreign films and it was just a whole new world and that was the end of it for me. I mean I lived eight breathed movies the rest of my life a USC film school Lucas won awards for a student film THX 1138 three years later Francis Ford Coppola produced it as a feature. It was Lucas's first job as writer-director and his disturbing images made a lasting impact on other filmmakers George made this phenomenal film. I was completely, you know exhilarated by this movie. He had made THX 1138. I think the ideas that I had in THX or ideas are still live with me. I was at the time very young and as a result, I was very much into telling the world what a terrible place this is and explaining that the world isn't the way we were told it was George was interested in engineering and design and racing cars and graphics. So he came also with a lot of passions THX 1138 was a kind of, you know, more visionary experimental film and I think it's a it's a kind of minor classic. The theme of the the piece was that we all live in cages only the doors open and we can't get outside and that we just need to understand that we are control of our lives with that we can have freedom that is the prison with the doors open from THX. It's the small town in American graffiti and in both cases, it's the fear of the unknown on American graffiti. We filmed all night and I had never been up all night. I was making American graffiti about change that change in life that that sort of ritual that one goes through when one turns 18 in this country. I care if you go off. You think I'm going to crack up or something boy, are you There's a lot of thematic end of era things going on that show at the end of a particular kind of music. It's the end of a particular kind of innocence. It's the end of high school. I think that being a teenager is difficult no matter what era you're born into and most of the problems of a teenager are very personal in nature. What's wrong? The essence of American feed is you can't stay a teenager forever. Listen, I don't think I'm going to be going tomorrow. Mom, what are you talking about? Well, I was thinking I could wait a year, you know, go to city for a while. You chicken wait a minute after all we went through to get accepted. We're finally getting out of this turkey town and now you want to crawl back into your cell, right? You know, I think I could really credit George Lucas for inspiring me to become a filmmaker. Unlike all the other films that came along in the 50s and 60s about you know, what it meant to be young and come of age. It had a little bit more of death to it. We're leaving in the morning. All right. All these different stories and intertwining told a whole spectrum of what it was to be young in America and trying to find yourself and I try to do that in boys in the hood. Listen, I want to do something with my life, right? I want to be somebody. Listen, let me tell you something and you join that army. You ain't gonna be nobody. There's a scene in boys where I have the street called Crenshaw every Sunday all the young black kids in the area get together and they drive their cars up Crenshaw Boulevard. They have like low riders and different funny cars and stuff and it's much like graffiti. He seemed to be as interested in directing the background traffic and the old cars as he was talking to the actors. It was an independent filmmaker with a non-traditional approach to the process. Later. And he said and I'm going to gather up all this footage. Kind of in a documentary style and I'm really going to direct the movie later. I thought well, okay, he's going to direct the movie later. He's not going to direct the movie now when he's saying action and cut. He's going to direct the movie later. Well, this will be interesting. He would never tell you when you were actually on camera or not in this documentary style. You didn't know so you didn't have that thing that actors do where they sort of brace themselves and get all pumped up for their close-up and then get real lazy on everything else and all the Masters, you know, because the close-ups the one that really counts and all that was gone out the window. You never knew whether they had a close-up of you or not. He shot the entire movie in sequence and at first I thought don't they have enough imagination to know and you know, I mean we don't have to do it all in order. We're actors. We could we can remember what was like what our attitude was supposed to be from one scene to the next but I talked to him about that and he said well everybody's going to get really exhausted and at the end of six weeks of shooting all night's people are going to look like hell and they should look like hell because it's supposed to be 5 o'clock in the morning and then people should look fine. We'll be shooting the scenes at 5 o'clock in the morning when everybody looks bad, you know, Jerry. I had a pretty good time tonight. No, no, really really. I really had a good time when you pick me up and we got some hard stuff and saw a hold up and then we went to the canal you got your car stolen and then I got to watch you getting sick and then we got this really