So last year we were um approached by randy and she asked us if we were if we’d be interested in creating a curriculum for kids based on um the delil lama’s book ethics for the new millennium uh we were interested and little did we know that we’d end up um in india in march spending time with students from nigeria and from tibet and meeting his holiness the del lama um a lot of what we what we’ve been doing is sending our experiences back uh via a blog that we’ve been keeping and ultimately we hope to end up
With a guide book to ha or for happiness to help students uh find their own definition and discover happiness lasting happiness m and also uh some kind of web component that’s interactive and um and comping to students so we can jump right into questions i think hi mr lucas um the coming of age archetype i’ve noticed is really prevalent in your films and i was wondering why is this important to you well um one of the greatest decisions you can make in your life is what you’re going to do with it and obviously coming of age is that point
Where you’re transitioning from being taken care of to taking care of yourself and um where you are beginning to become responsible for your own actions um so it’s a crucial period and it’s a period where if you make a mistake it’s going to haunt you for the rest of your life um hi i’m luke um and um at mount madon we put on a production of the r every year and we’ve been doing it for about 30 years now so it’s quite a long time and um when we’re on stage we can kind of put our own spirituality into the characters because they’re so
Archetypical and um i was just wondering how did you put your own spirituality into your films and and even did you put your own spirituality or is it just uh something that came to you creatively well creatively or spiritually or intellectually um you are your work which is it’s very hard to separate the artist from what he does uh no matter who it is or what they’re doing um because the you know your creativity is so interconnected with your inner being that it reflects you as a person so if you want to know a person
Uh a filmmaker or uh even 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 meline hi in project happiness we are explain the difference between short and long-term happiness what do you think are the 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 uh pleasure and joy happiness is the result
Of a combination of pleasure and joy shortterm happiness which you could call pleasure um and then long-term happiness which you can call joy short-term happiness which is pleasure is uh self-centered it’s all about getting something it’s all about getting pleasure uh and so uh it’s by its very nature short-termed 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 an 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 uh pleasure into a long-term relationship thing won’t work it just can’t pleasure cannot by its very nature be longterm it’s short term and you know it’s a little spike that goes through your life and it makes things better and there’s
Nothing wrong with pleasure good meal uh you know whatever but um joy is is different joy once you have joy it lasts forever uh it doesn’t hit as high on the scale as pleasure does pleasure will go way up there but only for a few minutes or maybe for a few hours or maybe for a few days but joy um goes uh on a lower scale but it will last forever and joy is as the opposite of the passion of of uh and the self-centeredness of pleasure is uh compassion giving uh helping other people um the uh uh issue of joy uh really has to do
With taking care of other people and doing things for others rather than for yourself whereas joy it’s all for for yourself and not for others and that’s and those two things combined make happiness um which is also a mental state which you can either decide you’re happy or not so but the biological reality is uh that uh you have these two components pleasure and joy hi i’m nina um in the film making industry you’re truly a revolutionary your film have young people rebelling against authority and asserting their
Independence um i was wondering when we mature 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 um that’s a big challenge uh you you are fighting upstream when you’re trying to uh you know break away and when you’re trying to uh uh you know create your own identity and when you’re trying to do new things um no matter how you do it um uh eventually uh if you’re successful you find yourself uh part of the establishment and you find yourself
Becoming uh the very thing you’ve been fighting against uh then your real challenge is to keep your ideals so that you can actually change the system uh once you you’re successful um like you’ve been trying to do as you work your way up through the system uh but you’ll find that uh generally speaking when you’re young and idealistic and you see wrongs and you see things that don’t work and you see um uh endless stupidity which you’ll come across um it is um a good and uh a good thing to fight it and you’ll find if you fight it you do
Good at what you do and if you do good at what you do then you’ll become successful what are some of those ideals that you’ve kept well um in um uh 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 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 to tell me how to make movies or to have to uh 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 um 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 as a result i became very successful but if i
Had have gone down another road and just been a work for hire at a studio i probably would never have been successful you know if i had just sold out and there was points in my life where i was absolute broke uh 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 um overcome them uh well well i run into hundreds and hundreds of obstacles and um you overcome them with just sher persistence and belief in yourself um it’s not much else to it uh you work hard to be as um capable as possible uh you work to uh exploit your talent that we all have uh part of that is knowing yourself and knowing what you’re talented at i was very very very fortunate in that um i discovered my talent by happen stance uh i was interested in being an
Illustrator uh i liked building things i wanted race cars for a long time i built cars um and i wanted to be an architect uh i wanted to be an anthropologist i studied anthropology for a long time um 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 um and i didn’t really intend i was going to the university of southern california and i just sort of picked that major because it was something i was interested in um otherwise i was