bitching fight. I really had a good time. Yeah. Well, I guess I have a pretty good time just about every night. I know that part of it is sort of autobiographical in terms of the car culture that he grew up in in Northern, California. But what I think is that film is really about is a young man choosing a more learned creative life when there are a lot of things around him that would suggest maybe just drag racing all his life. When he came to me with the part in American Graffiti, he saw the character that I played Bob, Bob Falfa as having a crew cut to distinguish him from the other characters. And after we talked about it for a little bit, I and I was in no mood to get a crew cut at that, you know, that was long hair time. Back then I knew if I got a crew cut, I wouldn't work again for six months while it grew out. So I suggested instead the white cowboy hat, which Bob Falfa does wear. Hey, you know guy around here with a piss yellow noose coupe, supposed to be hot stuff. What do you mean, John Milder? Hey, nobody could beat him, man. He's got the fastest. I ain't nobody, dork. Right? Right. Because he accommodated and let me have the white hat, I had a sense of a character distinct from the other characters. What was so interesting was that a guy making his second film, 28 years old, could break all these rules and and yet adhere to the central rule, which is sort of don't be boring, tell a great story. Ron and I actually as directors are very, very similar. We have a tendency to stage scenes the same way and cover them the same way and and go for the same kind of humor. And he has great respect for the, you know, the sort of the traditional power of storytelling and the way it's been done over the years. And when we were working on Willow, he talked a lot about this. Magic is the bloodstream of the universe. Forget all you know or think you know. All that you require is your intuition. Power to control the world is a witch's anger. The individual has to find the aspect of myth that has to do with the conduct of his life. There are a number of services that myths serve. The basic one is opening the world to the dimension of mystery. More than anyone in the village, you have the potential to be a great sorcerer. Now, when you're out there, listen to your own hearts. These will protect you. Acorns? They're magic. I've always had an interest in the more traditional fantasy world of, you know, fairies and goblins and dragons and that sort of thing. So it was an interest in making a movie out of that genre. It's been a very difficult genre to make movies about and see if I could get that into the cinematic mainstream. Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that have them to find expression in symbolic form. I am so happy to meet you. How do you know my name? Elora D'Avento. Elora. Elora Willowsey. But she's just a baby. She's very special. Joseph Campbell kept identifying for us the sources, like the original sources of some of the ideas that we were working with, like the baby going down the river on a raft. And he talked about how 2,000 years before Moses, you know, there are examples of this symbol showing up and equating it to birth. Then we talk about the power, you know, witches and evil sorceresses and their history and storytelling and their importance and, you know, dragons and what it means to slay them. Because that's exactly what we were trying to do with the movie, is not retell any one fairy tale, but sort of utilize today's technology to retell these stories. One fourth of July, my son rolled out this tucker that we had and said, let's take the tucker to Calistoga. They're going to have an old car contest. So we cleaned up the tucker and we all got in the tucker and we went and we were in the fourth of July parade. And I guess it was my kids. It was my son that said, let's, you know, we should make the movie Tucker. And why don't we see George? He'd been wanting to do Tucker. And I said, well, why don't you do Tucker? Because he was wondering what his next movie should be. And I said, we should do Tucker. And I said, you know, I'll produce it. Let's do it. Let's just get on with it. The car of tomorrow, today. Looks like he's going 90 miles per hour. And you know who's going to build these cars? We are. In five years, we're going to put the big three out of business. Francis and I go way, way back. He's like the older brother. Under the hood, he's got luggage. The engine is in the rear where it ought to be. I'm more blind explorer, you know, kind of out there trying to make new rules. George really comes out as the master of designing the structure of a piece, the way it's engineered, and the way it really works. You know, I have more philosophical kind of emotional starting place, more like a playwright. We're very different as personalities. I'm relatively conservative. He's relatively out there. And, you know, I think it's, we've actually had a very good relationship because of that, because I'm a little bit more thoughtful about moving ahead and in various ways. Francis works from his heart and his emotions, and he just does whatever it is he feels he has to do. How can you object to seatbelts? Our marketing department says they imply the cars are unsafe. People are unsafe. Bennington, if one person is killed in a Tucker because of some safety feature that you eliminated. I think both Francis and I respect each other's talent, but we realize that we come from a completely different place. And Francis was my mentor. I mean, I learned almost everything I know about writing and everything I know about directing actors from Francis. When I was a little kid, maybe five years old in the old country, my mother used to say to me, she'd warn me, she'd say, don't get too close to people. You'll catch their dreams. Years later, I realized I misunderstood her. Germs, she said, not dreams. You'll catch their germs. I want you to know something, Tucker. I went into business with you for one reason, to make money. That's all. How was I to know that if I got too close, I'd catch your dreams? I didn't want him to be beaten in the end. And even though that was the real life, I think sometimes the influence you have goes far greater than the incident. I grew up a generation too late, I guess, because now the way the system works, the loner, the dreamer, the crackpot who comes up with some crazy idea that everybody laughs at, that later turns out to revolutionize the world, he's squashed from above before he even gets his head out of the water because the bureaucrats, they'd rather kill a new idea than let it rock the boat. If Benjamin Franklin were alive today, he'd be thrown in jail for sailing a kite without a license. It's true. Tucker won because he was right in that a lot of the features he was offered in his car were features that the public needed and wanted. And for a creative person, it really is the creation of ideas that is the motivating factor in life. It's the idea that counts in the dream. Raiders just sort of popped out. I mean, it just, I took the story, Larry just appeared, sort of speak, you know, he's a very talented and great writer. Stephen said he would do it. He's a very talented director. We got together. We all got together and talked and it was wonderful and we had a great experience together. We went and made the movie and it was a great experience and we got Harry and everything fell into place. And George came to the table with the basic bones of the story that he had worked out a long time before we ever had this this meeting. So he had the kind of the plot. It was going to be a pursuit to the lost Ark of the Covenant. It was going to be about a rogue kind of grave robber named Indiana Jones who kind of hides behind the you know, the mask of I'm going after priceless antiquities. But in fact, he's kind of like a rogue warrior out there in the middle of the world trying to find these things for money and glory. The rest of the stuff was just like a big kitchen with a lot of ingredients. We knew we're baking a cake. We didn't know what kind of a cake it was going to be and that's when that's what was fun for me because we all got to contribute ideas to the the bones and the roots of Raiders of the Lost Ark and it was a very even sort of stimulating three-way conversation about I'd like to see this. No, I'd like to see that we can have both those things. Oh, that's too corny. The that's not corny enough, you know, and those are the kind of conversations that were happening around Raiders, which is really about familiar kind of images put together in what is really a new way. As much as has been said about its debt to the serials. It's not really like those old serials. It's produced on a scale that completely changes the feeling you get from the story. No time to argue. Throw me the idol. I throw you the whip. Give me the whip. Larry was always insistent that the characters needed to be emphasized. I was always insistent that there had to be a lot of action and a lot of, you know, chases and this and that and George was always insistent that there had to be a logic to all of this. He was determined there was going to be a real story about the search for a very important religious artifact and within all that Indiana Jones was going to go from an atheist to maybe an agnostic. I told them the story and then they tore it apart, you know, and Steve was I don't like this or I don't like that or I want to I want to I've always wanted to do a scene like this and I've had to sort of figure out how I could fit a scene like that in or whether it would work or not work. I remember saying I was going to see a scene where you know guy gets in this cave and this huge boulder starts chasing him and he has to get away from the boulder. I brought the snakes to the table. I wanted to see and I just said I don't know where in the movie, but we got to have a scene where Indiana Jones gets surrounded by 2,000 snakes. He doesn't know how to get out of it. Take this. Wave it at anything that slithers. And we were talking that way. George said what I've always wanted to do you want to do snakes? I want to do flying wing. I've always wanted to have a big flying wing in a movie. The three of us I think in those sessions are coming up with that story