Going to go to san francisco state and actually become study anthropology and um so it was just a fluke that got me there uh when i got there there was nobody in the film schools which is i think one of the reasons i got in cuz they were extremely small extremely unpopular the people that went there were the the uh uh sort of antique version of geeks and uh they were all bearded and strange and weird and um uh and um so everybody say why are you 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 film school and actually gotten a job you could be a ticket ticker at disneyland you maybe 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 um i don’t really want to go into the the theatrical film business anyway i want to be a documentary filmmaker uh although there was absolutely no
Documentary film making in this country uh there was no place to show documentary films on television or anywhere else um so that was a pretty hopeless exercise um and uh but i decided that i loved it so much and everybody there at school there were only about maybe 150 of us um loved it that’s the only reason we were there is we loved film and that’s all we ever wanted to do as it turned out and and everything was stacked against us and but i just went ahead we went ahead anyway cuz we did what we loved we didn’t say you know my friend was a
Business major another friend that was in the law school and i my brother-in-law was a doctor that graduated from there they were all you know you’re going to have no future um and um so uh we just kept going and it just happened that um like everything in life things change all the time and the industry grew it just happened that at that particular time when i was graduating from college which was um you know in the 60s uh all the people who uh 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 studios corporations and said well we have to get people to run these things so we’ll hire people that are schooled in this sort of thing uh and uh so fortunately we got you know i got sort of uh rope into it even though that wasn’t really where i was intending to go life is fluid you’re always given opportunities and choices um uh 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 uh generally it’ll take you in the right place because i say then you’ll be doing things that you love and even if you’re doing something that is is you know you decide to be a gardener uh and that’s really what you want to do and that’s what gives you pleasure then be a gardener even though your father and your friends may say why aren’t you a lawyer because you can be a lawyer you got accept at the 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 um because you know money can’t buy you happiness and that’s been proven a million times it can buy you pleasure but it’s not going to ever buy you happiness and over time 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 thank you um we’ve read that you grew up methodist but now that you’re now you’re
A methodist buddhist is that correct well that’s what i tell my kids i’m curious as uh how you came to identify with the buddhist religion and also what the similarities are between the two of methodism and 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 um if there’s one god why are there so many religions um man of course she couldn’t answer that uh and um but i think that question is always been very uh relevant to my life um 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 uh would be the same um but as you find there’s you know hundreds of different interpretations of everything um which obviously means that that in my mind is not really the word of god that’s the word of man and uh if you go beyond all the religions because they’re all similar you they’re all i like to think of them as the blind men and the elephant you know each blind man goes up to the elephant one hugs the
Leg and says it’s a tree the other uh does the uh the uh ear and says it’s a leaf and the other one says that it’s a trunk and it’s a snake and um you know but they’re all describing the same thing so what you do is try to look for the the unifying factors in all religions um and um so uh i became good friends with joe campbell who’s also um you know looking at things from the anthropological side i got involved with him in u my first introduction to him was in anthropology in a class of mythology and then he tries to you know
Comparative mythology which is take all the mythology and try to find the similar factors that fall through and why people part of that is psychology or the way you know i think of anthrop or i think of mythology as sort of a a form of uh 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 um boundaries in which to form a civilization um and try to explain the mysteries that they find around them man
Has a very unique capacity in his imagination uh and desire desire to know everything which is you know god gave us a brain that’s our um that’s our uh stinger that’s our camouflage that’s our uh um 800 lb uh that we can use to survive with um and uh 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 uh the more we use those things in our daily life and pass them on to the next generation the more we advance uh and uh and are able to survive uh so uh when you look at the
Roots of everything and you look at what’s kind of psychological and then what’s the mystery uh man has always put the mystery um to say you know the way you explain everything as you say well we know this this is wood and i know this came from a tree but i don’t know this over here but we’ll 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 uh and we can go for another two or three million years probably before we even get a hint of whether
There’s any intelligent design or anything behind what happened um but we won’t know for a long time and what we it’s very good that we take everything we don’t understand and 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 uh if we’re uh 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 thank you so um in star wars there’s a very obvious theme of the apprentice and the mentor and we know that for that movie you were um 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 um children going into adulthood well the core thing to pass on is you know um in talking about religion is you know all religions say one thing basically which is uh 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’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 uh 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 like the idea of the jedi based