never had to say although we probably did you know, I have a recurring dream where I'm lost among the snakes or I go down into a tunnel but all of Raiders is full of those kind of very nightmarish elemental going into dark holes, you know into slimy scary places creepy walls, you know walls that are moving you step on the wrong place in the wall attacks you. So once we dumped all the elements into a big pile and sort of into a tape recorder. That's when Larry Kasdan and George even more than me began to organize it into a kind of plot most people who've been around me have said that my greatest strength is in editing not only in terms of the actual physical act of editing the film but also in terms of developing stories. I'm very good at focusing on a story and in telling the story and pulling out the stuff that doesn't need to be there and putting this stuff in that it actually is going to make sense out of the whole thing. Indy Indy, we have no time. If you still want the ark, it has been loaded onto a truck for Cairo truck. What truck you can only write so much on paper and I also believe the casting is 60% of the success of a movie and I think we cast this film awfully well with Harrison meet me at Omar's be ready for me. I'm going after that truck. Oh, I don't know. I'm making this up as I go but once Harrison got involved and became Indiana Jones, he's brought a lot of humor. He brought a lot of irony. He thought he thought of a wonderful line. That was nope. None of us thought of he thought it thought it up on the day. We shot it when he's been drug through half the picture behind everything you can imagine. He's looking into a mirror on the pirate ship and he's all bruised up and everything, you know, I don't need you do not the man. I knew 10 years ago. It's the mileage. It's not the years sweetheart. It's the mileage. And that was a line that Harrison cooked up here here everything went right and it's just one of those things where you just you know, it's like a good run on a ski slope. It's like a good playing a game. It's like driving a race. It's whatever you do, you know, at one particular moment that this is as perfect as it gets it just everything falls into place. Everything goes a hundred percent, right? Raiders of the Lost Ark was just the beginning but great joy ride Temple of Doom and the Last Crusade followed Indiana Jones became a new American hero adventurous romantic and smart. Indiana's popularity prompted Lucas to take the character in a new direction. And we think of George's this movie Maverick, you know, always breaking the envelope. Always pushing the limits of moviemaking, but he's doing the same thing in the realm of education. It's television show now. It's a very bad business decision because I could be doing infinitely better making feature films, but I love doing I love the subject. I enjoy the process and I'm making films that I think are very good some of the best work that I've ever been involved with. The idea of the show is to introduce young people and all people really to various historical figures who made a difference in the beginning part of the century. And the premise is that when a student reads about these people in their studies at school, they will say, oh, I remember this guy, you know, but he was with Indiana Jones and this thing and they'll start reading a little bit more about it and we have a little bit more of an interest. What's fun is is now if we're doing the Russian Revolution in St. Petersburg outside the Winter Palace, we're able to just take it people back into an era and time where momentous decisions were made where huge groups of people force great changes on our society. We want land for our peasants now. We can let people just glimpse what St. Petersburg looked like in 1917. Or Chicago. When I created the character of Indiana Jones, there was always this aspect of the fact that he loved to play jazz and that he was a jazz aficionado. I think it's so good. It's got a lot to say. It's a very gentle story. It poses one question. What is jazz? How do we get a feeling of what it is this particular musician Sidney Bechet felt about his music and the particular message that he wanted to be able to express musically to the all the people around him? There are a lot of rules that you have to conform to in order to develop a television show that we have not conformed to. It's very plot oriented. TV shows have to be very character oriented. It's very slow paced. Television has to be very fast paced. Yeah. Give it a try. You play it too pretty. Let's let's not ruin it. The only thing I want to do is make a very good show that has value. That to me is important. If George were to do this series 10 years ago, it would take a lot more time and a lot more money to produce the same effects that we're creating in an approximately two weeks effects wise. He would first have to go out not only shoot on location, but he'd probably be creating the sets on location hiring many many extras and going through the expense of creating a motion picture in traditional ways today. What we do is we do still go out on location to get the ambiance that we're looking for but then we don't have to hire as many extras. We can replicate them in the computer and create hundreds of people where maybe eight or ten existed before. The ring of horses in Mexico is an interesting effect because really it was created using only ten cowboys and ten horses. What we did is position the horses in a in a particular spot at 30 degree intervals and then film them that way. So we were given three separate elements that we then in the computer combined to create the whole effect. The funeral shot in Chicago is one of my favorite shots because it was one of those things when I first looked at it. I said, oh no way we can't do this. This is going to be too tough and George was very encouraging and saying, no, no, no, you can do it. I know this is going to be great. First of all, it's a map painting and we had to take the street that was shot on a back lot a very flat looking very dead looking back lot and widen it so that we could fit more people into the scene. So we went back on location and shot extra people walking down the street and were able to combine or composite all of those elements so that we got this huge procession and we eventually ended up putting cars going across the street in the back and it gave the ambience that George was looking for. Over the years. I think a lot of people have complained about the death of the old studio system and the death of the moguls because you know, they really loved film. I think in his own way George Lucas is a throwback to that kind of person who certainly loved film because when you go on Skywalker Ranch, you can tell that there are people that are part of a culture that's interested in making good films. That recognize they have a special gift that's been given to them to work in motion pictures. The working environment really has come out of the fact that I started out working out of my home and then as the company got bigger, I wanted to continue that tradition of a more home-like atmosphere because people that work in film have to devote a huge amount of their life to work and I felt it was important for them to have a pleasant environment to work in. Lucas built state-of-the-art post-production facilities, which are now used by fellow filmmakers around the world. Skywalker Sound was actually created because of the fact that I needed a post-production facility here in San Francisco. There weren't any. We're friends and he goes twam. Being in San Francisco. I'm out of the mainstream of production. If I were in Los Angeles, I would never have done it. I just go down the street and rent a facility. THX was created because we would put a huge amount of time into the soundtrack of a motion picture, which I feel is about half of the experience. And then it would get shown under conditions that would diminish the effect of the soundtrack. And fortunately, we have engineers here who were able to pull together a whole new speaker system that really made it sound in the theaters very much like it was here at the ranch where we, you know, created the sound. ILM was created in order for me to have the facilities to create the special effects for Star Wars and once Star Wars was successful. I needed to continue that entity because there really were no special effects facilities of that caliber that existed in the world at that time. ILM's breakthroughs in computer graphics liberated directors to create spectacular visual images such as those seen in The Abyss, then further and more creatively refined in Terminator 2. Over, you know, the next millennium, there will be enough information put into storage banks that the computer can begin to pull on its memory to create human beings. But it's the quirkiness of an actor that makes a performance work and that can also be programmed into a computer, but it's going to take a long, long time. It is not going to happen in my lifetime. I'll guarantee that. I've had a very interesting career and I've learned a great deal about making movies and about life. And I think I've just gotten to the point now where I've got everything together to a point where I actually start my career. Up to this point, it's been a big learning experience. We're dealing with a kind of special effect that we haven't used before and we're trying to come up with a new look. I still have stories I want to tell. There's still Star Wars stories I want to finish and it's very hard for me to always figure out where I'm going. But my first love is still film and then people say, well, which one of your movies do you like the best and all that sort of thing. They're all different and I love them all and I make a movie. It's like a love affair. It's not something that I rationally walk into. I can't say why did I do that particular movie? An idea came to me. I began to fall in love with it and infatuated with it and it consumes my life for a couple years and I make it. Sunday, see the world through her eyes as actress director Lee Grant hosts a series of films and videos by and about women celebrate Women's History Month Sunday afternoon beginning at 1. More from American Masters is coming up. This is PBS.