On compassion or love or yeah it’s it’s based on compassion and i mean again the the the force the religion and everything is based on all religions it’s not just based on one i mean obviously they heavy overtones in eastern religion um but you know it’s half methodist half buddhist um and uh or you know half christian judeo islamic christian which is one religion and half buddha uh which is in a different category uh but when you go back it’s all the same anyway so um it’s um the the one of the core values one of
The big problems of the struggle in star wars is about um uh passion against compassion which is greed against giving and giving up primarily and the whole issue is the flip side 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 and uh to uh 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’s basic job in the beginning which
We never get to see too much of because we start really during the war the they were like marshals in the old west i when they would go from town to town and they would you know uh help solve the problems and and um 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 uh justice and solve problems for people which is kind of what jedi are um and they’re negotiators they’re not fighters only they negotiators um sort of like the mafia they’re they’re they’re they’re
Compassionate negotiators with a very big laser sword which they don’t like to use but if somebody you know uh doesn’t want to solve the problem uh then u they’ll solve it for them so to speak which is an incentive for people to solve their problems without fighting um but that’s where all that comes from thank you uh 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 with for someone who has a greater vision how do you keep your individuality in your
Art well um i believe in the artist so like right now i’m working on indiana jones 4 with steve spielberg but i’m letting uh steve pretty much make his movie i mean i 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 in things and we have this relationship because he’s also a producer he also has the same situation and um when uh we have a difference sort of opinion i’m probably the only outside producer that’s ever done films with steven except the on
Jaws he had outside producers but since he’s you know since uh indiana jones he hasn’t had outside producers and um but when there’s a disagreement i just say look steve do it your way it’s your movie and he’ll say no no 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 taste 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 well um when you were talking about this idea of pleasure and like it’s it seemed almost like an addiction when you when you get the car and you can’t get back to it just madebe and then you were just talking about the dark side how once you start down that path you can’t really like go back is that the same way for this addiction to pleasure is is it is there is there no
Way of getting out of that dark side and if not how do you get back pleasure is addictive a joy could be addictive too i mean it’s not you know i mean again it’s a biological response you know you put on the pleasure pedal and it’s great um and i say the choice you have is to be um on the pleasure pedal full boore with joy and toodle along at 35 m hour but you’re going to be able to go around the world 100 times or go on the nitrous oxide pleasure uh pedal and push it as hard as it can and you can go 300 miles an hour
But you’re only going to 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 um because i’m addicted to that high i love that well the reality is it’s not possible it’s just that it’s it’s you know it’s like saying i’m going to stop the sun from setting it just you can’t do that i mean you can pretend to do it and you can say once you get that addiction that you’re you’re on a treadmill that 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 uh 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 uh there are addiction of gambling or i say eating or uh you know buying things or you know there’s a million things you pleasurable things you get addicted to um that just means
That you’re lost sight of reality that you don’t lost sight of the fact that this is this is a nice moment and then i have to learn to let it go but if i i’m afraid of letting it go i can’t let it go then you’re going to the dark side because your fear is that you can’t have it anymore and that has to do with relationships that has to do with your ultimately with your life you 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 going to 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 going to have some pleasure but if you help somebody uh the greatest thing you can ever do is have kids it’s an interesting uh reality of why we’re here that one of the greatest pleasures is making kids one of the greatest joys or the greatest joy is raising kids you will and kids kids i say children but children teach you compassion it’s an amazing thing about life which is
They come out they’re 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 you 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 um 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 teenager 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 gawky and pimply and ugly and they’re not cute anymore so the parents are just as willing to say okay go off have your life but that’s a true miracle i mean
How could you do that where a ch you like when they children are their worst like at two at two years old they’re breaking away from you um emotionally they’re really difficult they’re really terrible twos but you know that’s also the time by some miracle that they’re the cutest they are you know two and three-year-olds are absolutely adorable and um when you have kids you’ll understand what i’m talking about cu you’ll want to throttle them but you won’t uh because you know you love them too much and they’re too cute but when
They turn into teeners and they do the same thing you sort of aren’t going to throttle them but you’re going to say well yeah if you really want to go do that go off go to call you know go that’s fine i’m not going to hold you back all right i that was a very long answer and i’m really going to get in trouble thank you thank you so much thank [applause] you
